Diamondbacks Announce Coaching Staff; Trammell, Nagy, Baylor Included

If Major League Baseball ever decides to have a tournament between the coaching staffs of the 30 teams, our money is on the Diamondbacks.

Arizona announced their full coaching staff for the 2011 season on Tuesday and it is chock full of guys who could play the game back in their day. We already knew that they hired Don Baylor to be their hitting coach and that Eric Young was leaving ESPN to coach first base, but the Diamondbacks were just getting warmed up. Alan Trammell, six-time All-Star with the Tigers, will be the bench coach and Charles Nagy, a three-time All-Star and member of the Indians Hall of Fame, will be their pitching coach.

That talented quartet joins holdover manager Kirk Gibson, who you might remember from such classic home runs as this one, and third base coach Matt Williams, who might have been a work stoppage away from immortality in 1994, on a coaching staff you would have been happy to get in a pack of baseball cards when you were a younger fellow.

If all those guys can teach their players to do things as well as they did during their own careers, the Diamondbacks might be a sleeper candidate to make their first World Series appearance since 2001. Things usually don't work out that way, but Arizona might have stumbled on a winning formula with this group.

The only question we have is how Glenn Sherlock managed to hold onto his job as the bullpen coach. With Gibson and Trammell reuniting after their stellar performances helped the Tigers to the 1984 title, we would have thought that Willie Hernandez would have been the choice out in the 'pen for the Arizona chapter of the Retired All-Stars Club.