A.J. Hinch is more to the Tigers than a Manager of the Year candidate

The Detroit Tigers got one of the biggest breaks in the history of the franchise on October 30, 2020. For a time, it looked as though the Chicago White Sox were in position with a win now roster to hire A.J. Hinch, but instead owner Jerry Reinsdorf chose his old buddy Tony La Russa to the chagrin of White Sox fans everywhere. Al Avila quickly locked up Hinch as the Tigers’ 48th manager since joining the American League back in 1901. Shrewd observers of the game understood that a sea change in the Tigers’ fortunes had taken place.

The astounding stretch drive that saw a floundering Tigers team, that traded away several of its most talented players at the deadline, somehow surge to a wild card berth in spectacular and improbable fashion, makes Hinch an outstanding choice as AL Manager of the Year. He will have strong competition, as Cleveland Guardians manager Stephen Vogt is a great choice too.

However, Hinch’s work in turning around the Tigers goes back four years now, and his impact far beyond the dugout and the clubhouse has made him the single most important architect of the Tigers turnaround. From a rebuilding effort that was dead in the water when he arrived, to a team that will now play October baseball for the first time since 2014, Hinch’s impact can’t be overemphasized.

With a strong farm system, and one of the lowest payrolls in the game, the Tigers are now finally primed for sustained success. But before we get to his work in 2024, let’s first unpack just how far reaching Hinch’s work in rebuilding the Tigers has been since he arrived.

A.J. Hinch takes charge

When Hinch was hired, the Tigers were three years into an organization wide overhaul that was going nowhere fast. After losing 114 games in 2019 under Ron Gardenhire, and following that up with a 23-35 record in the 2020 season, Gardenhire’s health pushed him into retirement. Frankly, Gardenhire’s hiring had been another major Al Avila mistake in the first place.

During Gardenhire’s three year tenure, the Tigers were outright tanking for high draft picks. They had every opportunity to try their hand with any waiver claim or free agent reclamation projects they wanted, and yet Avila found nothing of note to help the club, and Gardenhire’s coaching staff likewise was far too behind the times to develop anyone significantly. As Hinch and his coaching staff have illustrated in the last few years, the Tigers should’ve done far better in those years in finding and developing undervalued talent and reclamation projects to trade for prospects.

Instead, Avila failed miserably at the 2017 trade deadline, and compounded it by holding onto players like Nick Castellanos, Michael Fulmer, and Matt Boyd, hoping that one of them would have a huge season and become a very valuable trade chip. It never happened, as Gardenhire and his staff were too antiquated in their methods, and the front office wasn’t advanced, nor coordinated enough, to help them in that regard.

The Tigers were a very insular organization by that point, rarely trying coaches or players outside of Avila’s old boy network. What they needed badly, was a major infusion of coaching and front office talent from top development clubs like the Houston Astros, Tampa Bay Rays, and Los Angeles Dodgers. This was my rationale for pushing Gabe Kapler as the Tigers’ top managerial option when Brad Ausmus was fired at the end of the 2017 season.

Whatever you think about Kapler’s ability to push the right buttons from the dugout, he’d played a huge role in turning the Dodgers into a player development juggernaut as their Director of Player Development from 2014-2017. This was exactly what the Tigers needed.

A.J. Hinch’s bench coach at the time, Alex Cora, was another option reportedly favored by some of Avila’s assistant general managers, particularly Sam Menzin, and that too would have been a good choice for their purposes. Of course, unbeknownst to us, Cora had already guaranteed a 2020 suspension as the key driver of the Astros’ sign stealing program along with veteran star Carlos Beltran and numerous front office personnel. It’s also possible that he wouldn’t have been interested in the job. Kapler was, and the Tigers lost out on a chance to begin remaking their woeful player development department.

Instead, Avila chose Gardenhire and wasted three seasons of Tigers baseball. Leaving aside what they did with those top draft picks, the Gardenhire decision was another key factor that made this a lot longer rebuilding effort than it needed to be.

We’ll get to the 2024 season shortly, but it’s important to understand that if there’s a single architect of the Tigers turn around, it is A.J. Hinch, and in ways that go far beyond the work of the average manager.

Hinch retired from his playing career in 2005. The Arizona Diamondbacks immediately hired the journeyman catcher as their manager of minor league operations, and by August of 2006, Hinch was their Director of Player Development. A Baseball America article in 2006 named Hinch as one of ten names to watch in the industry set to make an impact in a major league front office and likely to ascend to a general manager’s seat eventually.

In May of 2009, the Diamondbacks fired Bob Melvin as manager, and despite no managerial experience, named Hinch as their new manager. Hinch hired Kirk Gibson as his bench coach, and it was a short lived tenure, as Hinch was fired a year later and Gibson promoted to manager.

Two months later, Hinch was named Vice President of Pro Scouting for the San Diego Padres, a position he held for four years until 2014, when the Houston Astros hired him as manager to replace Bo Porter. The rest is history, with some infamy thrown in as well.

Point being, by the time Hinch retired as a player, he’d already built up a wealth of contacts in major league organizations and become something of a scout for coaching and front office talent, despite minimal experience in those realms himself.

In his years in player development with the Diamondbacks and in pro scouting with the Padres, he made himself intimately familiar with top names in the pro and college ranks in those fields. By the time he returned from his 2020 suspension from the Astros sign-stealing scandal, he was the perfect choice not only to manage a young, rebuilding club, but also to recruit top talent in coaching, front office scouts and analysts, as well as players. His comprehensive understanding of how a modern baseball organization is built at all levels gave him a unique insight into what needed to be done in Detroit.

The Tigers needed a true expert in modern player development, and they needed someone with the rolodex of contacts who could recruit talent at all levels of the organization. Other than the ninth round selection of Tarik Skubal in 2019, the greatest decision of Al Avila’s tenure was the hiring of A.J. Hinch.

The early years in Detroit

Hinch immediately put together a strong coaching staff, hiring George Lombard as his bench coach and Chris Fetter as his pitching coach. The latter decision gets a lot more ink, as Fetter and Hinch have created one of the top pitching departments in baseball over the last four seasons, but in all the less obvious ways, Lombard has had a major impact as well, helping to turn the Tigers defensive positioning and baserunning around to world class levels and taking a lead role in guiding many young players in the nuances and psychology of the game at its highest level. It would be no surprise to see team’s come calling to make him their new manager this offseason.

At the end of his first season in 2021, that coaching tree that Hinch was building paid further dividends when Dave Littlefield was finally fired as VP of player development. Ryan Garko, like Hinch a former Stanford catcher who had worked with Fetter in the Los Angeles Dodgers player development group, was hired to take Littlefield’s place, with Hinch and current VP and assistant general manager Sam Menzin taking key roles in the recruiting and interviewing process.

Garko almost immediately transformed the Tigers player development system starting in 2022. Having followed the Tigers farm system closely since Avila’s hiring in 2015, the impact was obvious and has only grown over the past three seasons.

Suddenly, rather than top prospects who failed, the Tigers saw players like Kerry Carpenter and Keider Montero develop out of near total obscurity. Reese Olson, Parker Meadows, Wenceel Pérez, Brant Hurter are just a few names that went from talented but only middling ranks as prospects, to quality major league contributors and more. One of Garko’s first and best hires has been Gabe Ribas, again hired out of that Dodgers player development lineage where he and Fetter made contact, as Director of Pitching in the farm system. The hitting side under Kenny Graham took longer to come together, but they’re rapidly making progress on that front now as well.

By the time the 2022 season opened, and as was only reported later in the season in the wake of Avila’s ouster, Chris Ilitch had mandated that major decisions by Avila were ok’d by Hinch and Menzin as a sort of triumvirate. When Avila was fired following the 2022 season, having made two more unfortunate moves in signing Javier Báez and trading away Izaac Paredes for outfielder Austin Meadows, it was Hinch and Menzin who seem to have had a key role in helping Ilitch scout out potential replacements.

Rather than hiring a new President of Baseball Operations to start from scratch with their own front office and manager, it was Hinch, Menzin, and Garko, who were chief among Ilitch’s staff in interviewing candidates and eventually landing on Scott Harris. That’s a truly atypical way of doing things but it’s worked out well so far.

In all sorts of ways, everything that has improved in the Tigers organization far beyond what goes on in the dugout and on the field, goes back to that initial stroke of fortune in landing Hinch when it looked like he would go to the White Sox. Thank you Jerry Reinsdorf.

On the field, things haven’t come so quickly, but it’s been notable that every A.J. Hinch led Tigers team apart from the ill-fated 2022 squad has finished the season better than when they started. And it was really only in 2022-2023 that a real flow of talent started to come in from the farm system.

2024 AL Manager of the Year

Now that you have a feel for just how far reaching Hinch’s impact has been, let’s get down to his 2024 Manager of the Year case.

Heading into the 2024 season, it felt like everything would have to go right for the Tigers to reach the postseason after a pretty mediocre offseason from Scott Harris. Signing Jack Flaherty was a great move, and of course it was Hinch who flew to meet Flaherty personally to convince him to sign with the Tigers. But otherwise, it was just some modest plugging of holes with veterans like Mark Canha, Shelby Miller, Kenta Maeda, and Andrew Chafin.

Things did not go right at all, as Spencer Torkelson and Parker Meadows were downright unplayable the first two months of the season. Javier Báez remained terrible at the plate. The bullpen was strong in March/April, but the lack of a true stopper saw Jason Foley and Tyler Holton taxed and not that effective in May and June, and once Kerry Carpenter went down with another long-term injury in May, it started to feel like the goose was already cooked despite a good rotation led by Tarik Skubal, Flaherty, and Reese Olson.

An 11-16 record in May was followed by a 10-17 mark in June, and then the injuries bit even deeper. Casey Mize was lost to injury on June 30, and he wouldn’t return until the very end of August. Reese Olson went down on July 20, and wouldn’t return until September 16.

The Tigers actually posted a 14-11 record in July, despite those injuries. Yet they finished the month with a 52-57 record for the season, and made the only reasonable choice. They trade Jack Flaherty to the Los Angeles Dodgers for powerful switch-hitting catcher Thayron Liranzo and shortstop Trey Sweeney. They traded Carson Kelly and Andrew Chafin to the Texas Rangers for some interesting pitching prospects. Mark Canha went to San Francisco for a right-handed relief prospect. They promoted top catching prospect Dillon Dingler, promoted Sweeney to take over from Báez, who struggled miserably through another injury plagued season and eventually went under the knife for season ending surgery on his hip, and brought up young pitching prospects LHP Brant Hurter and RHP Ty Madden.

The rest is history. Somehow, Hinch and Fetter were able to work around the fact that they only had one established starting pitcher in Skubal. They started using relievers to open games in July, mixing in Hurter, Madden, veteran minor league lefty Bryan Sammons, and wayward starter Kenta Maeda as long relievers, or “bulk guys” as they were often referred to. Montero, Hurter, and Madden’s numbers at Triple-A were atrocious, but Hinch and Fetter were able to get the best out of them by careful game-planning, even as Fetter and his assistants Dr. Robin Lund and Juan Nieves, continued the work of tuning them up in terms of stuff, command, and understanding how to use their stuff to sequence hitters effectively through multiple at-bats in a game.

Hinch, Lombard, and hitting coaches Michael Brdar and Keith Beauregard employed something of a Fabian strategy, really emphasizing tough, gritty at-bats to wear down opposing pitching staffs while their mix and matchup approach to the pitching staff kept games close enough for what seemed like an endless array of late inning heroics from the young Tigers in August and September.

Unless you’re a close observer of the team, even now Skubal, Olson, and Mize may be the only names you recognize on the pitching staff. Yet the Tigers had the lowest team ERA in the second half of the season, and the sixth best fielding independent pitching mark (FIP) at 3.66. Those numbers are a testament to what they managed to accomplish not only with the pitching, but with the defense as well.

Even as that started to gel, the Tigers lost Riley Greene to an injury that saw him miss several weeks in late July and the first half of August. Parker Meadows picked up the slack, returning from his two month stint in Toledo in early July only to suffer an injury that kept him out until early August. From that point on, Meadows hit .291 with a 135 wRC+ while stealing bags and playing tremendous defense in center field. Greene returned on August 18, and Kerry Carpenter on August 13th, and suddenly the Tigers had three really dangerous bats in the lineup for the first time all season.

In August and September, the Tigers won 14 one-run games out of 19 one-run games they played. Hinch continued to pinch-hit more than all but two other teams in the game, and he and Fetter continued to piece together outstanding pitching efforts from a deep group of otherwise non-descript pitchers. Hinch’s ability to communicate his reasoning to his players and get that buy-in, whereas in years past players may have been frustrated by their role, is another of his best attributes as a manager.

Tyler Holton is probably one of the 3-4 most valuable relievers in the game over the past two seasons, but a decent part of that is the fact that he’s bought into A.J. Hinch and will pitch in any situation, often for many more than just three outs. He’s not out there demanding to be the closer.

Kerry Carpenter, the 20th ranked hitter in baseball by wRC+ over the past two seasons for hitters with 600 PA or more, sits against lefty starters so that Hinch has him available to pinch-hit in high leverage situations. Hinch can break it down to a player like Carpenter that he has right-handed hitters who are as good against lefties as Carpenter. It’s not that Carpenter is bad against lefties necessarily. It’s that others who rarely play can thrive in that spot, giving Hinch a monster weapon for crucial situations in close games. Carpenter’s trust in Hinch makes that possible.

That’s just two key examples of the non-traditional usage Hinch employs, and his ability to get players to put aside their ego for the team and buy into the overall team strategy.

A stretch run for the ages

When we look back at this stretch drive years from now, we’re rightly going to remember the players and their outstanding individual efforts. Parker Meadows has robbed multiple home runs over the last two months, and his ninth inning grand slam against the Padres on September 5th will remain an all-time classic moment.

We can point to the stirring come from behind victory in the Little League Classic against the Yankees back on August 18th as a moment that sparked the team. Akil Baddoo’s walkoff double against the Mariners on August 14th, or an eighth inning two-run shot by Javier Báez to take down the Mariners again the next night, are almost forgotten already because there have just been so many moments like that. Trey Sweeney’s game saving catch while tumbling over Riley Greene on September 21st is more fresh in the memory, but if you go game by game, this young Tigers squad produced moment after moment like this over the past few months. They never gave up. They battled every game to the last out, and more often than not they came through with the victory.

Despite the lack of high end talent in the rotation beyond Skubal and a fairly average offense, they’ve managed to do all the little things right and play an inspired brand of team-focused baseball of the type you always hope for, but rarely see for this sustained a stretch.

The Detroit Tigers haven’t won anything yet. We hope for a World Series title, or at very least a deep run in October this year, but nothing is guaranteed. What’s clear, however, is that a new era of winning baseball has finally arrived. Building on it will have as much to do with Scott Harris and his front office’s ability to finish off a World Series caliber roster in the years ahead while maintaining a strong and sustained pipeline of talent to the major leagues.

A.J. Hinch has played a central role in all of it, and the fanbase can trust that there will be no greater advocate for improvements in the roster this offseason. We knew immediately how huge a hire he was for this franchise, and it’s all coming to fruition now. His leadership ability, experience both as a manager and in scouting and player development, his communication skills and ability to strategize and teach the game, as well as his deep well of contacts made him a perfect choice to finally produce a model, modern baseball organization. So did the obvious motivation to redeem the stain on his record that undercut all his achievements with the Houston Astros.

That drive and ability has been apparent all along in his impact throughout the whole organization, but the second half of the 2024 season took it to another level. We’ve just witnessed one of the great managerial clinics in the history of the game.

Redemption song or no, Hinch is an ideal choice for American League Manager of the Year.