Golden boy? Pariah? This is what makes A.J. Hinch tick

As temperatures rose outside Houston, the air like glue, A.J. Hinch and his family sought an escape. The most eerily quiet summer of Hinch’s life just happened to coincide with a world-rocking pandemic, and that sent him and his family traveling 20 hours by car, across Texas and the fever-dream Southwest, finally arriving in the seaside escape of San Diego. The sun was out, but the breeze was cool. Temperatures perpetually hovered around 75 degrees. If Hinch was going to avoid contact with the outside world in a time he was also unemployed and embattled, he was at least going to do it somewhere pleasant. The family rented a house by the ocean, where they passed five weeks that felt like an odd mix of tranquil, frightful and uncertain.

Hinch had worked in San Diego as the Padres’ vice president of pro scouting from 2010-14. The family lived in a gorgeous home near the coast. Hinch escaped the fishbowl pressure of being a young, first-time manager and dove into the parts of baseball he has always loved most: studying the game, talking with players, working with trusted friends.

Now, Hinch was back in San Diego seeking refuge from a more powerful quake. His name — his family’s name — was plastered across headlines. He was at the center of a historic cheating scandal. Perhaps you have heard about it.

Major League Baseball’s investigation into the Houston Astros concluded the wrongdoing was largely “player-driven.” Hinch was the manager, which meant he was in charge of those players.

Once an all-American success — a Midwestern kid with a Stanford education, a terrific athlete with an equally sharp mind — Hinch was suddenly a villain. MLB suspended him for a full year. Astros owner Jim Crane fired Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow, casting them deeper into baseball limbo.

Hinch did one interview with MLB Network’s Tom Verducci, in which he accepted accountability but also drew more critics. In the days after, he kept getting calls. “Good Morning America.” “The Today Show.” He turned down requests to tell the inside story, instead staying quiet, isolating himself inside a silo of his own creation.

More than a year later, Hinch is speaking on a Zoom call from the Tigers’ spring training home in Lakeland, Fla. He is retracing some of his steps, introspective but careful which details to share and which to hold on to.

“I decided at that point to lock myself in a proverbial bubble, even before the COVID bubble started,” Hinch says, “and really focus on the most intimate people around me and really begin the process of getting back on my feet.”

That meant that most days in San Diego, Hinch would drop his wife, Erin, and two teenage daughters off at the beach. With the virus raging, Erin would draw a large circle around herself in the sand, a trench of sorts, another method of keeping people away.

With the girls at the beach, Hinch often went to play golf. Evenings meant grilling and movies, sometimes long talks into the night. Over the span of eight months, Hinch gazed into an unknown future.

Before he became the new manager of the Detroit Tigers, a man emerging from exile, a person hoping to make good on a second chance, he was a kid from Oklahoma’s Midwest City, a prospect on the cover of Baseball America, a rising executive, a World Series champion, a husband to Erin, a dad to two girls, and also the son of a father gone too soon.

So often, charting a path for the future means delving into the past.

(Courtesy of Angie Hinch Wages)

Midwest City, Oklahoma. The National Association of Home Builders once recognized it as “America’s Model City.” It is a working-class Oklahoma City suburb built around an Air Force base, the place where a young couple settled and made a life.

A.J. Hinch was born in Waverly, Iowa, but his family moved to Oklahoma while he was in grade school. Hinch’s father, Dennis, worked as a firefighter while taking mortuary science classes at Central State University in Edmond. The family moved into a three-bedroom ranch, where Hinch had a John Elway poster in his bedroom and every Dale Murphy baseball card in production. Life revolved around sports, and church, and the dinner table. Dennis had a saying Hinch now repeats to big-leaguers: Do it right or do it again.

Once, Hinch’s older sister, Angie, told The Oklahoman newspaper her brother liked baseball more than girls. “Oh, that’s definitely true,” Hinch had said.

A few years later, asked the question again, Hinch blushed. “I would say I wouldn’t want to answer that question,” he told the newspaper.

One story became well-worn: On Hinch’s 16th birthday, Dennis told him he could either have a car or a batting cage. He chose the cage, the perfect detail to encapsulate the Type-A athlete destined for success. A few years ago, in an interview at Oklahoma Christian University, Hinch came clean: The car was old and beat up, a hand-me-down from his sister. The cage proved a better investment, even if the pings and thumps might have aggravated the neighbors.

Hinch grew up in the shadows of Midwest City High School, long known for athletic tradition. Think “Friday Night Lights,” 10,000 people at a football game. On the baseball diamond, Hinch made varsity as a freshman. By his senior year, Hinch was also the Bombers’ quarterback, a dual threat who willed his way to a few dramatic wins. In baseball, he became the Gatorade National Player of the Year in 1991-92. He graced the cover of Baseball America. He turned down a third-round draft selection in favor of a scholarship to Stanford.

Most people don’t know Hinch was also in the show choir. Before one high-school baseball game, he and a few teammates performed the national anthem, barbershop-quartet style.

“A.J. Hinch is one of the 10 best kids that any of us came in contact with in the time he was at Midwest City,” says Ron Smith, Hinch’s quarterback coach. “And the people at Stanford would tell you the same thing.”

The whole family laughs describing those years. They know how contrived it sounds.

If ever there was a quirk in the tidy Hinch mythos, it’s this: Dennis worked for several years as the director of a funeral home. A few times, a 9- or 10-year-old Hinch would snoop around the business, wondering what he might see. He quickly learned it was better to stay outside, shooting baskets while Dennis worked.

Odd as the experience sounds, it brought the kids a strange awareness of mortality.

“I think it gives you a new perspective on death,” Angie says.

On the day it all came crashing down, A.J. Hinch called his mother.

Until that day in January 2020, Hinch was unsure what would come of MLB’s investigation into the Astros. Becky Hinch says her son saw the snowball growing larger and larger, rolling downhill, heading toward him. He also told her he felt his side of the story was being heard. Per MLB’s report, Hinch told investigators he “did not support his players decoding signs” and “believed that the conduct was both wrong and distracting.”

“He fully expected a week (suspension), or 30 days,” Becky says. “But never dreamed it would end up being so big.”

Becky already knew about the suspension through one of her granddaughters. On the phone with his mother, Hinch’s voice crackled.

“Mom, it’s worse than that,” he said. “In 30 minutes it’s gonna be on TV that I’m fired.”

A mother’s instinct was to protect her son, and Hinch’s instinct was to shield his mother and his family from the shrapnel of media coverage and general chaos. He pulled his girls out of school; he didn’t want them to learn the news on their phones.

“I spent a large part of the first portion of that never even really dealing with me,” Hinch says now. “It was always about somebody different. Maybe that was my way of giving myself some time to digest what was actually happening.”

On Feb. 8, 1993, Becky Hinch called the Stanford baseball field. She knew her son would be at practice.

Becky reached an administrator, who alerted Stanford coach Mark Marquess. Becky told Marquess the news she was still processing: Dennis, then working as a plant manager for a concrete product company, had gone to a business meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. There, he had a heart attack. He was 39. And he was gone.

Becky, distraught, asked Marquess if he could tell A.J.

Only days before, Hinch had phoned Dennis after hitting a walkoff home run to beat Cal State Fullerton in his third collegiate game.

Up in an office, Marquess and assistant coach Dean Stotz told Hinch his father had died. Hinch buried his head in his coach’s chest.

“That was my first time where my world was rocked,” Hinch says.

Hinch, who was the team’s starting catcher, spent that night at Marquess’ house before flying back to Oklahoma to care for his mother and sister. He considered never going back to Stanford. Maybe he could support his family for a year, attend a junior college, then go pro. Maybe he would just stay home and work.

“Who knows how my career would have played out, or my life would have played out,” Hinch says now.

The family had a graveside service for Dennis in Iowa, but the memorial was in Oklahoma. In a tear-filled room, Hinch approached football coach Ron Smith, placed a hand on his back, told him, “Hey Coach, it’s gonna be OK.”

“God gave him something internally that only a few men have, and that was that steady, even keel of internal control,” Smith said. “And don’t get me wrong. He cried. … But yeah, A.J. Hinch consoled me at his own father’s funeral.”

Hinch did return to Stanford, but before he left Oklahoma, he was going through his father’s briefcase and found an airline ticket in one of the sleeves. Dennis had planned to come see his son play in college for the first time.

It was the start of so much Dennis would miss.

(Courtesy of Angie Hinch Wages)

For as much as Hinch was always seen as special — “He had a magnetism,” high school baseball coach Jerry Long says — part of him always longed to be … well, normal.

At Stanford, Hinch would play Bill Walsh College Football on Sega, go bowling on Thursday nights, drink a few beers at the Delta Tau Delta house. But Hinch was also the All-American, the magazine cover boy, the coach’s favorite, the guy with a charismatic charm who could fit in any crowd.

“He was presidential,” says college teammate Brodie Van Wagenen, who would go on to become a successful agent and GM of the New York Mets.

Kyle Peterson, a Stanford pitcher two years younger, had Hinch’s picture on his wall, cut out of a magazine. Hinch lived under the pressure of his own reputation and also his own expectations.

Mark Marquess, known for his relentless intensity, treated Hinch a little differently than some other players. In games, Dean Stotz often called pitches from the dugout, but by the time Hinch was an upperclassman, he was practically calling games himself.

“He just had a confidence about him,” pitcher Mike Robbins says. “It always seemed like he belonged, and he had a couple of secrets that the rest of us didn’t have.”

The gifts that made Hinch exceptional also separated him from the pack.

“I always wanted to be seen as one of the boys,” Hinch told the Houston Chronicle in 2017. “I always wanted to be seen as just a normal guy, but I didn’t have the normal experience.”

In the locker room, former teammates say no one viewed Hinch as arrogant or haughty. They just knew he was different, destined for the big leagues. Sometimes that meant teasing the golden boy.

“It was really easy just to take shots at perfection,” Peterson says, laughing.

If Hinch could relate to anyone at Stanford, it might have been a golfer only one year younger. Tiger Woods. On at least one occasion, the two star athletes shared lunch, talking about pressure and expectations.

Hinch’s career accolades can get lost in all that has happened since. He was a three-time All-American, a two-time conference player of the year. Partially because of a shoulder injury, Hinch also never quite ascended to first-round status. He stayed for four years at Stanford — also in part so he could play for Team USA in the 1996 Olympic Games, where they won a bronze medal.

(Otto Greule Jr. / Allsport)

In 1996, the Oakland Athletics selected Hinch in the third round of the draft. By 1998, he had shot at being the team’s everyday catcher.

“Is there a lot of pressure on him? Yeah,” A’s general manager Billy Beane once said. “But if anybody is capable of handling it, A.J. is.”

Hinch’s big-league career is like a blip on the radar now. Seven-plus years of ups and downs. A’s, Royals, Tigers, Phillies. A .219 career batting average. And by the end, a cold encounter with failure.

The year before Hinch’s MLB debut, he was playing in the Arizona Fall League when a friend set him up on a blind date with an Arizona State student named Erin. She knew nothing about baseball, but it was not long before Hinch called home and said, “I’m renting an apartment in Phoenix. I met a girl.”

By the time his playing career was over, they were married and had a home in Arizona. One daughter was born and another was on the way. Rather than keep chasing a dead end — “I would say I was a good self-evaluator,” Hinch says — he took an opportunity to become the Arizona Diamondbacks’ farm director.

It meant a little more time at home. And finally, something a little closer to normal.

“What I didn’t know,” Hinch says, “is I’d be back in a dugout two years later.”

On May 8, 2009, the Diamondbacks fired Bob Melvin and gave the manager job to a 34-year-old with no major-league coaching experience. It was, in hindsight, a disaster.

To paint it all in broad strokes: Hinch came under fire from the fans and the media, every move scrutinized with his inexperience in mind. There was a sense he never won over the D-Backs’ clubhouse. Hinch has admitted he was almost trying too hard to be managerial. He was fired the next summer, 212 games later, with a 89–123 record.

“I learned a lot in that short period of time,” Hinch says. “One, with how to deal with fires that are all around you and the attention that came with being the manager, the responsibility of leading a team. Ultimately, I think that helped me learn a valuable lesson of, ‘You just have to be yourself in this job.’ And with the good and bad of you, your reactions, your overreactions, you’ve got to show the players who you are in order for it all to function right.

“That time in Arizona, I was caught in between needing to be a teammate versus being a manager.”

(Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

When it ended in Arizona, only a few could foresee how well Hinch fit the prototype of the modern manager that evolved over the next decade. Smart and analytical, Hinch can take a new-wave approach to the game without abandoning his gut. He has front-office experience, so he understands the logistics of roster construction and the joys and pains of player development. He also has a Stanford psychology degree, a knack for figuring out what makes players tick.

In an ESPN profile a few years ago, Van Wagenen said Hinch spent many years using that psychology degree mostly on himself. The process started after Dennis’ death.

“Literally overnight, he went from being a son and a brother to being the patriarch of the Hinch family,” says Van Wagenen, also the best man at Hinch’s wedding. “He took that responsibility seriously. In order to do that while also still learning yourself, growing as a person and educating yourself and putting yourself in a position to have a professional career, a lot of those circumstances created a level of internal focus on his part, to be able to manage all of it.”

Particularly after all he learned in Arizona, Hinch slowly learned how to impart his wisdom to others. In 2015, all of these factors led to a job with the Houston Astros.

By year’s end, a video of Hinch addressing his team after the Astros clinched the playoffs — back when they were young and fun and hungry — circulated on social media. A snippet of raw emotion, Hinch’s speech ended with, “I love you motherfuckers.”

Angie and Becky still live in Oklahoma, and every so often, they’ll see A.J. appear on camera, in the thick of managing a major-league game. Angie often laughs when she sees her brother flashing a sly grin or moving his hands a certain way. It looks too familiar.

Becky, too, sees how much of her late husband lives in A.J. — the mannerisms, the cadence, the tucked-in shirts. Hinch keeps his vehicle spotless inside and out. Clean room, clean office, clean shave. Just like Dad.

Angie likes to point it out, and A.J. often tells her she’s making it up.

“Genes are funny,” Becky says. “Things follow you that you don’t expect.”

In 2017, on the night the Astros won the World Series in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, Hinch stood alone for a moment in the midst of celebration at Dodger Stadium. He looked up, into the Los Angeles night. He thought of his father and all the dreams they had shared.

(Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images)

May 3, 1999. A tornado ripped through central Oklahoma. By then Angie was living with her husband in the home where she and A.J. had grown up.

Angie, her husband and their two young children gathered in a closet, and as the sirens blared, they said, “I love you,” and “Goodbye.” The storm roared and tore through the block. Much of the house was destroyed. A board fell through the closet where the family was taking shelter. Angie and her family somehow emerged, thankful to be alive.

Hinch was off playing baseball for the Oakland A’s when the storm hit. Becky and Angie told him there was nothing he could do if he came home.

The family moved from the ruins of the home, rebuilt, and then sold. The storm altered so much that even today, Becky can drive through the old neighborhood and think, I don’t recognize this anymore. You can see the rows of new houses, replacing what was destroyed. About four houses down, nothing was touched.

“It’s just weird,” Becky says, “how a tornado can take a path like that and both destroy and not touch.”

The Hinches had a shed out back, and everything in storage was lost. Baseball cards, trophies, jerseys, boxes of things that had belonged to Dennis.

“The hardest part of the ’99 tornado is the things that can’t be replaced,” Angie says. “The pictures, the photographs, the sweatshirts we were saving.”

Looking at it from 10,000 feet, the paradox is cruel. A.J. Hinch cannot return to the idyllic home of his youth. It is a place that no longer exists.

(Courtesy of Angie Hinch Wages)

Here he is now, not even four years after winning the World Series, and everything is different.

That championship? Many think it’s tainted.

Hinch? He’s the subject of online vitriol, trash-can memes, mentioned in the same vein as the Black Sox and Pete Rose and steroids.

In 2017 and into 2018, the Astros used an elaborate “codebreaker” system to steal opposing teams’ signs. Complex as it was, the execution in its final form became absurdly simple: Someone in the dugout would stand by a trash can in the tunnel, monitoring a live video feed, signs already deciphered. If they started banging on the trash can with either a bat or massage gun, it meant a breaking ball was coming. No bang? Fastball.

Per MLB’s investigation, prompted by a report from The Athletic,  Hinch expressed his disapproval for the scheme. On two occasions, he destroyed the sign-stealing monitors with a bat.

But the details are puzzling. Although he took a bat to a screen on two occasions, Hinch also admits he never called a team meeting, never exactly ordered the charade to stop. The MLB report noted, “Players stated that if Manager A.J. Hinch told them to stop engaging in the conduct, they would have immediately stopped.”

As authority figures, Hinch and Luhnow were suspended, along with bench coach Alex Cora, who was painted as more of a ringleader. Players were granted immunity for their cooperation in the investigation, and none were punished. Strange, how a storm can both destroy yet not touch.

“Obviously it was a long process … to think about how I got to that point,” Hinch says. “I thought I was gonna be in Houston forever.”

(Alex Trautwig / MLB Photos via Getty Images)

Once the manager of a budding dynasty, Hinch woke one morning last January in a new, suspended reality that would consume the next year of his life.

It started with slow days in Houston. Then the trip to San Diego. Then another car ride to see friends in Northern Michigan. Most days, it was just A.J., Erin, the girls and the family dog.

“A range of things over the last six or eight months,” Hinch said in November. “A lot of learning and a lot of growing and a lot of facing yourself in the mirror …”

The family went on walks and bike rides. With so much unknown about COVID-19, they avoided others on the street. And with baseball on hold because of the pandemic, Hinch spent close to four months unable even to watch from afar. (“I don’t know what life is without baseball,” Hinch had once told The Oklahoman. “I try not to think about it …”).

Because he was banned from ballparks during his suspension, he even had to get approval from the league to watch a college game played in a minor-league stadium.

His oldest daughter graduated from high school and began college, albeit online. In September, Hinch contracted COVID-19. All situations that bring about weighty thoughts.

The successes and failures in Hinch’s life have all played out in the public eye. In the aftermath of all that happened in Houston, the reckonings happened privately.

“I shared everything with my girls,” Hinch says. “I shared everything with my wife. Probably the only people that truly know everything that I think, in terms of how important baseball is to me, in terms of how we got on the path we got on in ’17, to what it feels like to be a national story and continually be brought up. … I think that life experience, I hope, is valuable to my girls. Certainly is valuable to me and my wife. I think my family has never been closer.”

There are books being written, maybe even a TV series being made, about the Astros saga. But all these days later, even after a year of introspection, there are some things Hinch still doesn’t want to share. How did smashing the monitors go down, exactly?

“At this point, it doesn’t matter who did what or who didn’t do what,” Hinch says. “I know that everybody has a lot of interest, but at the end of the day, we were wrong. I’m sorry to be a part of it. I’m sorry for the stain that we put on the game. The details and the names and the actions … I’m gonna stay away.”

As the 2020 season and offseason unfolded, many around the game — including Hinch and his family — wondered: Would he ever be welcomed back?

Those close to Hinch of course defend his character, believe in his integrity.

“I think as people get to know him … you’re gonna find out this guy’s moral code is strong,” Stanford’s Dean Stotz says.

“Would I hire him? In a heartbeat,” former Midwest City baseball coach Jerry Long says. “Would I trust him? I’d trust him with my family. I’d trust him with my life.”

Said Mike Robbins, the Stanford teammate and now an author and motivational speaker: “I don’t mean to sound weird and hyperbolic, but our country and our world could use more leaders that are willing to say, ‘I screwed up, it’s on me, I learned from this, I wish I would have done it differently. I am gonna do it differently moving forward.’ I’ve been impressed and inspired, and I think there are a lot of leaders that can take a page from that.”

Others are more skeptical, less forgiving.

“He shouldn’t be managing again,” former Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia said on the R2C2 podcast. “I’m sorry. He shouldn’t. How could he manage again? He can’t tell a young team not to cheat? And when he was with the Diamondbacks, the veterans didn’t like him? So, then, who likes him?”

Even Pete Rose, the only manager to ever serve a longer suspension, had an opinion.

“I bet on my own team to win,” Rose told NJ.com last year. “That’s what I did in a nutshell. I was wrong, but I didn’t taint the game. … But this is a little different. It’s a lot different, actually, and I think that’s why the commissioner came down so hard.”

Once a golden boy, now a pariah. The clash creates a purgatorial existence.

“I have to accept it,” Hinch says. “I can’t tell people how to think or what to think or what to believe. Obviously, I apologize. I’ll continue to apologize. I don’t take it lightly. I am embarrassed. But I have to let everybody process this as they see fit. … It’s not gonna go away. … It’s a part of the back of my baseball card as (much as) anything, and I’m gonna have to deal with it over the duration of my career, and I understand that. I think it’s fair. I think it’s understandable.”

Hinch’s yearlong suspension ran through the final out of the 2020 World Series. And in the first days of his suspension, his mother wondered: Would he even want to return to managing? After all that happened?

Her question was answered by the time MLB games resumed in July. Hinch kept baseball on the TV, watching, keeping tabs.

“I could sense his interest,” Becky says.

Thirty minutes after the final pitch of the World Series in October — as Justin Turner ran around the field despite a positive COVID test in the concluding act of a chaotic season — Hinch received one more fateful phone call.

It was Al Avila, the general manager of the Detroit Tigers, a rebuilding team slowly trying to climb back to contention. He told Hinch, “I’d like you to get on a plane.”

(Courtesy of Ilitch companies)

Soon, there will be baseball.

Ernie Harwell, the late and legendary Tigers broadcaster, began every spring training reading from Song of Solomon, alluding to a return from darkness. For lo, the winter is past …

Since the day he took over as manager, Hinch has dived headfirst into his work. He has studied players, read scouting reports, watched every Tigers game from last season. The rhythms of a daily sport have been a welcome reprieve after so much solitude.

Hinch has considered everything over the past year. Of course, he has wondered what his father might tell him.

“I’ve thought about it a ton,” Hinch says. “My name has been and will be attached to the sign-stealing problem forever. And that’s his last name. So I’ve taken it very seriously. It’s very personal to me. It’s not something that I’ve talked about a ton, but it’s a reality. I know he would have supported me and been in my corner. But I also owe him an apology for being associated with it and putting our family name in it.”

And soon, a moment Hinch has been waiting for: He will walk onto the grass, stand in the sun, place a toe near the foul line. In that moment of peace before the game — yes, perhaps between boos and mock trash-can bangs — he will do what he always does. He’ll share a moment with Dennis, the father who never saw his son wear a major-league jersey, the father Hinch has now been without for the majority of his life. “Make sure he knows how much I appreciate him,” Hinch says.

After a year spent in gray spaces, Hinch may seek solace in the black-and-white nature of the clarifying sport his old team defied.

In baseball, the game a father long ago introduced to a son, you are either safe or out. A pitch is a ball or a strike. You win or you lose. The game is not bound by time. And you are never too far from home.

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic / Getty Images; Courtesy of Ilitch Companies)