Rick Honeycutt refined pitchers and helped rebuild a Dodger tradition
by Cary Osborne
Toward the end of Kevin Malone’s brief tenure as Dodger general manager, the Dodger organization brought a familiar face back.
Dave Wallace, who served as a Major League and minor league pitching coach and instructor with the Dodgers from 1981 to 1997, was hired in December 2000 as a special assistant to Malone after three seasons in the New York Mets organization.
Wallace, his seat barely warm in his new role, contacted another familiar face to gauge his interest in also returning to the Dodgers.
That face was Rick Honeycutt.
But another one of Honeycutt’s former teams had tried to lure him into coaching before to no avail.
Honeycutt pitched for the Dodgers from 1983 to 1987 during a 21-year Major League career that ended in 1997 due to a career-ending elbow injury while he was with the St. Louis Cardinals.
With retirement came a vow. Honeycutt, a valuable baseball mind who had much to offer the game in a non-playing role, promised his wife, Debbie, in 1997 that he would leave the road to see his son, Ricky, through high school.
The St. Louis Cardinals, under Honeycutt’s former Oakland and St. Louis manager Tony LaRussa and former pitching coach Dave Duncan, wanted him to join their coaching staff. Honeycutt turned down the opportunity.
During that period, Duncan was also a candidate on numerous occasions to become a manager for a big league club in the late 1990s and told Honeycutt that if he were hired, he wanted him as his pitching coach.
Honeycutt stayed true to his vow, though, ultimately seeing Ricky graduate from high school.
Duncan admired how Honeycutt was not just a teammate during his playing days, but a teacher. Honeycutt pitched until he was 43 and often counseled younger teammates on mechanics. For Duncan, a former big league catcher whose forte was strategy, having Honeycutt was like having a player/coach who could offer a perspective that he couldn’t.
Honeycutt’s wisdom truly began to grow when he was a Dodger.
It was during Honeycutt’s first Spring Training with the club in 1984 when he first got to pick the minds of Dodger pitching savants — pitching coaches Red Adams and Ron Perranoski, Wallace and the legendary Sandy Koufax.
Koufax’s words resonated significantly.
“All those gentlemen showed me a different world in what they presented to pitchers,” Honeycutt recalls. “I always leaned on Sandy being the main guy, the guy you always respect so much. His presence, you’re almost in awe of being around him. But he had a way about him, such an easy way of talking. I remember the bullpens and things he would say: ‘These are things we believe in. They may not be for everybody, but these are the things we’d like you to try, and this is why.’ The more he would talk, it just made sense. All the things they wanted you to do, they just made sense mechanically.”
After St. Louis tried unsuccessfully to bring Honeycutt back into its organization, the familiar voice of Wallace beckoned.
Tommy Lasorda followed up by telling Honeycutt that he needed to get back in the game.
In 2001, Honeycutt returned to the Dodgers as a consultant, working mostly with minor league pitchers. Then he was asked to take on more responsibility and became a minor league pitching coordinator from 2002 to 2005. In 2006, Honeycutt was hired as the Dodgers’ Major League pitching coach.
On Monday, Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman announced that Honeycutt would transition into a special assistant role with the club. Honeycutt, 65, retired as Dodger pitching coach, tying Perranoski for the longest run for a pitching coach (14 seasons) in club history.
The year prior to Honeycutt taking the job, the Dodgers ranked 18th in MLB in ERA. They ranked eighth in his first season.
In Honeycutt’s 14 years as Dodger pitching coach, the Dodgers ranked in MLB’s top 10 a total of 13 times. They ranked in the top five 10 times. They had baseball’s best ERA twice — 2009 and 2019.
When Honeycutt arrived in 2001, he found a much different Dodger pitching philosophy than when he left in 1987.
“(The organizational pitching philosophy in 2001 was) they wanted a guy to be as tall as possible and not use their legs,” Honeycutt recalls. “The Dodger philosophy (in 1987) was we believe in ground force. … The (regime in the Malone era) wanted short strides. They wanted guys to throw what they call it, ‘downhill.’”
Honeycutt mentions Koufax often in association with the Dodger philosophy as he once knew it, and the legend helped shape how he pitched from 1984 until the end of his playing career and also his teaching as a pitching coach.
“When you look at a golfer, they’re creating 400 pounds of ground force to swing a golf club. Their balance and stability is that strong. That’s really what Sandy and this organization leaned on was angling the foot on the rubber and how you create maximum leverage with your lower half to produce that force and how do you become balanced,” Honeycutt says. “You’re transferring weight from the lower half from the back side to the front side and have it be in a way that you’re able to not only throw with the most power you can, but also have control of that.
“The way I like to think of that is, ‘Do you understand what’s happening (in the lower half) that makes you throw the ball, and can we improve that balance so you can now start commanding your pitchers better?’ The more command you have, the more success you have because you’re able to throw different pitches with different speeds with different variations.”
When Wallace brought Honeycutt back into the organization, he also brought back the Dodger method of pitching that had been the same for decades.
Honeycutt says he takes pride in being part of the group that restored the old Dodger pitching philosophy of using the lower half to create power. He is also proud of the continuity in voice and message that for years has cascaded from the Major League level down to the Rookie League level.
That oneness in voice, he says, allows a pitcher to find comfort at every level.
The first group under Honeycutt that had success from that philosophy included Chad Billingsley, Jonathan Broxton and Hong-Chih Kuo, followed by the next wave that included Clayton Kershaw and Kenley Jansen, later leading to Walker Buehler.
Honeycutt is also proud of the pitchers who have come into the Dodger organization from other organizations and have had success — names that include Derek Lowe, Zack Greinke and Rich Hill and players from foreign professional leagues like Hiroki Kuroda, Hyun-Jin Ryu and Kenta Maeda.
“It’s like anything else, a good foundation — it’s like a business, it’s like a team, it’s like a group — you have to have principles in place and people have to buy into those principles,” Honeycutt says.
Ted Lilly, who was with the Dodgers from 2010–2013 during a 15-year career, called Honeycutt when he heard of his retirement as pitching coach. Honeycutt says there were times when he and Lilly clashed. But in the phone call, Lilly told Honeycutt how much he appreciated him.
In a 2015 interview for Dodger Insider magazine, Kershaw defined what he felt made Honeycutt so successful.
‘“He does such a great job,” said the three-time Cy Young award winner. “I feel pretty fortunate that I’ve had him for as long as I’ve had him. We’ve been working together so long. I kind of feel like he understands what helps me and what doesn’t help me. He’s able to communicate that, which is really tough to find.
“During the game, I’m not very talkative, so he does the best he can. It’s tough. There are so many different guys with so many different personalities and how to talk. I get upset when I don’t pitch well, and he just knows what to say. At the end of the day, we’re all building for the same thing, trying to get everybody out. (He’s) a good, calming presence.”
Honeycutt underwent spinal fusion surgery in February. Eleven days later, he showed up to Camelback Ranch in Arizona for Spring Training camp.
He was pale, his voice was softer, and he wore a back brace that wrapped around the bottom of his long-sleeved shirt.
Honeycutt couldn’t help himself. Against his doctor’s advice, he was on a baseball field watching his guys throw bullpens.
“He’s the best. He really is,” Hill said that day, admiring how Honeycutt showed up days after surgery. “Having spent the last three years around him and being around his ability to communicate with the pitchers and just his ease of communication and his understanding of situations because of his experience … it’s something all of us are really fortunate to have Rick on our side.”
Honeycutt coached through the entire regular season and postseason, but family and health were making him think about 2019 being his final year as Dodger pitching coach.
“Going into this year, I did look at it as being my last year that I was doing it,” Honeycutt says. “If I were in a different place I would have probably taken a little more time to heal up. But I felt deep down (this year) was going to be it. That’s what really drove me to get through the early part of the year when I was really physically struggling at times. It kind of gave me the determination to get through this season.”
Honeycutt says the pain varied. When the Dodgers were home, he felt stronger from the consistency of being in his own bed and the ability to utilize the Dodger training room to heal. On the road, especially early in the season, it was more of a grind.
But the staff continued to thrive under his guidance. Its 3.37 ERA and 1.10 WHIP led the Majors. Dodger pitchers held opponents to the lowest on-base percentage (.282), slugging percentage (.379) and OPS (.661) in the big leagues.
His last season saw the continued rise of Buehler.
“He has all the weapons,” Honeycutt says. “He has the thing that either people have or don’t — the ability to want to elevate themselves in high-leverage situations. They want to rise to that moment, and he’s definitely showed he likes that situation.”
His last season saw triumphs and challenges for two of the greats in the organization — Kershaw and Jansen.
“The game itself tells you when you have to make changes. Both of them have made changes,” he says. “They both have to continue to evolve themselves and pitch backwards somewhat more and more. It’s not that they can’t use the weapons they’ve always had; it’s just being a little more unpredictable with it.”
And his final season saw the arrival of Dustin May and Tony Gonsolin.
“Those young men both have to want to continue to improve. I love both of their poise. They were not overwhelmed at the big league level. They had a lot of confidence,” Honeycutt says. “Dustin had the power fastball, has the power cutter right now, power sinker. (Next step for him is) when he gets his changeup or curveball that he’s going to need to be a successful starter. Tony has the ability, and I feel like he has the overall command and the devastating split. Has the good curveball and good slider, but both can be inconsistent, so the offspeed pitches, it’s perfecting the offspeed pitches because the guys at this level can sit on fastballs and hit anybody’s fastball.”
Honeycutt leaves a legacy as one of the most successful pitching coaches of his era.
On Sunday, Aug. 21, 1983, he pitched seven innings of shutout ball in his Dodger debut against the Philadelphia Phillies at Dodger Stadium. Thirty-six years later, on Oct. 9, 2019, he took the field for the final time as Dodger pitching coach.
On Oct. 10, one day after the Dodgers’ season ended in Game 5 of the National League Division Series, Honeycutt reached out to a group of Dodger pitchers, including Kershaw, Hill, Buehler, Maeda, Ryu and Jansen and told them he was retiring as pitching coach.
He will remain in the organization as a special assistant. Though the role has yet to be defined, he expects to help in Spring Training and on the minor league side, where he strives to keep the oneness in voice throughout the organization.
He is the connector from the Dodgers’ glorious pitching past, its elite present and its promising future.
“If there’s one thing I feel good about, it’s trying to pass on what I learned, and (I) brought (back) those consistencies and was a part of bringing that back to the Dodger system,” he says.
