Former teammates dish on Hague: 'He's a baseball guy'

This story was excerpted from Alex Stumpf’s Pirates Beat newsletter. To read the full newsletter, click here. And subscribe to get it regularly in your inbox.

Michael McKenry was the one who got to break the news to Andrew McCutchen that the Pirates found their new hitting coach. Better yet, it was a familiar face: Matt Hague, a former teammate of theirs from the 2012 season.

“You don’t ever assume one of your former teammates is going to be your coach,” McKenry said.

You may never know whenever you’re playing together, but you can have hunches. Alex Presley, also a member of the 2012 Pirates and now a broadcaster for SportsNet Pittsburgh, got to play with Hague for Double-A Altoona in 2010, a year when Hague was named the Curve’s Iron Man. There were plenty of future big leaguers on that Curve team -- Josh Harrison, Jordy Mercer, Tony Watson -- but Hague’s prep work and approach stood out to Presley.

“If I wanted to know what was going on with a pitcher, he was a guy I felt good about going to,” Presley said.

Now, Hague is set to shepherd a new generation of Pirates hitters. While the team has yet to announce the move, sources say Hague will be the Pirates’ hitting coach in 2025, taking over a team that has some talented hitters but has underproduced in recent years. At the start of the search for a new hitting coach, general manager Ben Cherington expressed a desire for a “tighter cohesion” with the hitting team. That search led to Hague, who was drafted by the Pirates in 2008 and played parts of 2012 and 2014 with them. He spent the last year as a Blue Jays hitting coach after a four-year run as a Minor League coach in their system.

And while Presley and McKenry hadn’t talked to Hague much in the past few years, his reputation as an up-and-coming coach paired with what they knew about him as a teammate makes them excited about the hire.

“He was a guy that, you knew, he was a baseball guy,” Presley said. “Baseball was what he was really good at. There are guys that you see and you’re like, ‘Well, when he gets done, he’s going to do this. I can see him going outside of the game.’ Matt was always a guy that, he’s a baseball guy. He was going to stay in the game. … You know that he’s evolved with the game.”

“When you love it, you love it, and I think that’s Hague, to his soul,” McKenry said. “Baseball probably pops out of his veins if he starts bleeding.”

McKenry jokes that the trio are “baseball rats,” the types of guys who can pore over videos of swings for hours. Maybe it’s part of the life of a bench player, needing to grind for those opportunities in the Majors. But it tends to be those types of players that find more success as a coach.

“Probably the best compliment I can give somebody is they’re just a great competitor, and this guy was a great competitor,” McKenry said. “I think that’s one thing that he can bring that a lot of people can’t.”

The Pirates are going to be banking on that competitive nature resonating with players, and that Hague can be someone who can bridge that gap of not only communicating what a hitter should be trying to do and how to implement it in games. That takes knowledge, but also people skills.

“Matt was always a very approachable, fun guy in the clubhouse,” Presley said. “Liked by everybody, but when he was on the field, he was a bulldog in the box.”

“He was a listen-first guy, but also had a little bit of a goofiness to him to make things light when maybe they were harder,” McKenry said.

Hague will be inheriting a challenge, but just about every new hitting coach does, and one can argue that what he lacks in Major League coaching experience can be made up for with his experience of knowing what it’s like to come up through the farm system and being a Pirate.

“I think it’s a win-win for him and the organization,” McKenry said. “I think bringing in someone that’s worn black and gold, even if it was for a short period of time, in the big leagues is important. I think the rich history will play here, and the more [people like him that] can come back here and help out in different roles is a huge benefit to the city, the fans and the organization.”