Coaching Career
Following his playing career, Queen joined the Cleveland Indians as a minor league pitching coach, including a stint on their major league staff in 1982. He later joined the Los Angeles Dodgers organization, serving as manager of the Bakersfield Dodgers in 1985.
In 1986, Queen joined the Toronto Blue Jays, where he would play a significant role in the development of the homegrown players during their 11 straight winning seasons. He started as a coach, being promoted as their farm director in 1990 and served as their major league pitching coach from 1996 through 1999. During his four seasons in that role, two Toronto hurlers won three consecutive Cy Young Awards as the top pitcher in the American League — Pat Hentgen in 1996 and Roger Clemens in the 1997 and 1998 seasons.
In addition, Queen was instrumental in helping shape the careers of several Blue Jays players. They include pitchers Chris Carpenter, Pat Hentgen, Todd Stottlemyre, Mike Timlin, David Wells and Woody Williams; infielders Alex Gonzalez and Jeff Kent, as well as outfielders Shawn Green and Shannon Stewart, among others.
Queen also served as the Blue Jays interim manager for the final five games of the 1997 season after Cito Gaston was fired, and later became a scout for the organization. Nevertheless, one of his major achievements came in 2000, when the Jays coaxed him out of retirement to help revive the sagging career of Roy Halladay, by then a 23-year-old pitcher. Queen met Halladay in Dunedin, Florida, where the Jays had sent their once-promising hurler after his ERA had soared to 10.64 in the major leagues. Then he ran a virtual boot camp for Halladay, rebuilding his delivery, teaching him new grips for his pitches and helping him develop a new mental approach.
"There’s no one I made that drastic a change to and verbally abused the way I did Doc", Queen explained after Halladay won his first Cy Young Award in 2003. “There aren’t many people that would have gone through what I put him through. I had to make him understand that he was very unintelligent about baseball. He had no idea about the game”, he added.
In 2009, then Toronto's general manager J. P. Ricciardi brought Queen out of retirement again to serve as a senior advisor, working on special assignments with minor league pitchers. Queen held that position for the rest of his life.
Read more about this topic: Mel Queen (pitcher/outfielder)
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