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Tim Keown
A.J. HINCH ADDRESSES every question as if he’s been given the answers in advance. He speaks with abject certainty about pitching changes and lineup decisions and momentum shifts. There’s never a pause to formulate an answer before sending the words into the world. He can explain a simple, subtle lineup change like an architect detailing the placement of windows. He is calm and assured and consistent, every answer traveling in a straight line. If we ever need someone to narrate the apocalypse, A.J.’s our guy.
He was the same guy when the Detroit Tigers were stomping their way to the best record in baseball and building a lead in the American League Central that reached 15½ games on July 8. He was the same in September, when the Tigers were losing series to the Chicago White Sox and Miami Marlins, and getting swept by the Cleveland Guardians and Atlanta Braves amid an unthinkable collapse that gave the division title to the Guardians, who won 16-of-17 to end the season.
And he’s the exact same now, after the Tigers regained a measure of dignity, and possibly revenge, by beating the Guardians in the wild-card round and now find themselves down two games to one in the ALDS against the Seattle Mariners. The consistency, as you’ve no doubt surmised, is not accidental. The foundation of Hinch’s philosophy, the main tenet of his faith, is to project confidence, to send it out in waves with the belief that it will waft from him to his players, sort of like a contact high.
The Tigers are an odd outfit. Other than Tarik Skubal, the best pitcher on the planet, there are no universally feared hitters or transcendent talents. They have two former No. 1 draft picks, first baseman Spencer Torkelson and pitcher Casey Mize, who have had their once-gilded paths strewn with rocks repeatedly over the past few years. They are mostly a collection of interchangeable and highly complementary parts, a bunch of players molded into Hinch’s ideal of selflessness and self-awareness, guys who — and this is a compliment — succeed in large part by understanding their limitations.
Kerry Carpenter hit one of the most memorable homers in the playoffs last year, and another in Game 1 against the Mariners on Saturday. He is a valuable asset, a left-handed hitter who hit 26 homers this season. No matter: Hinch often replaces Carpenter with pinch hitter Andy Ibanez, a career minor leaguer who is trying his damnedest to stay in the big leagues. Ibanez, though, is a right-handed hitter who possesses an extremely marketable skill: he hits left-handed pitching. And since the Tigers are obsessed not only with improvement but with optimizing individual talent for the collective good, Carpenter frequently loses at-bats to Ibanez.
“It’s something I tell people when they ask about the character of this team,” Hinch says. “Andy is always ready when his chance comes, and Carp is always on the top step rooting for him.”
The Tigers truly excel at one facet of the game, and it’s perhaps the most esoteric and least noticed: baserunning. They are the best team in the game, by far, at taking the extra base, whether it’s going from first to third on a single, scoring from second on a single, or turning a maybe-double into a real-life one. They led the league in XBT, or Extra Bases Taken, with a rate of 53%, the highest in more than 50 years (the league average this season was 42%). The strategy is not without risk: the Tigers also led MLB in outs on the bases with 63, 18 above the average.
And while those numbers might evoke visions of the 1975 Kansas City Royals, the reality is far less flashy. The Tigers’ style is best described as reasoned but only mildly feral, especially since they are not a fast team: 29th of 30 in team sprint speed. But what they do well is read situations, get good jumps and understand better than anyone that putting pressure on the defense is one way to offset physical limitations.
“This team has been built to maximize everybody’s strength,” Hinch says. “We are obsessed with getting players better, and the players have bought in. We use 13 different position players and five different closers on some nights, and because the player buy-in has been awesome, it’s really opened the door to a really fun team.”
I spent the better part of two weeks with the Tigers in May and June, those halcyon days when they were the best team in baseball and it didn’t seem close. “I race to work each day,” Hinch said in July, “and I’m fully aware it’s not always that way in this job.” And I returned this past weekend in Seattle expecting to see a different team, or at least detect a more cynical or maybe weary vibe, given the sharp turns the season had taken. But Hinch was the same Hinch, and the Tigers were the same mildly goofy collection of randomized parts. Despite everything, despite every unsustainable high and unsustainable low, nothing appears to have changed.
Now, they’re about to find out how far belief can take a team that has come face to face with its flaws and lived to tell the tale.
WHEN HINCH WAS hired to manage the Houston Astros before the 2015 season, he stood before his team for the first time and asked: Why is nobody here talking about winning? The question itself was jarring, considering the answer was right in front of him. The Astros had lost at least 100 games for three straight years before losing 92 the year before Hinch arrived. They weren’t talking about winning because they couldn’t conceive of winning.
But those Astros were a team filled with top prospects who held the promise of a brighter future — one that nobody before Hinch seemed interesting in rushing. He made the goal explicit, said it out loud and told them they were about to go out and make it real. And the Astros won 86 in 2015, 84 in 2016 and then at least 100 for three straight seasons, including the sign-stealing 2017 World Series winner that eventually earned Hinch a year’s suspension.
When Hinch was hired to manage the Tigers in 2021, the scene felt familiar: top prospects made possible by years of losing, a moribund fan base and a pessimism that was passed down genetically. And so Hinch stood in front of his team for the first time and asked them: Why is nobody here talking about winning?
“Same exact thing,” Hinch says. “When an organization falls into these ruts and droughts, everyone — whether it’s fan bases, players, coaches, people who work in the organization — they lose track of why we do this, and what we’re pursuing. We’re pursuing winning. I’ve always believed you have to announce what you’re trying to do and openly talk about it.”
It took longer. There were three losing seasons before the Tigers broke through last season with a remarkable second-half run that was the inverse of this season’s second-half collapse. But the culture changed, and the attitude changed, and the Tigers are in the postseason for the second consecutive season. “A lot of what we’ve accomplished stems from A.J.” Mize says. “He preaches one thing: commit to the present and don’t worry about anything else.”
IT’S BEEN A ride. The low point for the Tigers came on a Tuesday night, September 23, in Cleveland. In the sixth inning, the Guardians put together the world’s least impressive rally to score three runs off Skubal on their way to a win that put them in a tie for first in the AL Central. There was a bunt single by Steven Kwan to lead off, and a sacrifice bunt by Angel Martinez that Skubal decided to long-snap — literally between his legs — down the right-field line to move the runners to second and third, and then an RBI infield single by Jose Ramirez.
Then, David Fry.
Fry tried to bunt a 99 mph Skubal fastball and had it tip off his bat into his face. It was a terrifying moment; Fry went down, Skubal tossed his glove and his hat into the air and crouched near the mound with his hands over his mouth. Fry was carted off, and Skubal was clearly shaken, as evidenced by a wild pitch and a balk that led to two more Guardians runs.
Skubal went to the hospital later that night to visit Fry, and he watched as a doctor stitched Fry’s nose, broken in two places and sliced open in two more, back together. Skubal apologized and Fry waved it off, saying, “I already knew I couldn’t hit you. Now I learned I can’t bunt you, either.”
SO MUCH ABOUT baseball doesn’t make sense. Tommy Kahnle can throw 40 changeups in a row and still make a hitter look foolish on the 41st. His entire professional existence can look like an elaborate practical joke, or maybe a magic trick. They know it’s coming, and it usually doesn’t matter. Like all good wizards, Kahnle’s sorcery derives from what can’t be seen: his fastball, a pitch he almost never throws.
This rare fastball is not particularly fast, especially in today’s game, and its natural habitat is in hitters’ heads, where it resides in peaceful slumber. Kahnle started throwing his changeup more often after coming back from Tommy John surgery in 2022. By last season, when he threw 61 straight in the postseason while relieving for the Yankees, it veered close to obsession.
“It just keeps working,” he says in a tone that suggests he doesn’t understand it either. “I think it works because I can command it, and also because guys know I’ll throw a fastball every once in a while.”
Kahnle pitched a perfect seventh inning in the Tigers’ Game 1 win over Seattle, throwing 10 pitches. The first nine were changeups, and the 10th was a two-strike, 92 mph fastball that gave a surprised Luke Raley no chance. It doesn’t always work — Kahnle had an up-and-down regular season and ended up with a 4.43 ERA — but when he’s on, it’s as close as baseball gets to an in-game comedy routine.
Kahnle is a voting member of what has become known as Hinch’s “Pitching Chaos,” a term that refers to the Tigers’ insistence on using their relievers in situations rather than roles. It’s a practice born at least partly from necessity; it’s easier to ditch regular roles when the roster isn’t dotted with pitchers who fit into them. Will Vest is as close as Hinch has to a primary closer, but five other pitchers had saves this season. In Game 1, starter Keider Montero pitched the 11th inning for his first career save. It’s whatever it takes and whoever you’ve got.
“The culture on this team is to offer something every day to a win, and not get caught up in perceived roles or expectations or even the reasons we do what we do,” Hinch says. “We want to use our whole roster and make it really difficult on the other side. When you have players that buy in — common goal, common desire to be a winner — we get to do a lot of creative things. It’s not a magic potion, and it does take some getting used to, to pitch the fifth inning one day and the eighth the next, or to pitch one inning one day and 2⅓ the next. But over time, we’ve been able to establish that as our norm.”
TORKELSON AND MIZE seem destined to their shared fates, conjoined top overall picks — one-one, in the game’s parlance — who succeeded and failed and dealt with the doubt and the pressure to come out on the other side. Both of them fought the internal battle against external expectations long enough to cast it all aside to pursue their own ideas of who they are and what they should be.
Torkelson hit 31 homers two seasons ago and then regressed to the point where he was demoted last season, when he hit just .219 and struck out in nearly 28% of his plate appearances. “I definitely went through a lot of struggles,” he says. “I definitely lost some confidence. I don’t know how any human wouldn’t.”
To that point, his whole professional career, even the good times that came with the 31-homer season, were played against the backdrop of expectations. “I always knew deep down that I belonged, and that my talent would do well,” he says. “And at first I thought the expectations weren’t going to be an issue, but with everything out there in social media now, I wanted to live up to what everybody was writing about me rather than being myself. It wore on me to be what they want me to be, but I’m over that. I’m definitely more at ease and free now that I’m going to be me and love it and love this game and play my ass off.”
He hit 31 homers again this season with a career-best OPS+ of 117. He plays a stout first base and is one of the few Tigers whose names are written in the lineup in pen. He says, “I was lucky to be surrounded by people who reminded me of who I was and who I can be.”
The day before we stood talking at his locker, the big screen at Comerica Park flashed a statistic from Torkelson’s past: as a 12-year-old Little Leaguer in Petaluma, California, he hit 36 home runs. It sounds like a made-up number, I tell him, and I wonder if he channeled any of that inner 12-year-old when he was fighting his way back to prominence in the big leagues.
He laughs.
“Yeah,” he says, “I told myself, ‘Hey, let’s just go back to being that guy.'”
MIZE, WHO WILL start Game 4 of the ALDS, was left off the postseason roster last season after an objectively bad ’24 season — 2-6, a 4.49 ERA, less than five innings per start. The season, and the indignity of the roster move, turned him into a roiling mess of emotions: angry and embarrassed, happy for his teammates to play in the playoffs, determined never to let it happen again. “I didn’t think I’d face a moment where I had to look myself in the mirror and say, ‘This isn’t good enough. You have to overhaul this whole thing.'”
But overhaul he did, and he arrived at spring training with a couple of new pitches, each a variation on the slider. Remarkably, he went 19-2 at Springville High in Alabama and dominated in college at Auburn and made the big leagues without being able to throw a pitch that could turn left. Nothing he threw — not the hard, hard sinker that went down or the changeup that dived toward the knees of a right-handed hitter — could veer away from a right-handed hitter or toward a left-handed hitter.
More than anything, he showed up to camp with an attitude that belies his easygoing personality. “I wasn’t being mean to anybody, but I think guys could tell I had a little edge to me,” he says. “It was a make-or-break time in my career, and it could have gone a couple of different ways.”
He was so intense and self-directed, in fact, that several teammates felt compelled to ask him if he was OK.
“Yeah, I’m OK,” Mize told them, “I’m just taking this thing back into my own hands.”
He was promised nothing but a chance to compete. (“I felt like I was on the outside looking in,” Mize says.) He came out of spring training as the Tigers’ fifth starter and climbed from there, winning 14 games and making his first All-Star team. Back when Hinch told him he’d break camp as a starter, Mize says, “It was good, and I celebrated it, but I also understood that I don’t want to look back on my career and say, ‘Look at all the spring training battles that I won.'”
His new pitches were devised and crafted at two pitching laboratories (Driveline and Maven) last offseason. “Now I feel like I have more options, more at my disposal to navigate a lineup,” Mize says. “Last year, if I didn’t have a certain pitch working, I’d have nowhere to go. I’d be standing out there thinking, ‘Well, he’s fouled off the best I’ve got. I don’t really know where to go from here.'”
Mize and Skubal arrived in the organization together and advanced through the minor leagues together and made their big league debuts together in 2020. Mize tells me they’re close friends, not rivals — “If we’re rivals,” Mize says, “he’s kicking the s— out of me.” I muse about their vastly different paths, Mize a No. 1 pick, Skubal a relatively unknown ninth-rounder out of Seattle University. I ask Mize if he has ever been to Skubal’s hometown of Kingman, Arizona, and suggest that it’s hard to find a more remote place in the country.
Mize hits me with a look and says, “I see you’ve never been to Springville, Alabama.”
ARE THE TIGERS a team that roused itself in the nick of time, or one that peaked early and ran out of juice? It’s one thing to create confidence, another to sink it deep enough to overcome whatever nastiness gets in the way.
They went from exalted to doubted so fast it’s hard to pinpoint the transition. But is this their sweet spot? That question, in so many words, was presented to infielder Colt Keith, who put a new twist on an old cliché by describing his team as “a grindy team that plays better when we’re looked at as the underdog.”
Somewhere, no doubt, A.J. Hinch picked up the signal from the universe, and nodded his approval.
