New St. Louis Cardinals hitting coach knows he’ll take heat. And he’s OK with that.

No one is asking for sympathy for the plight of Major League hitting coaches, but there’s not often a large amount of fairness in their jobs. They aren’t, after all, at the plate with a bat in their hands, and no one seems to notice when things are going well.

When things are going poorly, though, they’re often among the first to come under scrutiny, and as the Cardinals found out first hand that winter, not everyone is prepared to handle that scrutiny as well as they might hope.

Turner Ward gets all that. He’s been here and done the job before, and he’s more than ready to jump into his newest assignment.

“We share the responsibility, but ultimately it comes down to me,” Ward said of his new hitting staff, which includes assistants Brandon Allen and Daniel Nicolaisen. “Players make you better as a coach, and of course you want that to be the same from this end. We want to make the players better; or as I put it, ‘gooder.’”

“The responsibility’s everywhere.”

The eminently quotable Ward, who had previous stints as the head hitting coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds, had his pearls of wisdom featured on t-shirts sprinkled throughout the clubhouse last season, when he was the assistant coach. Now, in replacing Jeff Albert, he’s spent his winter darting around the country from his home in Mobile, Alabama, checking in with his charges and keeping a watchful eye on winter development.

“I’ve been up to St. Louis and I went up to Nolan (Arenado)’s place (in California). A few of the guys came to Marucci (in Baton Rouge). I’ve seen (Brendan Donovan); his wife’s from this area, so I got to see him two or three times,” Ward explained in the process of claiming he’d done “not a lot” of travel.

“You want your offseason to be your offseason, but it’s skill, man. The guys are trying to get better, and as a coach, you want to be there for them and to help them with that whatever way is possible.”

Long-standing relationship with Goldie

When the Cardinals sought to improve their hitting staff ahead of the 2022 season, Ward was an obvious candidate. His experience in the majors as both a player and a coach imbued him with the credibility that they felt was missing from their staff, and his long-standing relationship with Paul Goldschmidt allowed him to come to camp with one of the most important stamps of approval in the clubhouse.

Indeed, the two are so close — dating back to Ward’s time as Goldschmidt’s manager at Double-A — Goldschmidt gifted him his second career Silver Slugger trophy; the award was on display in Ward’s living room during an interview with MLB Network earlier this winter.

“It was really the only place that I wanted to be, me and my wife,” Ward said about joining the Cardinals a year ago. “It was just so exciting to get back and do something that I really love, and that’s coaching, mentoring, teaching, learning at the big league level.”

In that history with players, it seems the Cardinals found another lesson. Both Allen and Nicolaisen have extensive history with the team’s up-and-coming young hitters, having worked at various levels of the organization for the past several years.

Working from a position of strength

Nicolaisen, who’s been predominantly based out of the team’s complex in Jupiter, Florida, spent the winter working to retool Paul DeJong’s swing before being promoted to the majors in January. Allen, most recently the hitting coach at Triple-A Memphis, has risen along with the young regulars, and caught the eye of his new boss as camp broke last spring.

“The last thing I told ‘BA’ at spring training last year,” Ward recalled, “I said, ‘you’re a big league hitting coach.’”

“I think he’s an outstanding person, and I think — I know — we’re going to work really good together. I’m excited about what he and us and we all are going to bring to the table this year.”

The Cardinals, of course, are working from a position of strength. They return to the roster the National League MVP (Goldschmidt) and third place finisher (Arenado), as well as seven of the eight players who posted double digit home runs for them in 2022, with Willson Contreras inbound to take the place of Albert Pujols.

The word ‘coach’

As a team, they were third in the National League in on base percentage and fourth in slugging. The lights went out in the postseason, but the engine roared throughout the summer. Figuring out the October outages will be at the top of Ward’s to-do list when the time comes, but by his calculation, there’s always a plan to be made.

“We know we’re going to struggle at times,” he said. “I always make that a point, because you can’t go through a season without it.”

“Our job as coaches is the word ‘coach.’ When things are not going good, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

The Cardinals are ready to trust that no one can do it gooder.