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AL DIVISION SERIES: INDIANS VS ASTROSOctober 4, 2018AJ HinchHouston, Texas - Workout Day Q. A.J., do you have any clarity or anything you can tell us as far as any roster decisions you've made in the last few days? A.J. HINCH: We've had some pretty grueling meetings getting through the roster, which is a good problem to have as a team. It's a tough problem to have for the players. We've set our roster up, had the conversations we need to have, and I think the biggest surprise or the biggest dilemma or the curiosity around our bullpen is what is front and center for us. Our bullpen will consist of Osuna, McCullers, Pressly, Tony Sipp, Collin McHugh, Will Harris, and Josh James. That leaves off some very notable relievers for us. Some have World Series saves. Hector Rondon has saves for us this season. As you can see, it was a tough bullpen to crack. On the pitching side, that's the way we went. On the position players' side, we opted to keep Myles Straw active and not Max Stassi or J.D. Davis. So the balance of the position players are as expected. Tweet it out. (Laughter.) Q. A.J., in what role do you plan to use Charlie Morton in the series? A.J. HINCH: We'd like him to start Game 4 unless we win the first three games, which would be ideal. Not use him. I guess that would be the best scenario for us from a winning perspective. Unlike last year, we put a couple of our starters into the bullpen, and there was an uncertainty surrounding Game 3 and Game 4. This year we know going in we're going to have Verlander in Game 1, Collin in Game 2, Keuchel in Game 3, and Charlie in Game 4. And given the bullpen length we have, some of the depth that Josh James brings and Collin McHugh brings, there's less of an appetite to push Charlie into the pen. Also given he's thrown only a few innings in the recent weeks, he's not somebody that I would feel comfortable using in the first couple games and then bringing back for Game 4. So I'd expect to see him in Game 4. Q. A.J., what went into the decision to leave Hector Rondon out of the bullpen? A.J. HINCH: By far, one of the most difficult decisions -- and really I say them as a group because there's some really, really good relievers that pitch well for us that carried the bullpen at certain times. With Hector, he had a tough month. September really his only bad month. He wasn't great in the second half as a whole, but most of that is weighted into September. Honestly, this is a very difficult offense to match up with, and some of the things that he does and some of his execution that he does didn't match up very well with very many areas of the lineup with the Indians. Will Harris coming through with a scoreless September, his cut fastball/curveball combo is really good. Josh James, we really saw him emerge. And also, he can protect some of the guys who have been injured in recent weeks -- Lance McCullers, Charlie Morton. That length was very important for us, along with his stuff and strikeout rate. So as we pieced together the bullpen, it looked less and less likely that I was going to find a perfect spot to place Hector. He very likely, along with Joe Smith and Peacock and Devenski, guys that have pitched notable innings for us, could find their way onto a future roster if we're able to beat the Indians. But we had to pick 11 pitchers and 14 position players in a 5-game series, and that's a tough exercise when you have a deep roster. Q. With all the series going on right now, and there's a lot of talk about bullpenning and openers. This series will be more traditional. There's so many strong starters. Is that nice? Is that significant? How does that strike you? A.J. HINCH: I think, if they pitch well, it's significant because you'll see the most starter innings -- you know, if things play out as people expect. Now that it's laid out that way, it probably won't, and there will be some starters that leave games early. I think it's just different. I think -- I've said this all year about the opener versus our rotation and we face all kinds of guys, and September created a whole new love affair with the opener idea and the expanded rosters. Now you have short series. I think you just have to focus on getting the 27 outs. How you get there -- what's comfortable for people is when you have Justin Verlanders and Corey Klubers and Coles and Keuchels and these guys that get into the latter parts of the game. But I think you have to play the game the way you have to play it. Whether your personnel fits -- you can't have an overriding philosophy. I love starters. Why? Because I've got good ones. I think that's the easiest way to fall in love with a rotation and have that mindset, do I want my starters to go deep in the game? Yeah, they're good. If not, then I've got to have a contingency plan, and it becomes a bullpen day very quickly if you fall behind or if the starter is not at his best. Q. Speaking of good starters, what makes Verlander so special? We saw it last year every time he went out. A.J. HINCH: He's always evolving. You know, as much as everyone expects greatness out of J.V., and he largely delivers, he's always evolving. He's had this start circled for a while now. We felt like -- I mean, I'm sure he knew he was going to pitch Game 1, and as people were starting to predict it was going to be the Indians. He's got a long history with the Indians, he's going to come up with ways to combat the successes or failures that he's had, and he does that on an every start-by-start basis. And having that mindset and having that ability to evolve as the game around him gets younger, he gets older. When people think his stuff's going to decline, he throws harder. When guys start to hit his breaking ball, he comes up with a cutter. He's always doing something to evolve. And that's what this particular great one does. I don't know if they all do it, but I know he does it. Q. A.J., we've seen guys come up from AAA this season and not be able to stick. What made Tony Kemp and Tyler White the guys that could come up here and stick, and what boost have they given you offensively as you dealt with injuries all year? A.J. HINCH: Yeah, we've had injuries all year, and our roster depth has been tested. For those two guys in particular, their at-bat quality is really good. When I put those guys up to bat, there's a great expectation that they're going to have a good at-bat. Successful, we don't know, it's a tough league, but a good at-bat. Part of that is zone control, knowing the strike zone. Part of it is knowing their strengths. I think both of them have come up and gone back down. I think that creates a whole new opportunity for growth. And they've both taken it well. We promised them opportunity if they earned it. We gave them the opportunity. For Tony Kemp, it was his first real opportunity to contribute pretty regularly. Tyler White kind of rode a different road. But when the opportunity opened up, they seized it. It starts and stops with good plate appearances and good at-bats because that reliability is why they got so many. Q. Last year at this time, you'd only had Verlander on your team for about a month. Since from then to now, is there anything about him that surprised you or maybe you didn't know about him that really has been helpful to your team? A.J. HINCH: Well, I didn't know him at all when he got here, and then the honeymoon period was pretty good. So I think that it's easy to love those experiences. And I think his -- you know, his hunger for greatness was pretty well-known going into his Astro tenure. I think it's become a staple for what he's all about. He's opinionated, he's thorough, he researches. He does a lot of things that make you realize on the back end why he's really good. He's got a passion for pitching and a passion for competing and a passion for statistics and analytics and any sort of edge that he can get to beat his opponent. I think that -- and I'm not surprised by that. Maybe I didn't learn that about him, but I've gotten to witness it for a full year. Q. Martin Maldonado has been a significant addition to the team. How important is it for you to have a catcher like him now in October? A.J. HINCH: It means a lot. If you look at what the Indians do on the bases, he could factor in very, very highly depending on what strategy the Indians try to take with their base running and base stealing. He's a very, very, very good catcher, and working with pitchers, caring more about catching than he cares about his hitting, the feedback, the effort level, the balls in the dirt, the pitch framing, the throwing. There's not a part of the defensive side of the game that he's not extremely passionate about and extremely impactful. So we'll see. If they want to test us on the bases and Martin's catching, they're going up against the best throwing catcher in baseball. With the work from our pitchers and the way that he can shut down the running game, it's a huge dilemma for the other side, and if you look at two of the last three opponents that we could have, it's -- they like to put pressure on you. They want to put pressure on the best, and we have a perfect counter to that. Q. After carrying three catchers last postseason all three rounds, what went into your decision to carry two here and the extra runner? A.J. HINCH: Well, Myles Straw is really fast. That factored in for one. The third catcher debate is huge, like insurance. You guys all got insurance? You don't ever want to use it unless you have to. The third catcher changes the way the game is run. It also changes the structure of your bench. We feel like Straw can be a huge impact on the bases, or even if I put him in defensively, maybe he gets an at-bat. He is so fast he forced the third catcher off the roster, and that gives us a lot of weapons. It allows me to utilize Jake Marisnick in a different way. It allows me to save Tony Kemp's at-bat. I don't have to spend that as a base runner. He's a potential upgrade for every player on our offense. I won't run for Altuve. I likely won't run for Bregman or Springer, but he's probably faster, and that type of weapon in these type of games can pay huge. Q. A.J., you touched on this a second ago, but the starting pitching this series may be the best we see out of any postseason series moving forward. What's the challenge for the lineups in both teams to kind of match up with the starters? A.J. HINCH: If you look at the numbers, making contact is a problem. They have four guys with 200-plus strikeouts; we have three. The bullpen matchups, I know Tito well, he's going to try to find the perfect matchups, which matchups are tough to deal with when you have so many -- such a balance. They have three left-handed relievers. The right-handed reliever is good on righties. Contact's a premium. We're a good contact team, and so are they. So you have two good contact teams against two good pitching staffs that are the best at getting swings and misses. Someone's going to continue that trend, and someone's not. So I think getting a good pitch to hit is a premium. Not missing, it's huge. Taking advantage of any mistake that might happen where you have a little bit of a window against Kluber or Carrasco or Bauer or any of their -- Clevinger. These guys are elite at getting outs and getting swings and misses. Contact is going to be huge in this series. Q. A.J., does your experience at all different levels, everywhere you've been, help you in telling players who have played for you and done well at times that they're not on the playoff roster? Does that help you through all that? A.J. HINCH: No. No. I've ended careers before as a farm director or assistant GM. We've released players. You know, I released somebody ten years older than me, or almost ten years older than me when I was a manager in Arizona. It never gets easy, and I'll never get used to it. Every single guy in the clubhouse has a way to help us win, and they have helped us win. So those are never easy conversations. You can experience it all you want, but anybody that's delivered bad news knows it doesn't get easier the second time. You just want to be more thorough. You want to give your example. You want to wear it. As a manager, it's on me. It's on the organization. We're choosing who we move forward with, and that's tough to give some reality to some really, really good players and some really impactful guys that, going into a series, I don't know who's going to be the key guy. I don't know who's going to be on the mound when the most important at-bat happens. We feel good about the guys we're matching up with them, but there's a lot of managers around the league that would take the guys we left off and go take them as a championship-caliber bullpen. Q. What are the most important takeaways from last season's success that you can lean on during this postseason run? A.J. HINCH: I mean, we've been there, so I think that helps. And it's easy to say that because everything went in our favor. But that team across the way has been there too. They didn't get to experience a parade like we did, but they got to experience the seventh game of the World Series. I think our guys understand the urgency, but I think all teams that are still standing understand the urgency. We've got some flashbacks. We'll have some cool videos. We'll be able to watch the successes that we had, but that will only get you so far. You've still got to go out and compete and get your hits and get your outs and field the ball and play clean baseball. It's better to have that kind of reflection in the rearview mirror than to have bad memories, I guess. I'll take the win over the loss. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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