Randy Smith: Honeycutt Still On Top Of His Game

  • Monday, November 21, 2016
  • Randy Smith
Randy Smith
Randy Smith

Rick Honeycutt is home after another successful but long Major League Baseball season. Thirty-five spring training games, one hundred sixty-two regular season games in one hundred eighty days, and a handful of post-season playoff games. That's a grind no matter how you look at it, but Rick still enjoys it from beginning to end. "I've been fortunate to be involved in a kid's game since I was ten years old," he said on Saturday morning. He was speaking to a crowd of more than one hundred men at the monthly Men's Breakfast at Christ United Methodist Church, where he and wife Debbie are members.

  

He credits men like LFO legend Jack Archer for helping to get him where he is today.....perhaps the best pitching coach in the major leagues. That's a pretty broad statement but to see just how good he is at his job, just look at the stats. He has spent twelve years as the pitching coach for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and in eleven of those years the Dodgers have had the best pitching stats in the National League. The Dodgers currently have the game's best pitcher in Clayton Kershaw, whom Honeycutt says is a real joy to work with. There is another indicator about just how valuable Rick Honeycutt is to the Dodgers. He has now worked for four different managers in his twelve seasons in Los Angeles. In fact, before current manager Dave Roberts was hired to replace Don Mattingly, the Dodgers rehired Rick Honeycutt as the team's pitching coach. That is absolutely unheard of.

Honeycutt says he's more "old school" than a lot of other pitching coaches. He still believes in hard work and dedication and he also believes that a lot of today's major leaguers don't have the same fundamental foundation that he had. " It all comes down to fundamentals. The best players are the ones who are fundamentally sound in every aspect. When I was playing Dixie Youth baseball with Jack Archer and my dad, the first few practices we had, they hit us ground balls and we were supposed to catch them correctly bare-handed, with no gloves."

Honeycutt also told a story of just how basic some of the really great coaches are. "I had a chance to meet John Wooden (the great UCLA basketball coach). He spent his entire first practice every year instructing his players how to put on their socks. When somebody asked Coach Wooden why he spent so much time with such a basic thing as putting on socks, he replied, ' to prevent blisters. You can't play at a high level with blisters on your feet." 

Rick also thought back to his days as the set up guy for ace closer Dennis Eckersley with the Oakland A's. A lot of times he would be called upon to face just one batter in an opponents lineup. Some times that one player would be a Don Mattingly or Wade Boggs, but most of the time he got the job done, then handed it over to Eckersley for the final inning. Now baseball keeps stats like "holds". That's when the set up guy would hold the lead until the team called on its closer to seal the deal. When Rick Honeycutt pitched they didn't keep that stat. If they had he would most likely be the career leader in "holds."    

It was great to see my old buddy Rick Honeycutt. He is a little heavier than when he played baseball, but still looks in shape enough to get a couple of guys out in the late innings. Now he spends his time teaching other pitchers how to do the same thing. He was one of the best at what he did in his twenty-two year Major League career. He is still one of the best if not -the- best at what he does as a pitching coach. It's just a matter of record. 

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Randy Smith has been covering sports on radio, television and print for the past 45 years. After leaving WRCB-TV in 2009, he has written two books, and has continued to free-lance as a play-by-play announcer. 

His career has included a 17-year stretch as host of the Kickoff Call In Show on the University of Tennessee’s prestigious Vol Network. He has been a member of the Vol Network staff for thirty years.

He has done play-by-play on ESPN, ESPN II, CSS, and Fox SportSouth, totaling more than 500 games, and served as a well-known sports anchor on Chattanooga Television for more than a quarter-century.

In 2003, he became the first television broadcaster to be inducted into the Greater Chattanooga Area Sports Hall of Fame. Randy and his wife Shelia reside in Hixson. They have two married children, (Christi and Chris Perry; Davey and Alison Smith.) They have five grandchildren, Coleman, Boone, Mattingly, DellaMae, and CoraLee.

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