Report: Detroit Tigers fire Scott Coolbaugh, among other coaching changes

The Detroit Tigers will have a new hitting coach next season

The Detroit Tigers have announced a slew of coaching changes this morning. The biggest change to note: they are finally parting ways with hitting coach Scott Coolbaugh, a move that should have been made months ago.

Here are the other changes coming to the coaching staff, per MLB.com’s Jason Beck:

Josh Paul was previously the team’s quailty control coach. Hessman being gone is also not a surprise, as he and Coolbaugh seemed to be tied at the hip.

The 2022 Detroit Tigers had the fourth-worst offense in franchise history, averaging 3.44 runs per game. Only the 1904,1905, and 1906 Tigers had a worse offense—even the 2003 and 2019 teams had better offenses than this year’s team. These changes were necessary.

But the biggest surpirse may be Ramon Santiago being reassigned to a player development role. He was pretty aggressive with some of his sends as third base coach, but other than that, he didn’t seem like a detriment to the team or anything. He seemed pretty popular among players as well.

In the bigger picture, this is just the beginning of wholesale changes coming to this organization. Yesterday was Scott Harris’ first day on the job, and he and A.J. Hinch will probably make a lot more moves over the coming days and months.

A.J. Hinch went on to say that the organization “will look to build a hitting department.” Cody Stavenhagen from The Athletic reports that interviews for these coaching vacancies are already underway, adding that decisions regarding the medical team and training staff will happen next week.

At some point over the next few days, there will probably be an end-of-season press conference where there will be additional explanations for some of these moves. When that happens, you can count on Motor City Bengals to be there to analyze it all.