Even keel, inner fire
Brian T. Smith describes A.J. Hinch as calm yet competitive.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — My watch ticked to 8:15 a.m. An hour ahead of Houston, but almost three full hours behind A.J. Hinch.
These are the early, building days for the Astros manager. Hinch pulls into the sparkling-new Ballpark of the Palm Beaches under the cover of 5:30 a.m. darkness. He works out before Jose Altuve, George Springer and Dallas Keuchel arrive. Then there’s the slow, quiet time before the bats begin to crack and the gloves start to pop again. Prep work, staff meetings, private conversations — the beautiful minutiae of the modern baseball world, which sets up the daily action that always follows.
Which is why a sleepy-eyed Hinch turned in his office chair Friday morning and made a cup of coffee — single pod, sweetener after the pour — before he opened up about everything attached to the 2017 Astros and Year Three of his reign.
Hinch knows the game gets real for him and his club this season. And before the first week of spring training was complete, a manager known for his public even keel and private inner fire was acknowledging the questions that will await if these Astros can’t live up to the expectations they’ve created.
“We have to answer those questions all the time,” said Hinch, wearing a dark-blue Astros jacket while bordered by framed pictures of his daughters and an open laptop computer. “I feel good about where we are. I feel good about how we’ve gotten there.
“All I can be is my best self. And where the leadership feels that fits in to the organization is up to them.
“Jim (Crane) and Jeff (Luhnow) have been great to me. But I know this sport — sports — is about winning. I know that the expectations, as they raise, the microscope starts to come to me. And to be honest with you, I prefer it to be on me than I do the players. My job is to lead this team.”
Connections made
A small cow sat on a chair opposite the Astros’ leader.
It was still dressed in a familiar bright orange. But I hadn’t seen the stuffed animal since the thrill of October 2015, when Hinch’s club shocked the baseball world and was six outs away at a roaring Minute Maid Park from knocking off the eventual World Series champs. The silly cow was a throwback to the joyous buzz of the Club Astros days and remains an inside joke between the team’s 2017 center fielder and a third-year manager, who has bonded so well with so many of his players who have arrived, departed and remained.
“I love connecting with people. I love connecting with players,” said Hinch, 42, who is 170-154 and has three postseason wins since following a fired Bo Porter in 2014. “And I just believe to be the most impactful in a relationship, you have to have that relationship. … If you build the relationship right, you can do anything you want as a mentor, as a coach, as someone who’s trustworthy and that has their best interests at heart.”
He can push them all to greater heights.
I wrote many times the last two seasons that Hinch was the perfect manager for the 2015-16 Astros. With the club’s chemistry and culture in place, a young core established and a few highpriced veterans smoothing the curves, Hinch’s initial focus has changed this spring.
While we wait to see what the new-era Astros can do with a 1-9 lineup that doesn’t dissolve after the five spot, Hinch has been driving to his under-construction spring training facility with inside baseball bouncing around in his brain.
I don’t want to get Houston’s seamhead diehards too excited about a highly intriguing 2017. But I know some fans were waiting to hear this all last season: “We’ve got to do some of the small things better.”
“We will always play hard under my watch,” Hinch said. “It’s a simple rule. It’s expected … That’s a given at this level for this team.
“The close games that we lost last year, it was not an issue with effort, it was not an issue with preparation, it was not an issue with the players being focused. … But the small moments within the game, we have to be better. And last year, early, we played well enough to lose by a little. And those games hurt us in the end.”
The 2015 experience
Hinch loved his first Astros team. Six games ahead of everyone else in the American League West in late May and a 61-49 mark after 110 games. He also remembers the feeling after it was all over in Game 5 on the road against the Royals: Gathering his young club together for the final time, then telling his men that change was coming because baseball is baseball.
“These (core) guys are all here, but everything else changes,” Hinch said. “We lost to Kansas City in 2015 and I said that to our team: ‘This team will never be the same.’ ”
Three-plus seasons removed from the bottoming out of Luhnow’s rebuilding project — a franchise-record 111 losses in 2013 — Hinch enters this year with the best weapons he has possessed on paper. He no longer has to preach “winning” as a new, foreign word. Now, his 2017 Astros just have to win.
“Getting off to that start in 2015 was huge, because the mindset changed,” Hinch said. “And you look back at that now and we’ve only played a couple games of irrelevant baseball, which is the last weekend of the season last year. I’m very proud of that. To where we enter the building for Year Three (and) the players, the coaching staff, the support staff, the front office — the mindset has changed. And the standards have changed, and the expectations obviously come with that.”
Plenty of promise
These Astros have a two-time AL batting champ, a Rookie of the Year who’s 22 and a 2015 Cy Young winner aiming for a 2017 comeback. Among Houston’s major pro teams, Hinch’s Astros have the clearest path to an immediate championship and the strongest long-term viability. How does he handle the weight?
Like always: Calm and cool — with more fire than most think.
“What gets me out of bed every morning is not fear of the pressure that comes in professional sports,” Hinch said. “It’s a burning desire to bring a championship to these players, to our fans, to this organization. The reward or the downside of this job is sort of external. I don’t really think about it, even though as a manager you sign up to know the pressure’s always on. It’s the nature of the job.”
Hinch believes in blending positivity with tough, up-front conversations. Honesty, directness and a democratic clubhouse, rather than a dictatorship.
If this all goes as well as it’s supposed to, the manager will continue to evolve with his Astros. And his “best self” will be good enough in 2017.
“I will always have the loudest vote in the clubhouse,” Hinch said. “But I will also have the calmest heartbeat.”
Then he was back to his morning coffee and his team.