Not only did Dave Duncan talk the Cardinals into giving him a two-year contract when the rest of Tony La Russa’s coaching staff was offered only one-year deals, Joe Strauss of the St. Louis Post Dispatch reports that he’ll be the highest paid pitching coach in baseball.
According to Strauss he’ll get a base salary of around $750,000 per season, which still seems like a bargain given that most managers earn several times that much and teams regularly pay twice that for mediocre veteran bench players.
Putting a coach’s impact into wins and losses if often tough, but Duncan has been La Russa’s pitching coach for 28 seasons and has done an amazing job taking veterans off the scrap heap and turning them into viable contributors in St. Louis.
And of course he’s overseen the development of Chris Carpenter and Adam Wainwright into elite starters. When one of the most successful pitching coaches of all time makes less than guys like Adam Everett, Alex Cora, and Juan Castro that either says MLB teams don’t actually think pitching coaches are that valuable or the Cardinals are getting a helluva deal with Duncan. Or maybe both, I suppose.