Detroit — AJ Hinch already feels comfortable enough with his new boss to joke around with him.
Scott Harris, the Tigers’ new president of baseball operations, was hired away from the San Francisco Giants less than three weeks ago. But his first official day on the job was Thursday, and that led to a little ribbing from the Tigers manager after he’d returned from the team’s season-ending road trip in Seattle.
“I said, ‘How’s your first day going?’” Hinch laughed Friday. “I acted as if he was off the last 10 days.”
Of course, that couldn’t be further from the truth, and Hinch knows better than anyone just how active Harris has been behind the scenes ever since his introductory press conference Sept. 20 at Comerica Park.
In between baseball games, as the Tigers rallied to avoid a 100-loss season with an 11-5 record following Harris’ hiring, the two men tasked with turning this franchise around have spent a lot of time together, both in person and over the phone. They’ve had sit-down meetings with players — most notably Miguel Cabrera and Javier Baez — and held nightly “download” sessions to keep each other in the loop on the day’s baseball business.
And while Hinch was headed home to Houston on Friday to “decompress for a little bit” after a dismal six-month slog that he politely described as “taxing,” he did sound energized about what lies ahead.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Hinch said.
That almost goes without saying, given the record on the field and the roster that produced it, though the way Hinch sees it, “I don’t think every area that struggled this season necessarily has to be, you know, gutted and replaced.”
Still, after a years-long rebuild was all but condemned this summer, and Al Avila given an eviction notice as general manager in August, a busy offseason is in store, regardless.
It actually began Friday with Hinch’s announcement of changes to his coaching staff, including the firing of hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh. That dismissal was hardly a surprise after the Tigers posted their worst offensive numbers since 1906, averaging just 3.44 runs per game, while getting shut out a whopping 22 times. The Tigers ranked last in the majors in home runs and averaged a league-worst 3.72 strikeouts per walk. Yet Hinch made it clear he wasn’t laying the blame for all the Tigers’ hitting woes on Coolbaugh, who’d spent a year with the Chicago White Sox before joining Hinch’s staff in Detroit in 2021.
“We are all responsible,” Hinch said. “We are all a part of this. But it was obviously time for us to assess the staff. And we’re going to have a different staff and a different message and a different collection of guys to hopefully push the players in a new direction.”
And to that point, Hinch reiterated Friday something he has talked about ever since he was hired as manager here two years ago: You can lead a hitter to the plate, but you can’t make him take a pitch outside the strike zone. (The Tigers swung at more pitches outside the zone — 36.7% — than any other MLB team this season.) So whether it’s Javier Baez’s “reckless abandon” spilling over into unseemly chase rates or Spencer Torkelson’s reluctance to tweak his own swing mechanics in a brutal rookie year, the Tigers’ next hitting coach certainly will have his hands full.
But there’s also a mandate coming from the top now that should help. Harris alluded to it with a brief dissertation on the importance of plate discipline and strike-zone control during his introductory press conference last month. And fans will see it start to play out over the next few months as the roster overhaul begins.
“I mean, that was very well-articulated by Scott,” Hinch said. “I’ve been trying to talk about this for a number of years, but your roster has to match your philosophy as well. … Now 30 out of 30 (MLB teams) are going to talk about zone control, they’re going to talk about swing decisions. We all use the same phrases. It’s the implementation that’s really the secret sauce, and obviously getting player performance — connecting with players — is the No. 1 responsibility.”
But it’s a shared responsibility, and that’s sort of the point here. It can’t just be one voice; it has to be many, from top to bottom in the organization. From the front office to the scouts — expect more changes there this offseason, by the way — and all throughout the coaching and player-development staffs. The Tigers have made some progress in that regard during Hinch’s time in Detroit, but there’s still a long road to go catch up with the competition.
The good news there for the Tigers, thus far, is that Harris and Hinch appear to speak the same language. That’s something they both realized early on in the interview process that led owner Chris Ilitch to hire his new baseball architect, and it’s been confirmed almost daily since.
“Yeah, he’s been great about the communication with me,” Hinch said. “I mean, we are synced up on so many levels. And even though he hasn’t been present, he’s been really busy. And it’s been very energizing for me to see that from my chair and know how he’s trying to impact the organization in a quick amount of time.”
Again, all that jibed with the background checks Hinch had done, making calls around the league on his new boss, a whip-smart 35-year-old who’d been a GM with the forward-thinking Giants and an assistant GM under Theo Epstein with the Chicago Cubs when they built a World Series champ.
“One of the things I was told was how impressed I was going to be with how his mind works, and I didn’t know quite what that meant,” Hinch said. “But the way he thinks about things, the way he responds to different things, the way he articulates his reactions, I mean, he’s a very intellectually curious person. And I guess that should be expected, given his background and where he’s coming from and who he’s worked for. But his intellectual curiosity is an 80 on a scouting scale. It’s one of the best attributes that I’ve seen so far.”
It’s part of what made the think tank so successful in Chicago nearly a decade ago. And that collaborative approach is exactly what Harris promised the day he was hired.
“It’s through sitting down with every member of the staff, understanding what’s important to them, how to motivate them, how to push them and sharing with them how to push me,” Harris said. “I want to be in an environment where I’m pushing them to get better and they’re pushing me to get better. So, I think that can only start at the ground level. It starts with forging relationships through conversation and through work and building that trust.”
Clearly, that’s happening already with Hinch. Almost to an unsettling degree, he joked Friday.
“He has a lot of questions,” he said. “He’s a good listener. And I think when he said at his press conference that he was going to do a lot of listening, most of us kind of think, ‘Oh, yeah. OK.’ But he actually really did it.
“I was told by players and staff that he would make you feel really good about yourself and you would really enjoy it. And that’s very true. There’s a little hidden motivator in there. It’s his vibe, the way he goes about it, his demeanor. … I know that I’m gonna have a voice with him, and he’s gonna push me and I’m gonna push him. And it’s been an incredible partnership in the early stages of this relationship. I mean, I’m super happy. He’s really good.”
And at the end of a really bad season for the Tigers, that’s one positive sign, at least, that better days are ahead.