The Pittsburgh Pirates announced the hiring of Matt Hague as the organization’s new hitting coach on Thursday.
It’s a homecoming of sorts for the 39-year-old.
Hague returns to Pittsburgh after originally being selected by the organization in the ninth round of the 2008 MLB Draft and spending parts of two seasons with the big league club. The Toronto Blue Jays ultimately got him his start in coaching, however, deploying him across Double-A, Triple-A and Major League Baseball over the last five seasons.
Pittsburgh will give him his first crack at being a full-time hitting coach in the big leagues, though, and he already has a plan for how he intends to fix one of the worst offenses in baseball last season.
“The first week and a half has been just massive amounts of diving deep in our internal system so I could have those fluid conversations and ultimately just meet them where they’re at right now,” Hague said, per the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “I am the new guy coming in, and I think it’s extremely important to understand their experiences and the things they’ve done and how they’ve gone about it. Just using this week and a half, it’s gonna be never-ending but continually having those touch-points to where when this thing gets fired up, we’re already on the same page and can kind of get into the nitty-gritty and go down the road of what their roadmap looks like to grow.”
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He also likes the city, so maybe that counts for something.
“I like Pittsburgh, man,” Hague said. “Pittsburgh’s great.”
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