Should Great Lakes Loons pitching coach Bobby Cuellar ever decide to write his memoirs, he most likely would include the 2016 season as one of his most interesting and rewarding. Keep in mind that he was also a pitching coach for former Cy Young winners Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez, as well as All-Star Johan Santana.

Cuellar indeed had a season to remember in 2016 that concluded with the Loons winning their first ever Midwest League Championship. The Midland squad did so against all odds and on the back of a pitching staff that featured no less than seven pitchers who were 20 years of age or younger during the season.

Cuellar was signed as a Dodgers minor league pitching coach in 2015 with the Ogden Raptors bucking the tide of young minor league coaches and managers being signed by the Dodgers. At age 64, Cuellar has plied his trade in baseball for 42 years having been selected by the Texas Rangers in the 29th round of the 1974 First -Year Player Draft.

Cuellar played in all or parts of 11 minor league seasons finishing with a one-year stint in Mexico. His lone “cup of coffee” at the MLB level was in 1977 when he logged 6.2 innings with the Texas Rangers giving up one run over four appearances. That run came on a home run to Dave Kingman who later set off the iconic Tommy Lasorda on one his most memorable rants after Kingman hit three home runs in a game against the Dodgers.

Even at 64 years old, former major leaguer Bobby Cuellar is still going strong as a minor league pitching coach.
(Photo credit – Benjamin Zack)

Following his stint with the Rangers, Cuellar played winter ball and experienced shoulder problems that would limit his MLB career to the 6.2 innings.

“That’s exactly what happened to me,” he said. “I threw fine. I did my job. And then I went off to winter ball and I got a sore shoulder. Back then, you didn’t really talk very much about it. I came to spring training and tried to throw through it and didn’t do a very good job.”

Cuellar turned to coaching in 1983 and in between that season and the past season he has compiled an impressive resume. He has worn the uniform of 15 different teams, 11 of them at the minor league level, primarily as a pitching coach but with one two-year stint as a manager of the Wausau Timers of the Midwest League.

At the MLB level, Cuellar has served as a pitching coach with the Seattle Mariners (1995-96) and the Montreal Expos (1997-2000), and as a bullpen coach with the Texas Rangers (2001), the Pittsburgh Pirates (2006-07), and the Minnesota Twins (2013-14).

Cuellar was let go in the house cleaning with the Minnesota Twins in 2014. The Dodgers came calling and he returned to minor leagues at the A-level, just about the lowest level possible.

As expected, Cuellar got some questions as to why he would settle in the low minors after his MLB experience. He has a simple answer.

“When somebody sees me here, they kind of go, ‘Why?’” Cuellar said. “Why not?”

I expect his simple answer does not reveal his true motivation. That is, the opportunity to again teach in the formative stage of pitchers’ careers. After all, he is credited with teaching former Twin Johan Santana how to master a devastating change up while at the AAA level. That pitch turned Santana into one of baseball’s best until his career got side tracked by injury.

Cuellar also heeded some advice from the Dodgers Rick Knapp who was their minor league pitching coordinator at the time. Their paths had crossed when both were employed by the Twins.

“Rick Knapp, our (minor league pitching) coordinator, told me when I took this job, ‘You need to take off your big league eyes and put your rookie league eyes (on) and your rookie league tape in… because you’re going to see a lot of things that you’re going to go, ‘Whoa,’ because you haven’t been here in a long time,” Cuellar said.

One expects Bobby Cuellar might have said, “Whoa”, more than once during the 2016 season. His pitching staff with the Loons compiled a 3.30 ERA on the year and a league leading WHIP of 1.20.

The youngsters ranked second in the league in strikeouts with 1193 trailing only the 1294 of the Kane County Captains. More importantly, their walk total of 420 was only 38 behind the league leading South Bend Cubs in that department. Even more impressive, on the season the pitching staff gave up only 1044 hits, just nine more that the first-place Cedar Rapids Kernels.

It would have been very easy to push the buttons to get there faster with the youngsters but Cuellar’s experience, along with manager Gil Velazquez, kept things on a very even keel and did not set expectations at all, much less too high.

“I’ve learned not to expect more things than I can and I’ve learned basically again that you need to go a little bit at a time and really, really try to hone in their basics really well before you add anything else,” Cuellar said.

“I’ve learned in 42 years in baseball and 32 years of coaching, expectations can only hurt you,” Cuellar said.

Both men also stressed the team aspect of the game and as a result the team camaraderie was on full display, especially in the drive for a play-off spot and a league championship.

“I think, as a staff, this is a very good group of young men, they pull for each other,” Cuellar said. “With everybody involved, our trainers, our staff and everybody else, the goal is to do your work before you play and go play. That’s basically what baseball is about.”

Bobby Cuellar, who speaks fluent Spanish, was given the opportunity to watch and mentor some of the Dodgers finest young pitchers in 2016. He became part of Cuban right-hander Yadier Alvarez’s professional debut on July 20th in which the youngster struck out 10 Kane County Captains in five innings. Cuellar was suitably impressed with Alvarez’s mixture of pitches.

“I think, at the end in the last couple innings, his change-up got better,” Cuellar said. “Sometimes when you’re a power guy, the more you get loose and your arm feels better, the more you throw it. I thought he threw some really nice ones at the end.

“He threw both his curveball and his slider. He threw some for strikes and then he buried some with two strikes.”

However, Cuellar cautioned about reading too much into one solid start.

“You don’t want to get too excited,” he said. “He’s still only 20 years old, it’s still his first time out here. We expect him every time to go out there and do the best he can and really truly judge it one outing at a time and one inning at a time. Every game is going to be different and this was a good one.”

One would expect Bobby Cuellar to return to the Loons as pitching coach in 2017 or perhaps move on to Rancho Cucamonga with his proteges, flip-flopping with present Quakes pitching coach, Kip Wells.