Don Baylor really helped Galarraga a ton, as you say, David. He was the hitting coach for the Cardinals in 1992, and he encouraged Galarraga to switch to a more open stance in midseason. The results were striking. Here are Andres' AVG/OBP/SLG numbers for the Cardinals before and after mid-July:

Before .181/.225/.269
After .303/.337/.509

Coaching is one of those aspects of the game that's notoriously difficult to quantify or predict, but in some cases (like Baylor w/Galarraga or Jeff Pentland with Sammy Sosa) its influence can be enormous.

Hey, I don't mean to rain on the parade too much, but are people really going to remember that Galarraga quit with class instead of hanging on longer to get the 400th homer? The guy is 43 years old and wasn't going to make the Mets' roster. He came back late last season with the Angels and only got 1 homer in his cameo (that frankly didn't make much sense from the team's perspective). It seems to me that he pursued the possibility of getting that 400th homer pretty hard, not that he voluntarily retired because he didn't consider the benchmark significant.

That's still deserving of praise in my book. I like the fact that some guys love the game so much that they don't retire until they are forced to. Guys like Rickey Henderson and Pat Borders apparently really love to play the game. I'll remember Galarraga for hanging on as long as he could, coming back from cancer twice, not for gracioiusly retiring before he attained a milestone.

There's a thing I think I saw happen with Gallaraga which I think explains some of the confusion Coors causes... and I'd like to bore you with it for a few...

I can't tell you what pitch it was, becuase it wasn't as obvious as "Sammy Sosa, sliders low and away..." But I believe Gallaraga had a pitch which he tried hard to restrain himself from swinging at because it resulted in many fly outs to deep right field, and which pitchers conversly tried to get him to go for. I believe that before Coors he had reasonble success-- they got him out with it some, but he let it go some too. However after he got to the Rockies he noticed that when he did swing at it in Denver, a lot of them carried into the third row instead of the right fielder's glove-- enough that he stopped restraining himself because now he was getting rewarded for that which had been penalized before. Over a few hundred at bats swinging with a whole heart, he not only hit some homers, but he learned to hit that pitch better and better, and he started putting them not into the third row, but up on the concourse. The last couple of years he was a Rockie it seems like I remember him scattering the crowd at the concessions ten or twelve times.

The result-- when he left Coors for the "normalcy" of Atlanta, he didn't collapse; because Coors wasn't just a soft touch, it was training wheels too. If he could reach the concourse in Denver he could now reach the fences in Atlanta...

It is perfectly reasonable to expect Jeromy Burnitz to revert on leaving Coors-- at least I didn't notice him learning anything in the Rockies. But it won't happen to everybody; the phenomenon isn't as simple as it seems-- just as pronounced. And in Burnitz' case it will be ameliorated some by Wrigley-- its not like he's going to San Diego or Seattle...

By the way I think Michael has reason on his side-- but the odd number will stick in people's minds. Cat'll be perpetually one above Dale Murphy, one below the line...

I'll remember him hitting the first pitch of THAT spring training about 450 feet off Maddux and Maddux shouting "You ain't sick!" at him...

The "Big Cat" big hitter and a class act, not bad things to be remembered for, good luck to ya Mr. Galarraga, you gave me many trills in your career.
Thanks, a fan