How AJ Hinch used his plan to take the Tigers forward in 2025

Another hallmark of the AJ Hinch-era Detroit Tigers, especially under Scott Harris, has been flexibility. In a program without many stars, Hinch’s job was to maximize the value of each player. This takes different forms on each side of the game. On the position player side, it usually means defensive flexibility — eight Tigers played at least two positions at some point last season — hitting with pressure on any possible edge, and a general tendency to favor the team’s advantage.

Today, I will look at how Hinch tried to control the game with his offensive tactics. To do so, I will be comparing how often he puts his players in the best position to succeed and how well they perform when they get into these advantageous situations. Spoiler alert: he’s really good at it.

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Let’s start with pinch-hitting. This is the part of the game that the manager obviously cannot control. The eye test says Hinch likes to pinch, often to the chagrin of the rest of us. Let Kerry Carpenter strike! What do you mean Trey Sweeney hits Javy Baez with a free right hand? Retrospection, however, shows that Hinch often used his weapons at the right time and conditions. Here’s a table showing both how often teams used pinch-hitters, and how well they performed, sorted by wRC+.

Here are the highlights from that table. First, the Tigers circle the field with a hitter’s plate appearance. I pitched successfully because that’s important, but Detroit was starting plate appearances for hitters. Their 41-PA lead over Cleveland and Texas is about the same as the gap between Cleveland/Texas and Arizona at 12. Put differently, the Tigers are about 80% less than the average team in the league.

Fortunately, that didn’t spoil the appearance of the plates. Detroit’s collective wRC+ of 106 ranks 7th, but that’s not the whole story. Only one of the six teams ahead of them, Toronto, used a higher than average number of pinch hitters. In fact, the Tigers pinch hit more than any team and had the best results except for one team that came close to matching their frequency. Teams like Washington may have done better, but by using less than half the plate appearances as Detroit, it has impacted far fewer games.

Interestingly, there is a moderate positive correlation between overall team quality and hit frequency. The Phillies and Yankees are the only top 10 offenses with a below-average number of pinch hitters, while Seattle and Toronto are in the top 10 for both wRC+ teams and slow-hitting PAs. There is no clear trend that says good teams should or shouldn’t squeeze; it’s a labor decision that Detroit has decided against going against the grain to depend on.

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Conventional wisdom says that pinching is usually a bad idea. The “pinch-hit penalty” is widely accepted. Last year, the major league pinch hitter posted an 81 wRC+ last year, which is about the same as Matt Vierling or Andy Ibanez. Managers are aware of this, yet Hinch has accepted a deliberate strike in 2025.

Clearly, Detroit thinks they’ve got an advantage here. Through both intentional scheduling decisions and Hinch’s managerial tendencies in general, Detroit has created an outlier. Hinch seems to be driving this change for Detroit, as he is ultimately responsible for deciding who plays when and where and preparing his players to make an impact in the game. By making this an important part of his team’s strategy, the players know their role and the players on the bench expect to enter the game rather than just sitting on the bench until their name is called. It’s a small area to be very profitable, but timely results in a pinch can twist more games than a typical 200-PA sample would suggest.

Another element of offensive excellence is team advantage. There is a lot of overlap here with pinch hitting, because many hitters will come in to get the platoon advantage, but always getting the platoon edge is better than hitting less. Here again we see Hinch’s Tiger putting forward this strategy. Let’s check the same table as before, but with platoon advantage instead of pinch hitting.

As a low blow, the Tigers are one of the few teams to be in the top-10 in both platoon-advantage PA and performance. Using the platoon advantage, however, seems to be a better understood strategy than pinch hitting, however. Team performance is tightly clustered around the average, as opposed to hitting slightly. There also seems to be a very strong relationship between the success of a platoon and how well it does with the platoon advantage, which makes sense. An ambitious manager can get a team advantage of something like 4000 plate appearances, rather than 200 hitters. This means that Hinch is a little flashier, but he still compares well to the rest of the league when it comes to getting platoon advantage from hitters.

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None of these figures are the end-all, be-all, of course. Both have some flaws or perfect interactions with other, more important, variables. It’s hard to separate which managers get the most plate appearances for hitters with a team benefit from managers with the most switch hitters, starters, and the best offenses that get the most plate appearances in basically any situation with little outs. Still, it’s better to be good at this than not, and the way Hinch has separated the Tigers from the rest of the pack is remarkable. It’s very important for a team with a deep roster of average or better hitters, but little in the way of true star power on the offensive end.

When you consider his success with pinch-hitting and platoons and the often-covered, aggressive base that the Tigers have displayed recently, it’s clear that Hinch is doing his best to develop every player on his roster. For the Tigers to bounce back from a disappointing second half with the same schedule, he will need to continue to get more out of his players than anyone expected. Look for continued aggression through dynamic parts of his roster, and hope for continued success, as Detroit tries to win its first title of a decade.