Hinch hire an awfully strange move

Hinch hire an awfully strange move

Strange hire.

A.J. Hinch has never managed at any level. Nor has he ever been a major-league coach.

Know how many of the other 29 current managers fit that description?

None.

Teams occasionally hire managers with no experience. Ozzie Guillen with the White Sox was one example, Joe Girardi with the Marlins was another. But Guillen and Girardi, at least, had been major-league coaches first.

Hinch, 34, was the Diamondbacks' farm director.

For all I know, he might be the next Miller Huggins. Hinch is a bright guy, a former major-league catcher who went to Stanford and had been considered a rising front-office star.

He certainly is quite familiar with many of the young Diamondbacks he helped develop, from shortstop Stephen Drew to third baseman Mark Reynolds, right fielder Justin Upton to center fielder Chris Young.

But that doesn't mean he can manage.

This move smacks of the Billy Beane "we can put any yo-yo in there" approach to hiring a manager. Except the Diamondbacks think highly of Hinch. They are removing him from one critical position and putting him in another.

The D-Backs needed a change; I get that. Bob Melvin was the 2007 National League Manager of the Year, but the team seemed to have gone stale; the offense stunk, the young players were developing too slowly and the Dodgers' fast start put the team in an 8-1/2-game hole. General manager Josh Byrnes and ownership had grown increasingly frustrated. New voices might help.

Changing hitting coaches would have been a less dramatic first step. Hiring Class AAA manager Brett Butler, who managed Reynolds, Upton and pitcher Max Scherzer at AA in '07, would have been more conventional.

Byrnes, signed through 2015, has enough job security to take such a risk. If Hinch flops, the D-Backs can always replace him at the end of the season. But this move will be questioned within the industry, and rightly so.

Strange hire.