The Matt Thomas Show with Ross - AJ Hinch - Have To Avoid The Emotional Rollercoaster

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

Astros Manager AJ Hinch joins Matt as the Astros head into Game 2 and attempt to tie the World Series with the Washington Nationals

This is 790 baseball direct. Direct from the ballpark. To your radio. Driven by Texas Direct Auto, powered by Vroom. Time is 1231. It is our great pleasure to spend 10 quality minutes with the manager of the Houston Astros, AJ Hitch, here on the Sports Talk 790. AJ, you have done a really good job of telling the whole world, telling your teammates,

hey, sit back and enjoy this. I don't know if anybody's told you this yet. I know you lost last night, it sucked. It wasn't fun. But I hope you personally are having the time of your life because I as an astro buddy since 1979 am. So with that being said, how are you this afternoon? You know what?

I'm doing well. And I am enjoying them. Yesterday's game was incredible except for the result. I think we've realized and experienced over the last few years of playoff baseball and even World Series baseball that you have to take every game. game individually and and try not to ride the roller coaster too high or too low. And, you know, look, we lost the first game of last series in the ALCS and came back in one.

We lost the first game of the World Series in 2017. And we also won the first game of the 2018 ALCS against the Red Sox and all those had different results. So, you know, I think, I think you have to have to avoid the emotional roller coaster during the wins and losses and just keep plodding away, try to win the games that you're in position to win. We had a chance yesterday, didn't get it done. But if we carry that into today and increase our stress level,

our panic, our sort of sense of urgency, I don't think that's productive to try to beat Steve Strasbourg in the Natt. So unfortunately, we lost game one. That's a reality. And now we move on to game two and try to do better. Let me throw a variety of quick hitters at you. Will we see catchers interference be reviewed next year at this time? I don't know.

I hope so, but at the same time, it opens up a lot of different things on foul tips. Can we review that, the video? I mean, when the egregious ones, you look at last night, you could, you know, you could really tell it was catchers interference. There's probably a ton more that are in the gray area. I don't know what other plays that being reviewable would open up. I think that's the dangerous, slippery slope of like, if this, then we have to review that. But unfortunately, it was a miss. And on the stage like this, it gets talked about.

But I just wish the egregious ones, like the ones you can really tell. Maybe 90% of them fall into this gray area. That one did not. Yeah, I even think, and again, I didn't hear with the sound up, but apparently Joe Buck even said he heard it from the booth, and that's midway to the stadium. Yeah, there were two. clicks. I mean, even Alan Porter behind the plate, who's a terrific umpire, and I have a lot of respect

for him. He said he heard two clicks. He just thought he viewed it as, or heard it as the foul tip off the bat, then the ball hitting the glove. And I had him reversed. I had the glove getting hit first and the foul tip being second. So obviously human error is part of it. And these are instinctual plays, but, you know, I wish it would have gone the other way. Two-part question on Alex Bregman. He said he was going to sleep with his bat last night. I would have suggested just snapping and having tried something different. So one on that.

And two, is he taking too many pitches early in the count? You know, I know Alex is taking it hard and impersonal that he's not, you know, dominating in the postseason and certainly he's had some big at bats and he's had some near misses. And I love the accountability that he creates for himself. and I mean, everything that Alex Bregman does is, is legit across the board. So I appreciate his candor and him falling on the sword, so to speak, of our offensive struggles. But I, you know, as far as his approach, maybe a little bit. I mean, it's always hard.

I'm not in the battered box and seeing the pitches that he's seeing. And he might be waiting around a little bit for the perfect pitch and they're making tough, tough pitches on him. But I, you know, look, you can fail the end. other way and be over-anxious and swing at everything. And then you'd ask me, hey, is he trying to do too much to be the hero? So I think it's just about results. When he gets pitches to hit, you know, he's fouling him off or near misses. And when he's right, he's not doing that. So aggressiveness or passiveness, I think, is the nature of the results. We'd probably be

talking about it the other way if he was swinging at everything and still making out. Yordon Alvarez got the walk, a couple of hits. Didn't come through with the bases loaded, unfortunately, but you had to be encouraged with him getting on base a few times. Yeah, good at bat. The walk early, I think being disciplined, I mean, he's been chasing so much throughout the postseason. And I think for him to draw a walk against a really good pitcher to lead off the second inning, I was encouraged by that.

I think the two base hits, one was a rocket, almost hit Scher back up the middle. That was encouraging. He had a pretty decent at bat with the strikeout. The result wasn't, but the big swings were. he just missed a couple pitches, but don't ask these guys to be perfect. We do ask for adjustments along the way. And as we know, when he gets hot, he's going to have these big moments. And it's funny, you know, I get asked about these guys on the podium,

or I get asked about them on this show or other radio shows in Europe. And it seems like the game then turns to that at bat. Like, what's going on with Alex Bregman? He probably gets the biggest at bat tonight. It's just the way baseball works. And that same thing's going with Alvarez. He's getting opportunities and he's slowly showing some adjustments that maybe today facing Strasbourg for the first time. He gets a pitch to hit and the building will go crazy when he does.

I think part of that, AJ, honestly, is the fact that it's October, that if this is a slump in the middle of May, we're like, all right, slumping, it's 162 game schedule. Everything is under a microstip, so I think that's part of the reason why AJ Hinchwood is here on the Sports Talk 790. So AJ Garrett proved that he was human yesterday, although we didn't believe it until the runs were given up. He does go seven for you. So he saves your bullpen. And on the other side of things, your skipper counterpart went to a, what we thought would be a starter, may indeed still might be a starter. They had to exhaust their bullpen.

So if you're going to find a silver lining, you did take your shots and you did force Max Scherzer to leave the game after five. We did. I loved our approach against Scherzer. And we talked before the game that you've got to beat their three. starter and make it difficult and make them make decisions. And they, you know, bringing in Corby, maybe it didn't help us yesterday, but it may help us moving forward. They, they have them penciled in in game three or game four.

But that's been their blueprint is to use, you know, essentially, you know, five or six pitchers for 90% of their innings this postseason so far. They weren't tested in the, in the St. Louis series from a number of game standpoint. And so the longer this series goes, the more likely that we are to see some of the ramifications for them having to use the same guys over and over again, you know, with Doolittle and Hudson. And then Rainey came in last night and he was a little erratic. So they have the numbers and they have just as many pitchers as we do.

But do they, how they deploy them is going to be important not only for each particular game, but as the series continues. So I don't know about silver linings. It's a race to four wins. They have a one-nothing lead. But we had a ton of chances against their primary bullpour. And if the series continues to be close games like this, we're going to see that same group again. I want to ask kind of behind the scenes a little bit on your preparation.

Most baseball managers and or players are diligent about how they orchestrate their day. How much did your day change yesterday, not having a real great feel of have the nationals? Because you haven't seen them in a few years, except for obviously spring training. I don't even think it counts. Yeah, the advantage being we won in game six of the ALC. So we had a full 24 hours extra. So on, you know, we went on Saturday. I was at the ballpark on Sunday.

We were going through a lot of information and into Sunday night and then and then into Monday. So the extra day did help us. We have some familiarity with these. We had our advanced team working on this as soon as we, we saw the NLCS. We were, we had guys preparing for St. Louis and for Washington. And so the information was there for us, really the minute that we clinched against the I hadn't looked at it and we hadn't studied it. I hadn't watched any video or done my normal prep.

So I, a little bit of crash course, but it's expected. It was the same way that way, you know, in 17 with the Dodgers. And it's the nature of these series that come one after another when you don't know who you're going to play

while you're continuing to play the previous series. So we feel prepared for these guys. We made pretty good, you know, pretty good adjustments. And we were right on some of the style. thought they'd run a little bit. We thought they were going to be tough to strike out. We knew Juan Soto was a tough matchup for a lot of our guys, and he proved to be, you know, one of the

most important players on the field yesterday. So no real surprises in game one. Is it weird or just coincidental that if I'm watching a team you're going against start to steal bases that you may be a tinge more aggressive on the base pass, or it's just one particular game that I'm looking at? No, one particular game. I mean, I think the combination is different. You know, tonight, Strasbourg, he also has his challenges with, you know, with the running game. He's big and tall and long limb, like very much like Derek Cole. So I think it's still more about opportunistic and not, not reactionary to what they're doing.

Or we take bases whenever we feel like they give them to us. And vice versa, they're going to run whenever they feel like they can put pressure on it. So that's their style of play pretty much every game. You know, our style of play is a little bit varied based on how they defend it. A couple more minutes here with A.J. Hinch. And Skip, you and I will not visit on air until hopefully next week we celebrate a big championship. But I'm very curious. And I don't even think you have an answer to this. You're going to have National League pitching situation where your battle will hit. In theory, you might be going with a bullpen game in game four or something

like that. Does that add an additional wrinkle about, oh my gosh, I got to worry about arms, how many pitches I got going, how many guys I want to go to? And oh, by the way, he's batting second in the top half of the next inning. Yeah, I mean, I think it just changes a little bit of, well, changes our bench. We'll have an extra guy on the bench, five instead of four. If we do a bullpen game similar to how we did the bullpen game against the Yankees, you know, you got to be aware with where the pitcher spot's coming up, and do you need a multi-inning guy or a one-inning guy if you're trying to avoid the pitcher's hitting?

You know, and then on top of that, I might have six guys on the bench. Grinky might be a pinch hitter in the bullpen game. that would be a game four. So I think, you know, those decisions are going to be made based on the context of the game, not so much, you know, not so much like predetermined as to what we're going to do. I mean, if we, as an example, let's say I start Brad Peacock in that game similar to how I did against the Yankees, and we bat around in the first inning, like he's going to get an abat. I'm not going to pull him just because because the abat came up in the first or second inning.

If he's still the guy that we have matched up to pitch against these guys. We'll see. If I started Rikidi, I think it'll be more traditional, but I'm not sure that he's built up to go 90 to 100 pitches. He's more of a three-four inning guy right now. But again, that's game four. That's a long way from now. And certainly we'll navigate the pitcher spot with Granky in game three as a normal starter. And then we'll see what brings us in game four and five. Well, it's your fault now that you mentioned Zach Granky and hitting. I'm going to go to YouTube for an hour and watch all of his highlights. Thanks very much for that, Skip. I appreciate that. He's pretty three homers this year and a base hit as an Astro too. So he's good hitter.

So he's got good mechanics, right? I mean, it sounds like it. Well, I think he's just got good bat to ball, hand-eye coordination. He's been a pretty good hitter his whole career.

So I, I made me good hitter, you know, as a pitcher. I still think he's, you know, we got a lot of guys that can hit

his position players. But I, I certainly like that he's going to be the most comfortable on our pitching staff standing up in the batters box. All right. I was going to,

you should watch. in today to lighten the mood up before we let you go and just say any of you sleep with a sporting good last night and then and then Alex erase his hand. I mean, that's the way it's going to work, right? The lighten things up a little bit. I don't think it's that heavy to be honest. I think our guys are completely in control of them. So they're a little mad that we let a game get away as they should be. They know the importance of winning every single game you can. But the mood's not not down. These guys will show up ready to play. I like hearing it. Thanks, skip for the time as always, friend. We really appreciate it. You got it. All right, AJ H. With us here on Sports Talk 7.00.