Cincinnati Reds bring back Chris Valaika as new Director of Hitting
A Farmers Only legend returns!
The SB Nation search engine has long functioned like a blind librarian who’s too short to reach the top shelves. Prompt it and it will give you something, but odds are it’s not exactly what you’re looking for.
Running to Google instead, I typed “red reporter valaika” and was greeted with a couple fun throwbacks.
Here’s the inimitable BK with a Farmers Only Weekend Recap from early August of 2012 where Billy Hamilton swiped a trio of bags to push his remarkable season total to 125 for AA Chattanooga. We get some glorious Kyle Lotzkar mention, as well as nods to old Farmers Only legends like Daniel Corcino, Denis Phipps, Mike Costanzo, Steve “Too” Selsky, and the up-and-coming Jesse Winker with the Billings Mustangs.
Chris Valaika went 2 for 3 in the Friday contest that weekend. Bakersfield had the Blaze, and Juan Duran socked a homer for them!
Next up on the Google search results wayback machine is the 2013 Red Report on Chris Heisey, which apparently I wrote. There’s not in-depth info on Valaika in it, obviously, because a) I don’t write in-depth about much and b) it’s Heisey’s Red Report, but it does reference Valaika as part of the same Reds draft class as Heisey - the 2006 vintage that included, among others, both Drew Stubbs and Justin Turner.
It’s been a long journey for Chris Valaika since that 2006 draft. He made his was to the big leagues with the Reds in that glorious 2010 season for a nice 19 game cameo (that included a homer), and he returned for them in 14 games the next season, too. He was granted free agency following the 2012 season, spent some time in the big leagues with both the Miami Marlins and Chicago Cubs across 2013-2014, and eventually got into the coaching game.
He’s quite well regarded in the coaching game, for the record. He spent the last three seasons as the hitting coach for the Cleveland Guardians, the first of which came with current Reds manager Terry Francona as Cleveland’s manager.
It’s worth pointing out that while their overall wRC+ was merely average across that trio of years in Cleveland, the team’s 19.0% K-rate from 2022 through 2024 was the single lowest of all 30 MLB clubs. Given some of Nick Krall’s comments since the end of the season in the wake of David Bell’s firing, reducing strikeouts and becoming a more line-drive oriented team with the bats is now apparently a priority, and it sure would appear Valaika - who the Reds hired to be their Director of Hitting yesterday - seems to emphasize an approach that mirrors that ask.
(I’ll momentarily ignore that the front office guy who acquired all the high-K guys the Reds have on the roster now wants a lower-K team after the high-K squad didn’t pan out the way it was supposed to and everyone in the front office still gave themselves promotions again. That’s just how the Reds operate!)
Anyway, in Valaika the Reds tick the box of hiring ‘one of their own’ while also getting a guy that Francona obviously knows and values highly. It’s also worth pointing out that the Reds didn’t hire Valaika as their ‘hitting coach,’ they hired him as ‘Director of Hitting’ to serve in an organization-wide role mirroring that of Derek Johnson - one that will have definitive developmental ask all up and down the farm system as well as at the big league level.
The Reds, it would seem, are going to try to coach away the strikeouts from the bottom up going forward.