Haines aims to make Pirates' hitters 'great at what you're good at' taken at PNC Park (Pirates)

JUSTIN BERL / GETTY

Hitting coach Andy Haines celebrates with Jack Suwinski after the latter hit a walk-off home run on father's day.

There was a buzz this winter in the Pirates' players' group chats, as the front office's decision to add to the group more aggressively was greatly appreciated by the players and made "win" and "winning" the focus of many of their conversations.

The same thing was happening in the coaches' group chats, with plenty of those messages coming from hitting coach Andy Haines.

“Early in the offseason, it became very apparent of what the strategy was with Ben [Cherington] and his guys," Haines told me over the phone. "Veterans [who give] stability, professional at-bats, experience, because we have so many high-ceiling, inexperienced hitters around them.”

Haines is entering a much different situation as he prepares for his second season as the Pirates hitting coach, but the challenges remain the same. As a team, the Pirates again ranked near the bottom of the league in many important categories, including runs (27th in baseball with 591), OPS (28th, .655), batting average (29th, .222) and strikeout rate (29th, 25.3%). To some level, it was expected. It was a very young club, and growing pains come with that. Haines also couldn't be in contact with anybody on the 40-man roster during last winter's lockout, which meant that he only had a little bit of time to introduce himself to his new hitters and then not hear from them again until they rolled into Bradenton, Fla. for spring training.

This year's club looks like a more promising group. Bryan Reynolds is still a Pirate. Several veterans were added. There is still a young batch of hitters who should come up in 2023 -- headlined by No. 1 prospect Endy Rodriguez and 2021 No. 1 overall pick Henry Davis -- and those rookies from last year have a year of experience under their belt.

It's a step in the right direction, but for the Pirates to take that leap forward, they're going to need more offensive production than what they have seen in recent years.

And as Haines would tell me, figuring out how to do that has "been our whole offseason.”

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The rebuild doesn't work without proper player development.

The Pirates have spent years acquiring young talent and building one of the best farm systems in the game, but it will be all for naught if those players are not properly developed and cannot contribute at the major-league level.

Making that jump to the majors was challenging at times last year. Just about every young player, with the exception of Jack Suwinski, seemed to struggle during their leap to the show. On the flip side, most showed improvement as the year progressed. Oneil Cruz and Rodolfo Castro chased fewer pitches out of the zone in the final months of the season. Suwinski bounced back from a wicked slump in July and posted decent results in his return back to the majors in August. Cal Mitchell did the same in September.

That's why it can be argued the lockout hurt the Pirates more than most teams. Haines couldn't start building relationships and starting to get to know these hitters until spring training, which itself was only about half as long as usual. He continued building those bonds this winter by traveling to see many hitters or communicating with them via Zoom.

"You can study and do your homework from afar, but to be up close and go through the challenges a major-league season presents players [together]," Haines said. "To be right beside them and witness their problems and challenges the major-league game is presenting them. How they solve those problems, what do they need more help in solving those problems, what makes them great? ... Have dialogue where there’s just this different trust facto. They know I’ve been by their side and that relationship has had time to develop. 

"Relationships do take time. You can work as hard as you can at it and make it a priority, but that’s a really big part of it, time. And you can’t hurry it up. The fact that I had that with them made going into this offseason just apples to oranges.”

That year did help point out some pitfalls young hitters could face coming up to the majors, the most obvious being the jump in pitching quality. Both Haines and Derek Shelton have said multiple times that the gap between the level of competition between the majors and Class AAA is larger than it's ever been. The Pirates are set to promote several of their top hitting prospects in 2023. That's why they focus in on certain metrics to help identify when they think the player is ready.

“There are some things, to us, that when you do these things, those play and it takes the level out of the equation,” Haines said.

For example, Haines told the story of a player who he kept nameless. The player split time between the majors and minors, but got about twice as many at-bats in the minors. For the Pirates, they consider "plus" fastball velocity as anything 95 mph or greater. That player saw twice as many plus fastballs in their somewhat limited time in the majors than they did in the minors.

It's why performance against velocity or breaking balls in the zone is used in the evaluation process. If a player is doing well overall but not in metrics like those, then the jump to the majors is going to be more challenging.

“If you measure a player in how they’re performing against in-zone spin and then 95+, those are two problems and challenges the major-league game is going to present to hitters," Haines said. "Those are things we can train. Those are things we can provide [information on].”

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Last year, Pirates players hitters age 25 or younger took 2,394 plate appearances. Even for a club that is generally on the greener side, you have to go back to 2012 to find a Pirate team that gave more at-bats to players that young. Meanwhile, they only had one player age 32 or older hit for them: Roberto Pérez, who batted 69 times before suffering a season-ending injury.

This winter, the Pirates added five hitters age 30 or older: Austin Hedges (30), Connor Joe (30), Ji-Man Choi (31), Carlos Santana (36) and Andrew McCutchen (36). It's easy to see why the change was made. Not only are most of those players established hitters, they add some much-needed stability. There were 40 times last year where the Pirates scored either zero or one run. It wasn't uncommon for rookie slumps to stack on top of each other, and there wasn't enough offensive thump to potentially break them out of the rut. More veterans could help change that.

“There’s going to be a little more volatility with a young hitter than a veteran hitter just due to not piling enough major-league at-bats,” Haines said.

“It raises our floor tremendously and gives us a lot better chance to get to our ceiling, and I think we’re all excited about that strategy.”

The benefits extend beyond lineup production. The Pirates did not have many veteran voices in the clubhouse last year. Adding some was a priority this winter.

“One of the most powerful things you can do when you have a message to get across is you can take it to a veteran player and say, ‘Hey, this needs to get to this guy, and it’s going to have a lot more weight coming from a player than a coach," Haines explained.

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Perhaps the biggest changes coming in 2023 were out of the Pirates' control.

Baseball is a cyclical game, and there are different periods of offensive and pitching dominance. In recent years, it appeared to be an offensive game, but that was due in large part to what was commonly refereed to as a "juiced" baseball. Meanwhile, strikeout rates across the league were rising up and batting averages were dropping. So when the league implemented a new baseball for 2022 that didn't fly as far, offensive production dropped across the league.

There have been plenty of changes in recent years to try to help hitters. Pitchers are now checked more thoroughly for foreign substances and will operate under a pitch clock this year. Changes that, in Haines' views, just help to even the score given the strides on the pitching side.

"I jokingly say the technology is on the pitching side and we’re in this reactionary state," Haines said. "[What it] has done to offenses is so pronounced that major-league baseball literally had to change the rules to try to help us."

But the most noteworthy change coming this year are the new shift rules. There must be two infielders on the dirt on each side of second base moving forward, meaning the most aggressive shifts are over. That's good news for Santana and Choi, two of the most heavily-shifted players last year, and McCutchen, who was shifted more than most right-handers and posted worse numbers against it.

Haines is holding off on determining how much the new rules should impact strategy and approach, if at all. WIth that said, it's a rule change that's designed to help hitters, and the Pirates were certainly drawn to those who stand to benefit the most.

“We have a lot of guys in the office who run those numbers for our guys to present that information and tell them, ‘Hey, this is how much you will benefit from not being shifted,'" Haines said. "I think that right there is a good start.”

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There's still more work to be done. Work that extends beyond 2023.

Early this winter, the Pirates interviewed a top hitting instructor at Driveline to become the director of hitting development, but ultimately determined it was not the right fit. The interview process convinced the club they would be best off promoting someone internally to that position rather than an outside hire. Without that hire in place, that means Haines and minor-league hitting coordinator Jonny Tucker remain two of the most influential voices for the team's hitting development.

Haines doesn't want to look at it as just major and minor leagues, though.

“We just don’t want to be this separated organization where you have the major-league team and then you have the minor leagues," Haines said. "It really should be we’re one organization, one hitting unit, and the major-league team is the top affiliate of that. That’s not easy to do. It’s easy to say. I think 30 teams say they want to do it. That’s very difficult for a lot of reasons in what the major-league game presents players.

“I’m proud of our whole hitting group. We asked ourselves some hard questions of how we can push that and be better for our players.”

That push, if done right, is going to yield the same result:

“We want you to be great at what you’re good at. We’re always going to revert back to that.”

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