New Pittsburgh Pirates Hitting Coach Andy Haines Believes He Has Learned From Firing

Andy Haines had his highs and lows during the past three seasons as Milwaukee Brewers hitting coach.

He helped the Brewers to the postseason all three years. Then he was fired after Milwaukee had a dismal offensive showing in losing in four games to the Atlanta Braves in a National League Division Series last October.

Now Haines is again getting a chance to be a major league hitting coach as he was hired by the Pittsburgh Pirates in December. Haines believes he sees things a little differently what he termed an “eventful” stint with the Brewers.

“I think when you look at it, when you really hold yourself accountable and hold yourself to a high standard, it’s easy to go to both extremes,” Haines said. “It’s easy to get defensive and say, ‘This isn’t right.’ It’s easy to beat yourself up and say, ‘How’d this happen? It should have been better’ when it doesn’t happen. I think reality is always in the middle somewhere when you get a little bit past it.

“When you sit down to get through it, the only option is you keep going to get better, man. That’s the reality of it.”

Haines believes he will be better in his second crack at being a big-league hitting coach. The Pirates feel the same way or, of course, they wouldn’t have hired him to replace Rick Eckstein.

The Pirates’ hitters need all the help they can get. The offense was feeble in 2021 when the Pirates went 61-101 and finished in last place in the National League Central for a third straight year.

The Pirates were last in the major leagues with 3.76 runs scored a game and 124 home runs while finishing 28th among the 30 teams with a .673 OPS. The Pirates homered 20 fewer times than the next closest team, the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Of the hitters who finished last season as regulars, just three had an OPS+ over 100, which is considered league average – center fielder Bryan Reynolds (146), first baseman/outfielder Yoshii Tsutsugo (.116) and outfielder Ben Gamel (104).

Tsutsugo logged a total of just 175 plate appearances in the major leagues between the Tampa Bay Rays, Los Angeles Dodgers and Pirates.

So how does Haines fix an offense so badly broken?

“You really have to see the game from the player’s lens,” Haines said. “It’s easy to see it the way we want it to look. But I think the best coaches and the most impactful people I’m around as mentors, they have a gift of seeing things (through) other people’s eyes, where they want to go and how you help them get there.

“Team-wise, I want a lineup that we’re all proud of, that’s relentless. We don’t take one pitch off, or we’re putting on a great show every night, we’re fun to watch and we can win in a multitude of ways: We can damage the baseball, stand in there and slug when we need to and when the game demands execution and some finer points of the game and maybe some more accuracy with a barrel, we can do that also. That gives you a chance over 162 (games).”

Haines had more talent to work with in Milwaukee. Yet while the Brewers were 12^th in MLB with 4.56 runs a game in 2021 last season, they were 18^th in homers with 194 and their .713 OPS ranked 20^th.

Then there was NLDS when the Brewers scored six runs in four games and were shut out twice by the eventual World Series champion Braves.

Yet the Pirates looked past all that when they decided to hire Haines.

“We thought that was kind of a unique blend, a guy who has been a major league hitting coach, been around some really good hitters but he’s still open-minded, too,” manager Derek Shelton said.

The Pirates tried different approaches to instruction and preparation last season, both at the major league level and in the farm system in the first year of an organization-wide rebuild. They think Haines will add to that.

“We will continue to break boundaries on that,” Shelton said. “Andy was really open in our conversations about how to do that and actually added some things in that we thought were important.”