The Pirates are hiring Matt Hague away from the Blue Jays to fill their vacant hitting coach position, reports Scott Mitchell of TSN. He served as Toronto’s assistant hitting coach in 2024.
Prior to his time on the Blue Jays’ major league staff, Hague served as the hitting coach at three minor league levels in Toronto’s system. The 39-year-old played in parts of three major league seasons — all with the Jays and Pirates — but only appeared in 43 games and took just 91 plate appearances.
The Pirates drafted Hague in the ninth round back in 2008, and he played in parts of 10 minor league seasons in addition to a season in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball and multiple stints in the Dominican Winter League. Though Hague never got much of a big league look, he posted a career .298/.376/.423 line in nearly 800 Triple-A games.
Hague departs one coaching staff that’s undergoing turnover in the hitting department for another. Toronto parted ways with lead hitting coach Guillermo Martinez in late September and hired David Popkins, who’d been the hitting coach in Minnesota but was also cut loose at season’s end, a few weeks later. The Pirates, meanwhile, dismissed hitting coach Andy Haines back on Oct. 2 after a three-year stint in that role.
Pirates fans looking to learn more about their new hitting coach will want to be sure to read David Laurila’s Q&A with Hague from this past July over at FanGraphs. The former corner infielder spoke thoughtfully about the differences between his perspective as a player and a coach, the ongoing battle hitters face in adapting to ever-changing pitch trends in the industry, and some of the technology he favors in helping hitters prepare for various paths of attack from opponents.
Seems like a decent hire. He did well with a handful of the Blue Jays’ younger guys and based on some interviews, got along with his players very well. Hope his return to Pittsburgh is successful.
Pirates have so much talent. Shouldn’t have been a problem, so hopefully some simplification solves the issue
Honestly, looking more into it, this may have been the best hire the Pirates could have made.
Nice to have the “Hague Convention” follow Felipe Vazquez.
The great news is that even if he tries, he can’t be worse than Haines.
But it may take more than a couple months to teach things like plate approach, how to pick up spin pitches, protecting the strike zone, situational hitting and yes, even bunting. All of these ideas should have been things the average player has picked up through years of playing but apparently are a group-fail here
Hope the new coach can turn things around
Exactly. They need to get back to basics.
Cruz, Suwinski and Davis need to be a huge part of the offense in 2024.
And if they are, the pennant is going black and gold.
it could have been worse, they could have brought Haines back
I just hope Hague gets to be his own coach and not take directions from Derek or Ben like Haines did
I don’t expect much improvement since they still have same GM and Manager.
Hitting coaches don’t matter. Someone on a chat here made perfect sense by saying if hitting coaches mattered we would see teams fighting for them, and they aren’t.
Abject baloney.
Hitting and pitching coaches have a role to play at every level because if you’ve ever played the game, you know it’s easy to pick up mechanical issues that become bad habits.
To counter “someone’s” comment, if hitting coaches weren’t needed, everyone would hit over .300, hit 30 homers and knock in 100 runs
Watch a week’s worth of Pirates games and take note of the poor at bats. You’ll need a notebook. Then tell me how hitting coaches are overrated. Maybe things will improve by magic
It’s not baloney. He’s absolutely correct. And the position would pay a lot more if actual hitting coaches were in demand. Can a hitting coach make a difference? Sure. But it’s like turning Austin Hedges from a 160 hitter to a 180.
The reason why the Pirates hitters don’t hit .300 with 30 homers is because they don’t have anyone who can hit .300 with 30 homers. Hell, most teams don’t have that anymore.
You’re mixing apples and oranges here. No, you’re not going to make a .300 hitter out of Hedges but you’re going to refine the tools players have
There’s a reason that the Pirates minor league system has highly rated kids who never make it as big time players at the MLB level. Suwinski. Davis. Hayes. Polanco before them. Your rationale is somewhere between hey, they’ll fix themselves and well, scouts misidentified their talents. It’s such a woefully misguided comment that it defies logic
I mean if you’re responsible for someone hitting 20 points better that’s a big deal. That would mean as a team the Pirates would hit around.250 instead of.230.
You added in pitching coaches which was not included in my statement.
Name the best hitting coaches in the league. They are no names with no real impact.
Oh i dunno. Hyers was the Rangers hitting coach. Atlanta pried him away after dropping their own solid coach, Kevin Seitzer. Kevin Long with the Phillies. Before that, he was with the Nats
I could go on
Look, I get that your take is likely shared by numerous fans, but it’s patently ridiculous.
I said this above but the idea that *none* of the Pirates can improve because they are bench or platoon varieties at best is, well, moronic. Cruz is a guy who had a decent year by most people’s standards. But his approach is often horrible. His strikeout rate is atrocious. Please tell me how he should improve. Maybe your idea is that he can rent some videos. Point is, I have no doubt that a good coach can take him to the next level
De la Cruz is another guy who can improve drastically. Hayes. Between having no idea about situations, no knowledge of strike zones, an inability to pick up spin pitches, the needed corrections are major. And yet, it would be moronic, again, to say that these guys are platoon level
I don’t think they’ll ever correct Suwinski. I suspect the same with Davis. I’m not even really sure about Hayes. But the Pirates can’t afford to allow these guys attempt to correct themselves
You saying it is ridiculous doesn’t make it so. The fact that most hitting coaches over the course of the last 20 years or so are widely interchangeable gives credence to the argument that they are not as valuable as people make them out to be..
There is a need for hitting coaches, sure. Someone has to coach. The same way there has to be a 3B coach, 1B coach etc. But these are filler positions at best.
I will say that a bad hitting coach (or a bad filler coach in any staff position) can be catastrophic, the Pirates have experienced that with their pitching coaches when they continued to stay away from analytics and hammer the down and away pitching strategy for too many years. Cole gets sent to Houston and then instantly becomes a 300K pitcher because the organization knew that pitching up in the zone would yield a better result than down and away/ground ball strategy for a guy like Cole.
I’ll finish with bad hitting coaches (like Haines) are detrimental to an organization but outside of maybe the best 2 or 3 in the league the remaining 20-25 that aren’t detrimental are just replaceable.
I get your points and you’re right, although I think you actually mean that *most hitting coaches are interchangeable
Just like players themselves, teams have to spend to get upper tier coaching or get lucky by hiring some young unknown who’ll just use the job here as a stepping stone
Still, there is so much to correct here that it’s almost amazing. You’re seeing kids with raw ability who apparently were pushed through the system quickly. Too quickly
The Hague, not a Convention-al pick.
The return of The Hit Collector! 2012 Spring Training gave us such hope.
They matter probably on an analysis level but for the most part those who can’t teach. Most good hitters have long surpassed any type of need for coaching
Exactly. I mean, the hitting coach could probably help him with timing and other things if he’s struggling but with the tech out there that young players have the hitting instructor is pretty much a relic position.
Hitting coaches all say virtually the same thing just like pitching coaches. It mostly depends on the ears listening. Sometimes it is who is talking that makes the light bulb turn on, but it is usually down to if the kid is ready to listen.
if that was the case, why did this team break the all time record for strikeouts two of the last three seasons?
And this franchise is over 100 years old
Strikeouts are way up league wide. It’s not just the Bucs.
Mainly because everyone is trying to hit the ball out of the park more than ever before, even the little guys. That leads to more strikeouts. Long swings always do.
He is better than Guillermo Martinez
Preach.
This makes sense.
I wish Hague the best even though it doesn’t matter much with a lineup filled with utility players and platooners.
Hague seems to get buy in from the players. Lots of line drives from the players who worked with him in Buffalo and Toronto.
Typical classic shatkins move….hired Popkins instead of promoting from within….Quality people move on elsewhere to obtain what they deserve.
Way to go Jays.
Pirates offense has been bad for years. Is it bad scouting or bad coaching or development?
I lean to development and coaching given how good some of these players are when they’re not in the MLB. I mean Davis, just wow.. mashes the ball everywhere except the show. Yeah could just be prospects being prospects but it is just so many failures.
The staffs may not be causing the problems.. but certainly doesn’t seem like they are fixing it.
Welcome back to the Black and Gold Matt. You know Pittsburgh work hard you’ll get our respect… fail hard… well we won’t notice for a year or two because it couldn’t get much worse 🙂
“Meanwhile” can’t come in the middle of a sentence between commas. It has to START the sentence.