Just in case you weren't sick to death of the topic of Rickie Weeks, Tom Haudricourt put together a story detailing what is being done to solve the problems of the sometimes frustrating, occasionally brilliant, Weeks:

"They're very straightforward," said Weeks, 26. "That's what I want. Just tell me."

Sveum, in his new role as hitting coach, and Randolph, who doubles as bench coach and infield instructor, have been doing exactly that.

Not coincidentally, both coaches are tackling Weeks' major foible: his tendency to rush things. At the plate, he often gets his bat in and out of the strike zone too fast to assure consistent contact. In the field, he speeds things up to the point of making senseless errors, with both his glove and his arm.

(snip)

"We're trying to get him to slow things down, smooth things out, so the rhythm of the position becomes second-nature to him. He's very athletic, very energetic. Sometimes at that position there's a clock that ticks. I think his clock is a little ramped up. But he's working his butt off and has responded very well."

Sounds harmless enough, right? This is nothing new, either, as previous coaches have said pretty much the same thing about Weeks' tendency to try to do too much, too fast. That is all well and good and something which can only really benefit the young man's game. Then we get to the info about a few small "tweaks" being made to his approach at the plate, and things start to get a little scary:

Sveum, blunt as always, has put several players up on the rack for overhauls of varying scopes this spring. The tune-up list with Weeks seems alarmingly high for a player with 1,615 major-league at-bats under his belt, but Sveum is determined to extract the offensive weapons from Weeks that made him a dynamo in the college ranks and minors.

Sveum's checklist includes getting Weeks to soften the Gary Sheffield-like "waggle" with the bat as he awaits a pitch, straightening up in the box, lowering his hands a bit, shifting his weight better from back to front and creating more of an arc in his swing.

Other than that, let's keep everything else the same.

Haudricourt is right, that is a pretty long list of "to do's" there. Not to jump on Sveum, who is, after all, new on the job, but I think it's fair to wonder if this is the best idea. Surely Weeks could use some tweaks to his approach to help harness all of that potential he has to be a high OBP/SLG player. It's hard to argue with any one of those changes, and Sveum would certainly know better than I would what he needs to do. The problem is that he is asking him to change so much all at once.

A person who has never seen a baseball game reading that article would have to assume that Weeks must be a pretty bad hitter to warrant that kind of overhaul. Weeks isn't that bad, though. Those that like to focus on batting average and strikeouts as measures of a player are apt to find Weeks wanting. Of course, batting average and strikeouts aren't very useful measures of a player offensively.

The more advanced metrics look at Weeks' OBP (career .352) and solid power (.406 career slugging) and compute that he is, in fact, of offensive value. Baseball Prospectus puts his career EQA at .270 (where .260 is "average") and has him with a WARP3 of 3.5 and 3.0 in 2007 and 2008, respectively. What that roughly means is that he's a useful player. Not the star that most envisioned at this point in his career, but solid.

Asking Weeks to make all of these changes to his game all at once is very likely to result in yet another slow start to a season for Weeks while he is trying to get the feel for his new approach. Over the past few years he has spent essentially the entire season trying to rehab his numbers from "ugly" to "passable" and generally succeeded, though taking a lot of heat in the process. It is also possible that Weeks doesn't need to make radical changes to tap into that potential, just experience and health. If that is the case, this would be counterproductive, as it would set back the clock on those developments. At the very worst, it risks permanently wrecking an average player's career by messing up his approach at the plate to the point where he no longer knows which end is up.

This is a tough call to make, because while Weeks is a serviceable major league second basemen, he has the potential to be much more. That justifies taking a certain amount of risk with his game. Ultimately, though, while each of the things on Sveum's list seems reasonable enough, he is running a major risk of "overload" here.  Sveum would probably be best served by trying to make these changes over the course of a season, not during spring training. That would allow him to evaluate each separately and keep what works and toss what doesn't.

This is the definition of "high risk, high reward" and Sveum is probably staking a good portion of his career on the gamble. For the sake of all involved, let's hope he's right.