Cody Stavenhagen of The Athletic Detroit broke news on Wednesday afternoon that the Detroit Tigers have hired long-time Chicago Cubs starting pitcher, Kyle Hendricks, as a special assistant to the front office. The relationship between president of baseball operations, Scott Harris, and GM Jeff Greenberg, goes back a decade to their time working under Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer in the Cubs\u2019 front office. Regarded as one of the smartest pitchers of his era, the soft-tossing right-hander made 301 starts and compiled a 3.79 ERA in his 12 year major league career despite rarely topping 90 mph.<\/p>\n
Hendricks pitched 11 of his 12 major league seasons for the Cubs, putting together a 105-91 record. He concluded his major league career with a decent season as a depth starter for the Los Angeles Angels in 2025 before hanging up his spikes. Now he\u2019ll work for the Tigers, presumably in a pitching strategies consulting role.<\/p>\n
The Dartmouth grad, nicknamed \u201cThe Professor,\u201d which is also Kevin McGonigle\u2019s nickname, worked with a relatively simple pitch mix that included fourseam fastballs and sinkers, one of the better changeups in the game, and a curveball. He had a cutter early in his career but quickly abandoned it. On the other hand, by changing speeds and shape, varying his delivery time, and locating all four pitches extremely well, Hendricks was able to make a fairly simple, underpowered arsenal function like an eight pitch mix with extremely intricate sequencing.<\/p>\n
Jim Price would no doubt have considered Hendricks a master of the art of pitching. If you enjoy the craft beyond just the power stuff featured around the game, Hendricks was your guy to watch. He understood the concepts of effective velocity and pitch tunnelling as well as anyone, setting hitters up with harder stuff around the edges while getting weak contact, but then dropping in well located curveballs and changeups for strikes until hitters got tentative. Hendricks was great at reading hitters, and if you started thinking soft on him, he would rush an 88-90 mph fastball up and in, often getting the kinds of defensive hacks you see against pitchers throwing 98 mph or faster. Aggressive hitters would be left beating the ball into the ground, lifting routine soft fly balls, or popping up.<\/p>\n