Kevin Seitzer’s departure was a bit of a shock, but the addition of Tim Hyers seems somewhat obvious in retrospect
I’ll be honest, I thought the Braves’ axing of Kevin Seitzer early this offseason was one of the more unexpected, shocking things to happen to this team in its current, post-rebuild, contending era. If you asked me for my top three “Whaaaaa?” moments of this run, they’d include, in some order, Seitzer’s departure, Chip Caray’s departure, and the time when the Braves acquired Brad Hand and then let Bryce Elder pitch to Bryce Harper in a playoff game in a key situation anyway.
The swapping of hitting coaches being what it is, the natural question is to ask what exactly the new guy, Tim Hyers, is going to bring with him to the team’s offense. This perhaps goes doubly so in the case of a team like the Braves, which is essentially engineered from the top down to do a very specific thing offensively, basically to a man. It’s one thing to listen to media soundbites, but y’all know at this point that I’m not really about that. Instead, let’s look at the data and see if we can figure anything out.
Big picture, my interest here is whether teams that hired Hyers (oy) changed their offensive identities after doing so. This is actually a really hard question to answer, because teams, offensively, are really just a composite of nine (or ten, or eleven, etc.) players, and unless those teams have a top-down roster plan like the Braves apparently do, you can get a mix of skillsets and approaches that makes it difficult to conclude much of anything. But, I pulled together the data, and I think to the extent it’s possible, the Braves’ addition of Hyers seems… really obvious in retrospect. I’ll just dump the tables here and you can see what I mean.
Also, maybe a little refresher on the Red Sox is warranted. Though they won 93 games in both 2016 and 2017, you can see from the above that the offense went from best-in-class outputs to some pretty blah (actually bottom ten) marks, which is why they canned Chili Davis and went with Hyers. In reality, this was sort of one of those “well someone’s gotta go even if it wasn’t really warranted” things, because while the team’s wOBA dropped by .030 from 2016 to 2017, the xwOBA dropped by .012; the bigger issue was just that the Red Sox were MLB’s luckiest team-that-doesn’t-regularly-play-at-Coors-Field in 2016, and had quotidian luck in 2017.
Anyway, on comes Hyers, there’s generic press about him working to overhaul the swings of Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts (both of whom leveled up in 2018, for sure, but the thing is, we rarely hear about the work that goes in with guys who don’t actually break out or improve), and as you can see from the table above, Hyers and company banish the stench of 2017, riding above-average inputs and outputs throughout his tenure. Yay for everyone.
It’s really the “how” that’s of interest, though. We can tell from the above, that relative to the Chili Davis tenure, the Red Sox under Hyers:
- Struck out more (but not in 2018);
- Emphasized damage on contact and reaped the rewards of that;
- Hit fewer grounders, generally;
- Swung more in general, including chasing more — a huge turnaround from a pretty passive approach under Davis;
- Made a lot of contact on pitches outside the zone, which is not great but also not necessarily awful; and
- Definitely de-emphasized contact in the zone.
As you can see from the table, a lot of this is really Braves-lite, especially when considering the Hyers years versus the Davis years.
After the 2021 season, Hyers declined to return to the Red Sox despite having a standing offer to do so, and voluntarily went to the Rangers. I won’t get into it too much here, but in press interviews at the time, Hyers just talked about needing a new challenge, with a brief nod to being closer to his wife. He made reference to “a new voice” a lot, which probably sounds familiar to you. Hyers spent three years with the Rangers, and while they didn’t win a trophy in his first year as their hitting coach, it happened in his second year instead.
The Rangers have had a funny thing with regard to hitting coaches: after Rudy Jaramillo had the job for 15 years in the 90s and 2000s, they went through six in a decade, with none lasting more than three seasons. Hyers replaced Luis Ortiz, who had had the job for the three seasons prior (one of which was shortened in 2020). The Rangers also had a funny thing (though not quite ha ha funny) overall — they were really quite bad from 2017-on, Hyers or not, with their 2023 title run their only 90-win season since 2016. They had a bottom-ten offense under Ortiz, and in fact hadn’t had an above-average offense since 2015. Inputs-wise, they were fine in 2019 but awful in 2020-2021, and much like the team’s fortunes overall, they were great in 2023 but slunk back into the bottom ten in 2024.
So, the table below is really kind of ambiguous, far moreso than what was evident from Hyers’ tenure with the Red Sox:
This is just tough to summarize. The Luis Ortiz-coached Rangers didn’t walk much and struck out a lot (except when they didn’t); the Hyers-coached Rangers reined in the strikeouts in 2023-2024 but not so much in his first year on the job. The offensive inputs and outputs are a mess; the team was clearly successful in 2023 and just… not… otherwise. Hyers’ Rangers teams kinda-sorta avoided grounders, and they were aggressive in the zone, but the z-contact pattern is really different from that of his Red Sox teams, and of course, from the Braves.
So, this could’ve been a slam dunk post about how the Braves are really just hiring a guy that more or less did with the Red Sox and Rangers what Seitzer did with the 2019-2024 Braves, but the problem is, the Rangers tenure makes things difficult and absolutely does not support that narrative. Hyers wanted a new challenge when he went from Boston to Arlington, and he really did get quite a challenge. Even when his 2023 Rangers succeeded offensively, they did so with walks and contact in the zone — though it’s worth noting that it’s not like his Red Sox teams were entirely homogenous pseudo-clones of the Braves’ recent offensive approach, either.
So, what are the Braves getting with their Hyers hiring? They’re getting a hitting coach with demonstrated experience in getting a team to adopt a Braves-y, damage on contact approach — albeit one that doesn’t quite mirror what the Braves have done for the last half-decade. But, they’re also getting a coach whose most recent gig was taken, apparently, as an aspirational challenge and had fairly mixed results, without much of anything that looks like Braves Hitting Approach.pptx.
Given the run environment and soggy ball experience in 2024, the Braves’ struggles therein, Seitzer’s departure, Hyers’ hiring, and the Braves maybe stepping out of their comfort zone to add Jurickson Profar, a guy who will probably be best served by not changing his approach at all from what worked in 2024, there are a lot of open questions swirling around how the team will approach offense in 2025. While there’s no reason to assume they’ll do anything but stay the course, given how successful their top-down hitting project has been from 2019-onward, you could still build a narrative that the times (or the approaches, I guess) are a-changing, based on any of the above. Hyers’ track record could probably be used to support either business-as-usual or doin’-stuff-differently, which is why I went through this exercise… even if that’s a pretty unsatisfying conclusion.