While waiting on my flight to Detroit…
# AJ Hinch, Scott Harris commit to deep offseason dive into Tigers’ hitting woes
Full article at link.
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There has to be some pathos involved, for the simple fact that hitting a baseball in the big leagues is more difficult than ever.
“What is required out of a major league hitter has never been tougher,” Hinch said. “Velo is up, the movement, pitch shapes, the pitching laboratories are much further along than the reaction side of the sport as an offensive player. The challenge is getting tougher and tougher.
“That’s not an excuse as much as it is perspective.”
That said, Harris and Hinch both made it clear that the hitting woes that were exposed at the end of the season were going to be addressed on all fronts this offseason.
…“One thing I noticed, we started to get a little more pitch-able at the end of the season,” Harris said. “Some of our contact issues and approach issues started to get exposed in September. We started to get a little pull-happy and that created some holes for us that got exploited in the playoffs.”
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The Tigers were one of the best fastball-hitting teams in the American League in the regular season. But in the postseason, Cleveland and Seattle dosed them with a barrage of spin, be it sliders, curveballs or splitters, and there was no immediate counter.
“Sometimes we started to audible off the game plan quicker in at-bats,” Harris said. “Sometimes we started to audible toward an approach trying to cover every pitch and every location. That’s really hard to do at this level. Some of the interaction between approach and contact started to hurt us.
“The pitches we were swinging at were exacerbating our contact issues.”
Harris said there is a correlation between the pitches hitters swing at and the pitches they subsequently get. He called it “earning” better pitches.
“It’s a lot easier for me to sit up here say this than it is to do, so I don’t want this to come off as this is easy, at all,” he said. “But sometimes spitting on (taking) tough pitches earns you a better pitch to hit later in the at-bat. As we got more pitch-able, we earned worse pitches to hit and we continued to try to cover those pitches.
“There is a cascading effect to this. That’s why we pay such close attention to this. It’s why we try to build an offense that is nudging closer toward better approaches and more contact skills.”
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Fair or not, Greene became the epitome of the Tigers’ futility down the stretch. His prodigious production — 36 homers, 111 RBI — was drowned by his American League-high 201 strikeouts.
He struck out nine times in the eight playoff games.
“I’ve talked to Riley about his approach, his thought process,” Hinch said. “But when you are in the middle of the fight and guys are throwing 98 to 104 mph, you can’t be in the box and mentally be defensive about striking out. What you can do is have a Plan A and a Plan B and adapt accordingly.
“What never changes is, you need to swing at the right pitches.”
…also, if they trade Skoobs this off season, trading Riley might be able to land some more pitching. This off season could really shake some things up!