Interesting news coming out of the clubhouse this week, as 8-year assistant and lifetime friend to Danny Hall Paul Kinkelaar was fired. He came to Tech in 2004 as director of baseball operations, and was promoted to pitching coach in 2008. He built a pedigree of fine pitchers in his 4 years here, taking relative unknowns on the high school circuit like Deck McGuire, Jed Bradley, and Mark Pope and turning them into the best pitchers in the ACC (and in Deck's case, one of the best in the nation). Ok, we're done with the facts, on to the exciting speculation of what actually happened!
Why fire a pitching coach that's your lifelong friend (Hall and Kinkelaar played ball together at Kent St. and were roomates), put out consistent high-level pitching talent, and turned this season's injury-ravished bullpen into an ACC championship? Simple, as Hall puts it, you want to win a NATIONAL championship:
Sometimes you just need a fresh start, a change in philosophy both on the field and in recruiting. It doesn’t mean you’re necessarily doing anything wrong, you just need a change in direction. We had reached that point.
I don't think this was motivated by anything more than a desire to win. Getting embarrassed 15-3 isn't the kind of thing that would sit well with a competitive spirit like Hall, Its sort of like when PJ fired Wommack in 09, except our pitching wasn't sucking. It just wasn't up to the level of Florida's, and that's where Coach Hall thinks we need to be in order to get to Omaha. Kinkelaar also dropped the ball on more than a few recruits, which is saying something since East Cobb is to high school baseball as Texas is to HS football. I say we trust Danny's 24 years in the coaching business and see if he can't pull out a guy who can bot recruit and develop and get us back to Omaha.