The Tigers head pitching coach has helped turn the organization into one of the best pitching departments in baseball.
Baseball awards season wasn’t quite over for the Detroit Tigers . After Tarik Skubal won the American League Cy Young award, and manager A.J. Hinch was a runner up to Stephen Vogt for Manager of the Year, that could have been it, but Baseball America announced on Wednesday that Chris Fetter was their 2024 MLB Coach of the Year.
That’s a really nice big deal for a former minor league pitcher who got into coaching without any thought that he’d ever be doing it at the major league level, because he didn’t quite make it that far as a pitcher himself. Instead, he joined the Dodgers as a scout, and then moved into coaching in the college ranks. He started out at Ball State in 2016, and once he had some experience, the Dodgers hired him as their minor league pitching coordinator back in 2017.
The chance to go home to the University of Michigan was took good to pass up with Erik Bakich tapped Fetter as his pitching coach the next year. A year later and the Wolverines came out of nowhere to reach the College World Series , losing to Vanderbilt in three games. A.J. Hinch and the Tigers were watching, and just four years after being his second baseball life as a coach, Fetter was the head pitching coach for the Detroit Tigers.
There were signs right away that Fetter was a different breed of pitching coach and was finding ways to squeeze new levels of production out of a pretty mediocre group of pitchers. Over the first two seasons, several veterans came through the organization and outpitched their peripherals under Fetter’s watch. Joe Jimeñez finally hit a new level of performance, only to be flipped for a prospect as soon as Scott Harris took over in the 2022-2023 offseason. Unfortunately, two of the Tigers’ top young pitching hopefuls in Casey Mize and Tarik Skubal got injured in 2022 just as both were starting to put it together.
You know the rest. As the Tigers massively upgraded pitching development program spread from Fetter and then minor league pitching director Gabe Ribas throughout the development pipeline, the talent pool got deeper internally, and the Tigers started landing a better quality of one-year major league veterans.
Michael Lorenzen came to the Tigers in 2023 determined to re-ignite his career as a starting pitcher and put together a really strong first half before getting traded. Jack Flaherty put aside years in the wilderness and became one of the top starters in the game under Fetter’s watch in the first half of the 2024 season. Tarik Skubal returned from elbow tendon surgery in absolutely monstrous shape, armed with a completely re-designed seam-shifted changeup and began his march to the top of the baseball world.
Reese Olson, Tyler Holton, Sawyer Gipson-Long, Will Vest, Beau Brieske, Brenan Hanifee, are a sampling of pitchers who all seemed to radically improve just in the past two years. Fetter and assistants Juan Nieves and Dr. Robin Lund helped one after the other take their game to the next level.
Not everyone works out. Matt Manning and to a lesser degree Casey Mize have been unable to find their footing. Guys like Gregory Soto and Alex Lange have hit peak years and then fallen off and/or struggled with injury. Kenta Maeda had a disappointing start to his Tigers’ tenure before finding his footing somewhat in shorter bullpen outings. But year by year, the Tigers crept up the rankings leaguewide in ERA and FIP until in 2024, despite no major additions beyond four months of excellence from Jack Flaherty they were fourth in ERA and second best in FIP.
The real kicker for Fetter was the Tigers incredible stretch run, managed with Tarik Skubal leading the way, but otherwise pieced together by Hinch and Fetter. He and his staff’s game planning and ability to work with a wide array of pitcher types and personalities got more than expected out of just about everyone who took the mound. With a blend of openers, non-traditional high leverage arms, and a set of decent but not high end pitching prospects pitching bulk inning outings more than regular starts, the Tigers managed to dominate for months.
With no other established starters on the roster until the very end of the season when Reese Olson returned, the Tigers put together creative pitching plans, using their bullpen to help a series of young, unheralded prospects and veteran minor league starters dominate over the final months of the season. They won close game after close game over the final two months, shutting down good offenses again and again, and reached the postseason for the first time in a decade. There, they defeated the Houston Astros in the Wild Card round, and took the Cleveland Guardians the distance in the ALDS.
Fetter gets high marks for not having a type or a style, and instead being able to adapt to each pitcher’s needs. His ability to read and set up hitters, as well as his knowledge of modern pitch design and delivery mechanics, are key attributes, but it goes well behind the technical. He’s able to reach a lot of different types of personalities from intense to laid back players, to pitchers who want a lot of coaching and those who only want to hear the most important points. His players consistently point out his ability to tailor and customize his coaching to the player, rather than trying to install strict systems and make pitchers into one model he favors.
A.J. Hinch was quoted in Baseball America’s piece on the award.
“He has a soft touch when he needs a soft touch. He has a firm hand when he needs a firm hand. He’s relentless in his research on how to make guys better and he speaks the language that the player can understand. He’s elite at all aspects of the job, and it’s one of the reasons that so many of our players have benefited from his influence.”
Along the way, a bit of a aura has built up around Fetter. His mound visits have become a bit legendary, with many of us now hollering, “go talk to him Chris!” whenever things start to go south. And so often, it works. The tall frame emerges from the dugout, strides slowly but purposefully to the mound, and rarely are more than a few quiet words exchanged. Yet time and again, outings that were going badly suddenly right themselves. The pitcher whisperer aura is now a thing, and because A.J. Hinch doesn’t really like his coaches to talk to the media, the fanbase is left to fill in the blanks in terms of Fetter’s personality and coaching styles, often to comedic effect.
Fetter isn’t under the radar anymore, but then he never really was to insiders in the game. Reports in the past indicate that both the Arizona Diamondbacks and New York Yankees pursued Fetter as a pitching coach before he came to Detroit, but were turned down until the opportunity to keep his young family in Ann Arbor and become A.J. Hinch’s head pitching coach offered him the best of both worlds.
Whatever you want to say about Chris Ilitch and the Tigers’ payroll, they have to know that Fetter provides outstanding bang for the buck. He doesn’t appear to crave a managerial seat, and doesn’t really seem to have the personality nor the experience handling the public facing side of that job that is usually required, but there’s really no way to know. It does appear that he values his work life balance more than whatever the Yankees were offering him years ago, and Scott Harris and the Tigers organization knows what they’ve got here. We’re fairly confident that Fetter will be the head pitching coach for years to come, and at least as long as A.J. Hinch is the Tigers’ manager. Fetter will always have opportunities around the game for as long as he coaches, so we’re definitely appreciating having him here now.
Behind the scenes, I’ve gotten nothing but rave reviews for who Fetter is as a coach and as a person. He’ll remain a bit of a mysterious figure until Hinch decides to remove his gag order, but it’s quite clear the Tigers have one of the top coaches in the game, and a man who makes everyone around him better as both a leader and a teacher. We’re very lucky to have him running the Tigers’ pitching department.
Our heartfelt congratulations go out to Chris Fetter, Baseball America’s MLB Coach of the Year.