Former Dbacks’ skipper A.J. Hinch was on KTAR radio in Phoenix yesterday talking about getting axed. He’s mostly diplomatic, talking about how wins and losses are all that matter, but there are times when it seems pretty clear that he resents the fact that his team basically mutinied on him right after he got the job. Stuff like this:
Handling players, getting people to calm down, I wish I would’ve been able to do that quicker last summer and been able to move on. ... For the first part of my tenure, it wasn’t about the baseball. It was about my age and my inexperience as a manager and the hostility on our team.
I don’t know that there’s any way to deal with that kind of skepticism other than to win like a mofo right out of the box. Hinch’s Dbacks lost six of his first seven games, and you can bet that by game five the “who in the hell does this guy think he is” meme had taken hold pretty firmly.
Like I said last week: hiring Hinch was unconventional thinking. I kind of like unconventional thinking so part of me wanted to see the Dbacks’ little experiment succed, but baseball in general does not. Hinch was probably doomed from the get-go, and as a result, I bet we don’t see a team hire someone without either coaching or managing experience again for a long, long time.