“It ain’t my first rodeo,” Lloyd McClendon says Wednesday, seated on the Tigers’ bench, hand on his knee, relaxed amid a long losing streak and the turbulence that comes with it.
Yeah, McClendon has been through this before. He managed the Pirates for five years and the Mariners for two, fired from both gigs. Baseball coaches take jobs knowing they will one day get fired. It’s part of this game’s reality, no different from the all-consuming rise and grind. McClendon shows up to Comerica Park every day by 10:30 a.m., then he gets in a quick workout. He looks at film, breaks down his own hitters. He analyzes that day’s starting pitcher and figures out his tendencies. He devises a game plan for his batters, then helps them with early work, either down in the cage or on the field. Then it’s batting practice, and then a game late into the night.
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As the hitting coach for the Tigers, McClendon is the man behind a lineup that currently ranks 29th in batting average, second in strikeout rate and first in chasing pitches outside the strike zone. That puts him in a curious position, because although the Tigers have a lineup filled with young players and veterans past their primes, he is still the man ultimately responsible for the lineup’s performance. In recent days, criticism from the Tigers’ fan base has been amplified. McClendon, meanwhile, has been hard at work.
“Driving me crazy,” manager Ron Gardenhire said. “He works his ass off.”
McClendon is old school in the best of ways, and he’s not one to pay much mind to what people are saying. Taking the heat might as well be in his job description. Wednesday, more than four hours before first pitch, he cited two poems people in public positions often look to in times of crisis: “If” by Rudyard Kipling (“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you …”) and “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley (“It matters not how strait the gate, / How charged with punishments the scroll, / I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul.”)
“I got broad shoulders,” McClendon said. “A strong back. Blame it on me. Don’t blame it on the players. Let them relax and continue to go about their business and continue to get better. I can deal with it.”
Right now, everyone sees the strikeouts and the puzzling plate approaches, the low run totals and the losses that are piling up as a result. But they don’t see the work going on down in Lloyd McClendon’s laboratory, inside the cages in the bowels of Comerica Park.
“Hitting is such an individual thing,” McClendon said. “You can’t treat any two hitters the same. As an instructor, it’s your responsibility to know what makes each one of those tick. Obviously you’ve got to spend a lot of time with them. I should have got a psychology degree by now.”
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Wednesday, McClendon was in the cage with Tigers rookie Christin Stewart, the kid with the powerful bat who was hitting below .200 before he broke out of his slump with a three-hit game that night. (The Tigers still suffered their eighth straight defeat, losing 6-3 to the Marlins.) Other young players stopped by the cage for extra work, too, and though McClendon says he is approaching this job the same as he always has, he admits the amount of young players in prominent roles makes all this a different challenge.
“The season’s not over,” McClendon said. “We got a long way to go. And there are a lot of bright spots and there are a lot of things that are gonna happen with this club, and it’s gonna get better.”
McClendon lives in a world that demands a tricky balance. He is passionate and fiery — as a manager, he once got ejected, removed first base from the ground and took it with him off the field — but he can also let things roll off his back and start over again the next day.
“Yeah, after he calms down,” Tigers right fielder Nick Castellanos said, with a hint of humor. “But anybody who cares a lot about what they do and has passion can get fired up about it.”
Baseball is — breaking news — a sport centered on failure. McClendon’s job is to teach the finer points of the swing, and it is also to help young players navigate these harsh waters. McClendon recalled plenty of examples of run-ins with greatness Wednesday, and they all had a common theme. As a player, he was teammates with Andre Dawson, and McClendon said you could never tell whether Dawson had a good or bad game the day before. Dawson had the same straightforward demeanor, tunnel vision on his next at-bat. As Mariners manager, McClendon once sat down with Robinson Cano, asked him why he never got upset. Cano told McClendon he understood the fact he would get about 600 at-bats in a season, and he was bound to make at least 400 outs. He’d also get about 200 hits as long as he went about his business, give or take a few here and there, so no reason to fret about when or how those outs and hits come.
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Now, as the Tigers’ hitting coach, McClendon spends a lot of time talking with Hall of Famer Al Kaline, a member of the 3,000-hit club. Kaline often reminds people he also made 7,000 outs.
“That’s a lot of fuckin’ outs,” McClendon says, laughing from down deep in his belly.
On the Tigers, McClendon says there’s one player who mirrors those approaches, and of course he will also one day be in the Hall of Fame. McClendon still marvels at Miguel Cabrera’s level of undeterred greatness, even in the face of struggles or slumps.
“You don’t know if he’s 5-for-5 or 0-for-5,” McClendon said. “The only reason I know is when he’s 0-for-5 he tells me, ‘You’re a horseshit hitting coach.’ And he laughs. And he says, ‘But you’ll be better tomorrow.’”
Still, in this climate, even Miguel Cabrera isn’t quite living up to expectations. Cabrera is 36, and coming off a serious injury, and though he’s hitting .292, he has only one home run. Cabrera finally talked about this fact Wednesday, admitting it is frustrating but trusting the homers will eventually come. This power drought is dragging into late May, but McClendon maintains a similar belief that the Miggy bombs are bound to return.
“I don’t know if people really understand what I’m saying when I say greatness,” McClendon said. “When you do what Cabrera has done all his life, particularly in his major league professional career, the last 16 years, where you go at it every day, you grind, you go hard, you work hard, and then you have an injury, it stops you from doing anything for eight, nine months — that’s an eternity. And then to be 36 on top of it, now you got to get that rust off you.
“It was really hot in the spring and everybody thought the rust was off, but it wasn’t. It’s not the same. And then we come to the cold weather, he’s got to fight through that. You see the bat starting to heat up. … The power will come. The rust has just about gone away, and I think when all is said and done, he’s gonna have a really nice year for us.”
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Up and down the order, McClendon has to hold a similar level of belief in his hitters. Veterans such as Josh Harrison have looked lost, and young players such as JaCoby Jones and Jeimer Candelario have raised doubts about their long-term potential. McClendon spends a lot of time breaking down pitchers and going over video. But sometimes his job is to simply play counselor for guys trying to prove they belong.
“For a lot of these kids, the stage they’re in, it’s 75 percent mental, getting them prepared and getting them over the hump from the previous day’s struggles,” McClendon said.
For the Tigers, some of the struggles have reaching a confounding level. All around, hitters are swinging at bad pitches. They are striking out at a high rate, even though McClendon isn’t particularly a proponent of the launch angle revolution, and even though the Tigers don’t have many launch-angle swingers. The proliferation of poor plate approaches almost seems like a weird coincidence, but McClendon doesn’t view it that way.
“It really isn’t,” he said. “Hitting can be contagious, and slumps can be contagious. The biggest thing is getting our young players through this and understanding you can’t ride that mental roller coaster.”
In the manager’s office, Gardenhire has gone back and forth from getting frustrated over his hitters’ plate approaches and stepping back, telling them to stop thinking. Gardenhire lets McClendon and assistant hitting coach Phil Clark handle the hands-on aspects of hitting, and last week, the manager maintained support for his coaches.
“They’ve been doing everything they know how to do,” Gardenhire said. “Ultimately they can’t walk up to the plate.”
In the dugout Wednesday, McClendon started to head inside, but then he turned around. He raised his hands in the air and looked to the gray sky, an appeal to the baseball gods. The grounds crew just removed the tarp from the field, and the forecast for the rest of the day was clear.
“You know what we need?” he said. “Some warm weather. In all my years …”
And then he turned around and headed into the tunnel, back to work, back to the lab.
(Top photo: Mark Cunningham / MLB Photos via Getty Images)
