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MLB WORLD SERIES: NATIONALS VS ASTROSOctober 23, 2019AJ HinchHouston, Texas - pregame 2 Q. I'm sure you're aware that Alex was very hard on himself postgame last night. At this point is your help for him encouragement, reminding him how good he is, or do you dig into the mechanics, which he says are way off for him? AJ HINCH: A little bit of both. First off, he's incredibly accountable to himself and he takes a lot of responsibility for our club, for our offense. He's Alex Bregman, he wants to be perfect, he has high standards for himself. So I love that. He's not a problem. He's not the only problem we have. He's part of a grind right now to try to win the World Series. My encouragement to him is to figure it out with our hitting coaches and our staff. He'll put in the work to feel better at the plate and be more productive. It's rare to see him kind of mentally frustrated but yet if anyone is equipped to figure it out, it's Alex Bregman. Q. Just a quick question here. Is the ongoing controversy around the front office of the ball club, is that a distraction to you all as you're trying to prepare and win the World Series? And secondly, how did you rise to the occasion to make the great comment that you did yesterday to lead off this coverage? AJ HINCH: I appreciate the compliment. It's not a distraction for us because it's out of our hands. Yesterday we dealt with it. It was certainly an important topic for us. But for us once we got to the game we had to focus on the game and played an incredible game against the Nationals, they won 5-4, we get to the next day, we start preparing for Strasburg. Our entire focus is about trying to win today. We do understand the conversation around our organization and that there's conversations going on that are outside of our clubhouse. Everybody's going to take care of that that needs to be involved with that. Our players, our coaches, me, we're focused on the games. For me, I feel responsible for the clubhouse. I feel responsible for everything that goes on down here. I consider myself a leader. So I felt like it was important for me to be visible and to give you my thoughts on a very important topic surrounding our clubhouse. I cherish this place. I cherish our players and everything that goes on. I was just being the manager of the club here down here in the clubhouse. Q. Health-wise we're seeing obviously a different Jose Altuve from last year. How important has that been in your run this year to have the real Jose Altuve? AJ HINCH: He's incredible and he was real when he was hurt. He wasn't able to do everything as perfectly as he normally does. I don't think anybody has any idea what this guy was going through at this time last year just to get himself ready to play. Well, this time last year we weren't playing, we had been eliminated. In the ALCS and the ALDS last year he was fighting through a lot. And we have some guys in our clubhouse that are fighting through a lot but not as much as Jose's injured knee last year. So I think he's huge for our organization on so many levels, from a makeup standpoint, from a clubhouse presence, from the middle of the order to top of the order bat to his defense, his energy on the bases. He's everything that's right about the Astros is Jose Altuve, and he's our guy. We have a lot of stars on this team. The guy who's been here the longest, the guy who arguably has the most impact around here is Jose. And so to have him playing at an elite level while we're chasing this World Series title is somewhat expected around here if you've been around the Astros and around Jose, but it's remarkable nonetheless. Q. During the regular season you were above average runners in scoring position. You're below .200 now here. Is that attributed to better starting pitching or stuff you guys can do? AJ HINCH: You don't make a living against Max Scherzer at any point very often. So that accounts for yesterday. I know that's been a little bit of our struggles throughout the postseason. I think while we're in a results-oriented game you have to consider the process. I liked our at-bats yesterday, they've progressively gotten a little better as the postseason has gone. We haven't been able to be perfect in those situations. But it's the competition, and we have to figure out a way to find more holes, to find better pitches to hit. But they're all working, they're all having their at-bats they're trying to have. They're trying. They're prepared. They're looking for any way to contribute. So I don't have a real explanation for it other than the game is really hard and the competition is hard and the players are working to be the hero. But I'm never going to doubt our guys, I don't care what the numbers tell you. Q. You may have addressed this last night, but Springer coming out of the box there, is he the kind of guy that you have to mention that to or does he take care of that himself? AJ HINCH: A little bit of both. I looked at the play, I was asked about it. I didn't have a chance to look at the video prior to coming in here. I saw a couple of things wrong with that play in that kind of perfect things aligned for ultimately I guess a mediocre base-running play. I think George got caught up in the moment of the play, in the anxiousness to see if the ball was leaving. It wasn't an egregious showmanship kind of pimp job, as they call it. It was a delay in reading the play correctly to where once he started running he ran into Tucker who was coming back to tag up because Eaton looked like he was camped underneath the ball. So the collision course of making a decision, George didn't give himself the longest chance to make it. He had to make a snap decision based on where he was at the time in which the play had matured and the ball had gone off the wall. Tucker, on the other hand, was trying to make an aggressive play by making sure if Eaton had caught the ball that he was going to advance to third base and kind of steal an extra 90 feet. All in all, I've been around George, I know how hard he plays. I know he leaves it all out on the field. I talked to him late last night on the phone. He called me. He initiated the conversation. We followed up today with a personal meeting and walked through the different scenarios. I'm not sure if the play ends any differently, but everybody understands the look when it's a late entry into a play like that. Q. How do you handle this? You've been in so many big games managing these guys. But on the one hand you don't want to go down 0-2, but on the other hand you were just barely one play away from winning Game 1. How do you handle that? AJ HINCH: First you leave Game 1 at Game 1. We're in Game 2 and this is an opportunity for us to win a home game. You've got to win four games to win this series, and winning the first game today would be key. I just think we have always, while I've been here, been a single-game mindset. We're going to worry about today, we're going to try to win today. We're not going to carry the baggage, good or bad, from yesterday into today. We're not going to really focus on the National League games that we're going to play in Washington. So experience will show you that that's the best way to do it. We've won first games of series and gotten eliminated. We've lost first games of series and won the only World Championship in Astros history. Today is all that matters. I believe in this team's ability to show up ready to play. Q. Just getting back to George calling you last night. Can you just share the general sense of what he wanted to convey to you contacting you like that? AJ HINCH: He just wanted to talk about the play. And I think -- I can't say that I was surprised when I was asked the question. But I wasn't as prepared for that play. There were so many plays yesterday that you could go to and so many opportunities. And so I think he was, too, a little bit, because it wasn't a malicious play where he was disrespecting the game. He wasn't disrespecting his teammates. When he gets asked in the clubhouse about it, he wanted to know my reaction. We walked through the play last night, my initial interpretation of what happened and he walked through what he was doing or what he saw. This guy cares. He didn't want to be perceived or looked upon as missing an opportunity to advance. And as I told him, I don't know what the infield, if they pitch Jose the best way and hits a fly ball to right field, I don't know if that fly ball to right field with Eaton's arm allows him to score. There's so much context and what-ifs. In this sport we always assume that the other way of doing things would have worked out perfectly. And as we know, that's not the case. But I wanted to encourage him to interpret the play the right way. But at the same time, to kick and scream and yell at him for something that I felt like was an honest mistake, I guess, was important for me so he could sleep at night. Q. Just peeking ahead a bit, Greinke was great for you after the trade. But he's been not quite himself, I guess, in the postseason. What have you seen that's a little bit different in October than August and September? AJ HINCH: You just don't want me to go with the single-game mindset quote, do you? What have I seen? Q. What's been a little different in October? AJ HINCH: I think for Zack it's all about pitch execution for him. And you can always go to that. When he's at his best, he's executing the multiple pitches, specifically his change-up. And that got him in trouble in the DS. It rescued him a few times in the ALCS. He faced the Yankees twice. So he had to adapt his game plan. They ambushed him in Game 1, they didn't in his second game. Not because of his stuff or his velocity or anything like that, but just his style of pitching begs for pitch execution to be at a premium when you're going to play this cat-and-mouse velocity, change rhythm, change tempo, the high fastball, the multiple breaking balls. That's his style of pitching. And what comes with that against elite hitters, what's necessary is the execution, not flawlessly, but in the right areas for your mistakes. Some of those haven't been in the right areas and he's gotten burned. His change-up wasn't there for him after a long layoff, that hurt him. Combine all that and you've had some flashes of brilliance and also some struggles. Q. Is it a little bit staggering how good Soto is at his age and is it a little scary how much better he can get? AJ HINCH: I've got a one-game look at him, and he looked pretty damn good. He was tough for us. And you can see -- I've watched all the highlight reels throughout the year. He had a huge splash on to the scene when he first got to the big leagues. I kind of like the story that he's not credited for his home run when he hit it like there was a rainout or something. It was a makeup game. He's got so much impactability and you can see that he plays with a swagger. And I love seeing the youthfulness of his game. I don't take offense to his style of play, his eager -- I think it's all fun-loving competition for a young guy who's burst on to the scene, who's already had a walk-off hit in the playoffs -- or not a walk-off hit but a huge hit when they were facing elimination. There's a lot to like. And I hope he struggles the rest of the series. Q. Is there any role that you and your coaching staff play in helping the players alleviate playoff pressure or is the onus on each player to find his own way? AJ HINCH: If you can alleviate playoff pressure, I'd like you to alleviate it on the manager, I probably feel it the most just because this is the playoffs. I don't believe in alleviating the pressure. You have to know it's there. It's going to be there regardless. You can't fake it, you can't pretend it. You embrace it, you deal with it. You have to be comfortable with it. So rather than try to pretend like it doesn't exist, you have to figure out a way to use it to your advantage and use it as motivation. It's different for each guy. I think it behooves the coaching staff to figure out the key button to untap the best version of the player. But it's impossible to alleviate it. This is Major League Baseball 2019, when everything you do is scrutinized. Q. You think about the impact you have on your people. A couple came here from Iowa to watch your game last night. They became fans of the Astros because you're originally from Iowa, make all the folks up there proud, and one of their daughter-in-laws is a first cousin of yours. AJ HINCH: Man, you dig deep on my family. I love it. I love the fact that I was born and raised in multiple places; born in Iowa, raised in Oklahoma. My dad is buried in Iowa. I have a lot of relatives, some that are here from Iowa, from Oklahoma. My in-laws are here from Arizona. This time of year we've got an increase in Astros fans. And obviously when you get in a position like this, to carry my dad's name is probably the most important for me on the back of my jersey. And if the people of Iowa or people of Oklahoma, people at Stanford, people in Arizona, in my background, I've been a lot of different places, take pride in that, all the better. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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