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Deer will work closely with hitting coach James Rowson - who replaced Rudy Jaramillo in the middle of last season and earned the job full-time - as well as manager Dale Sveum.

Sveum, a former hitting coach and Deer's teammate with the Milwaukee Brewers in the 1980s, has strong opinions about what the Cubs should be doing at the plate.

Deer hit .220 with 230 home runs and 1,409 strikeouts during his 11-year major-league career. Deer has worked as a hitting coordinator for the San Diego Padres organization.

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#Cubs hire Rob Deer as assistant hitting coach: http://cmcst.sn/aabpdf #CubsTalk (@CSNMooney)

And what might those opinions be? Nice reporting, Mooney

Rob Deer was Adam Dunn before Adam Dunn was Adam Dunn – he was the classic three outcome hitter: he struck out, he walked, or he homered. A career .220 hitter, Deer made his bones with a .324 career OBP and a .442 SLG. That’s an incredible .114 IsoD (12.7% career walk rate!) and an excellent .222 IsoP, the kinds of things you’d love to see your hitters incorporate into their game. More patience, more power. More runs.

So, Deer was Dunn before Dunn, and he was a sabermetric darling before such a thing was even remotely mainstream.

Deer has worked as a hitting instructor around baseball for a while now in his post-playing career, and has also been developing his proprietary “Vizubat,” a device designed to help hitters.

I like not only Deer’s background, as a different kind of hitter (diversity is often good), but I like that the Cubs are bringing yet another voice/mind into the equation at the plate. Lord knows they can use all the help they can get, and if Deer and Sveum already have a quality history of working well together, this could be a nice mix for the Cubs.

At what point do we start dealing with the laws of diminishing returns with all these assistants and multi-layered front office? Isn't there concerns about too many voices being a distraction and the whole too many cooks issue?

At what point do we start dealing with the laws of diminishing returns with all these assistants and multi-layered front office? Isn't there concerns about too many voices being a distraction and the whole too many cooks issue?

I really don't think that should be an issue. The whole "Cubs Way" manual that is being/has been created should have everybody preaching exactly the same thing top to bottom. I think having more guys just allows more individual attention for each player and time to work on things. Plus, another set of eyes to spot potential problems with mechanics can't be a bad thing.

This is funny because of the type of hitter Deer was, but I really don't know much about him as a coach. Perhaps having such flaws allows him to be a good coach.

Christians have (for the most part) the same manual, but that doesn't stop us from being hypocritical, arrogant, and (often times) wrong...

The manual argument wasn't great, but your religion analogy is just plain terrible. There aren't 2B people in the team's front office and Christians can't be "fired" for incorrectly following their manual.

For those who haven't been around long enough to remember....... the CUBS have already tried the College of Coaches thing. It didn't work.

Don't you think part of the reason that was unsuccessful was that each and every coach did things differently?

Which is moot, since the CoC was a ridiculous idea to work in place of having a manager, which isn't what's happening here at all.

I think you mean "moo point".

It's been a couple days, and I'm still not getting how attaching a ball to the bat makes you hit better.