After a lengthy search that actually dates to the regular season, the Pirates finally appear to have found their guy. Turns out they didn’t have to leave the NL Central after multiple sources told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on Tuesday that Pirates plan to hire Andy Haines as their hitting coach.
Haines, 44, was most recently the head hitting coach in Milwaukee but was fired after the Brewers experienced offensive struggles in 2021, the club producing a .233 batting average that was better than just two MLB teams.
By joining manager Derek Shelton’s staff, the challenge will be even greater for the Olney, Ill., native in Pittsburgh, where the Pirates finished last in runs (609), home runs (124) and slugging percentage (.364) this past season.
Although he certainly has been criticized for how his tenure ended in Milwaukee, Haines has an interesting backstory. After all, it wasn’t long ago that the Brewers were a very good offensive team, with Milwaukee hitting a franchise-record 250 home runs to rank seventh in 2019, Haines’ first season with the team, and producing the 12th-best OPS (.767) in all of MLB.
Critics of the move will likely point to what has happened to outfielder Christian Yelich on Haines’ watch. Ditto for the Brewers’ OPS in 2021 (.713, 20th), home run total (194, 18th) and alarming number of strikeouts (1,465, 7th most).
After Yelich won the National League MVP in 2018 and finished second in 2019 — the culmination of a seven-year run where Yelich was worth 31.7 Wins Above Replacement, per Baseball Reference — these past two seasons have not been good for Milwaukee’s franchise player.
Yelich has hit .205 and .248 the past two years with a combined .752 OPS, 21 home runs, 73 RBIs and a 26.2% strikeout rate in 175 games. That adds up to a bWAR of just 1.7.
The Brewers under Haines have also seen a dip in production from Keston Hiura, who hit .303 with a .938 OPS in 84 games in 2019 but was at just .168 and .557 in 61 contests this past season.
Is any of that Haines’ fault? We’ll find out.
Haines played college baseball at Eastern Illinois but never pursued it professionally, choosing instead to go directly into coaching. His first stops were Olney Central College and Middle Tennessee State, the latter for four years and netting Haines a master’s degree.
From there, Haines spent three years in independent ball, coaching third base for the Gary Railcats (Northern League) from 2005-06 and managing the Windy City Thunderbirds to a 68-28 record and Frontier League championship in 2007.
Eight seasons with Florida/Miami followed, where Haines started as a hitting coach with the GCL Marlins and worked his way up to managing Class AAA New Orleans in 2014-15. Haines helped the Greensboro Grasshoppers, now a Pirates affiliate, win a South Atlantic League title in 2011.
The Cubs hired Haines as minor league hitting coordinator in 2016. They promoted him to the big-league club as an assistant hitting coach in 2018, working alongside Chili Davis. That year, Chicago led the National League in batting average (.258) and ranked second in on-base percentage (.333).
General manager Ben Cherington has dropped a couple of clues on whom the Pirates would like to hire, and Haines seems to check those boxes.
The Pirates have talked about wanting someone who can set an entire organizational philosophy of hitting, which obviously Haines has experience doing. At the same time, they want someone with an advanced approach, and the master’s degree would seem to play well there.
Those who know Haines rave about his personality, although fans are understandably concerned with what has happened to Yelich and don’t want Bryan Reynolds to follow suit.
Bottom line, whomever the Pirates hired was going to face a tall task. Haines will not have the horses, at least not at first, that he had in Milwaukee. Yet the sledding won’t get any easier.
Haines will need to find a way to juice more out of Cole Tucker and Kevin Newman and help Anthony Alford find some consistency. Development of minor league guys will be an even bigger deal.
Making any sort of snap judgement isn’t smart since we’ll need to see how this develops over time, but at least now, after a longer-than-normal wait, a starting point has been established.
