Ever notice there is no WAR for managers?
It’s one of the most difficult occupations in sports to quantify.
There are plenty of great managers in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Jim Leyland is one of them, even though his career record wasn’t much above .500. Oh, Leyland took three different franchises to the playoffs, two to the World Series and won one. But when he lacked talent, his teams compiled poor records.
Anybody doubt that Bruce Bochy is a Hall of Fame manager? He’s won four World Series, three with the San Francisco Giants and one with his current club, the Texas Rangers. It’s the only time either of those franchises won world titles in their current locations. Yet, in 28 years as an MLB manager, Bochy is below .500.
Casey Stengel and Joe Torre were losing managers for multiple clubs until hooking up with the mighty Yankees. That’s just the beginning of the examples.
The role of manager has gradually been diminished by large analytic departments, enhanced technology and Ivy League graduates dotting front offices like a Dalmatian’s coat. Managing by the book has been replaced by a tablet computer.
Then there is A.J. Hinch. Anybody think the Tigers would be the best team in baseball since the trade deadline last year without him?
When Hinch and pitching coach Chris Fetter concocted pitching chaos last season following the trade deadline, it was pure genius. Similar setups had worked before, most notably in Oakland and Tampa Bay, but not to the perfection of the Tigers. They actually turned pitchers who had been struggling at Triple A into thriving MLB entities because of perfectly matching roles to skills.
Baseball presents a unique situation. The goal of minor league players isn’t to win for the team, but to reach the next level, with the ultimate being advancement to MLB. The trick for the manager is getting players who have been individually-minded throughout their professional careers to suddenly start buying into the team concept.
It’s no easy task. Even at the MLB level, salaries are widely determined by statistics, more so than other sports. There is also the matter of big-contract players with all security in the world in regard to salary and length of term.
Javy Baez hasn’t been a sour seed, though, even after being disciplined by Hinch, who handled it -- and Baez’s incredibly underwhelming performance -- in a manner that didn’t humiliate the player, while still getting his point across. We are seeing how that is paying off as Baez, after obviously-needed hip surgery, has surged this season.
Kerry Carpenter is arguably the Tigers’ best slugger. A left-handed hitter, he hit lefty pitching well in the minor leagues.He really hasn’t had a chance to do that in MLB because Hinch platoons him. Yet, Carpenter, although he’d prefer to play vs. southpaws, doesn’t whine about it.
In 2025, 'pitching chaos' has been replaced by 'position player mayhem' because of injuries. Yet, the Tigers just keep winning.
Hinch has had his bad moments with the Tigers. The team performed well compared to expectations during his first season in 2021, but faltered badly in 2022. In 2023, the Tigers closed strongly, but played exceptionally poorly for most of 2024, despite superior pitching.
There was a point last summer when Hinch appeared searching for words, especially when asked to give a self-evaluation about his job performance on 97.1 The Ticket. But he never lost his cool. While he lost a lot of games, he never lost the trust of his team.
Perhaps that’s because Hinch has this perfect blend for a manager. He is Stanford educated, so the Ivy League nerds in the front office are nothing new. He’s been on the scouting and development end. He failed as a manager in Arizona, won a World Series in Houston, suffered the indignity of being suspended in the Astros' sign-stealing scandal.
He played in MLB, as a catcher, the ideal spot for a manager because of exposure to both hitting and pitching. As Al Avila, the general manager when Hinch was hired, said at the time: "He can tell the analytics people when they’re full of it, and he can tell the baseball people when they are, too. He knows all sides."
That, along with the 'Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger' journey that Hinch went through has made him a savvy manager. It’s all added up to one of the best, if not the very best, manager in the game.
And it goes a long way in explaining the Tigers’ stunning success.