Braves hitting coach Tim Hyers is qualified but also a needed new voice

“Just had a lot of respect for him and what he does, and talking to people that have been around him, he’s going to be really good for us,” Snitker said Saturday from the team’s spring training complex.

Hyers has an easily communicated philosophy. He emphasizes game planning, swing decisions and mechanics. He tried to give his hitters simple thoughts to focus on.

“This day and age, there’s so much information out there,” Hyers said Saturday. “The art of coaching is being able to narrow a lot of thoughts. I call it the wide to narrow.”

He even brings a story that Braves fans can relate to. Hyers, 53, grew up cheering for the Braves of the early 1980s. His favorite player was Dale Murphy. A graduate of Newton High in Covington (a half-hour drive from the old Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium), he spoke Saturday of watching games and talking baseball with his father in the living room of his family’s home.

“And now wearing the jersey and being around some of these guys, it’s pretty awesome,” Hyers said.

But perhaps his greatest value to a team coming off a down season, relatively speaking, is that he’s new. It would be difficult to find much fault with the work that Kevin Seitzer did in his 10 seasons as the team’s hitting coach. He helped the team win the 2021 World Series. The 2023 Braves will go down in history as one of the game’s most prolific, tying the MLB record for most home runs (307) and setting the record for team slugging percentage (.501).

But last year, when the club was waylaid by injuries and fell to 213 home runs (fourth in MLB) and a .415 slugging percentage (ninth) and key players had down seasons, a price had to be paid. Seitzer and assistant hitting coach Bobby Magallanes were dismissed. It didn’t take long for the Mariners to hire both.

“I love ‘Seitz’ and ‘Mags,’” first baseman Matt Olson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “I’m sure a lot of that was on us, which (stinks) for them. Unfortunately, a lot of jobs and staff moves are made because of players, I feel like. But I’m glad they landed in Seattle and they should have a good opportunity.”

As well as Seitzer did his job and as highly as he was regarded by players, Seitzer’s 10-year tenure was unusually long for the position. And in a cutthroat business, the downturn in performance last season surely prompted the change and the chance to bring in a new voice and new ideas. Hyers was hired away from the Rangers, which granted him permission to interview with the Braves. (It may also help Texas, whose offense also regressed in 2024.)

Hyers may not be a significantly better hitting coach than Seitzer – or even better at all – but in a craft that is so heavily reliant on confidence, sometimes a change can be enough. A phrase that Hyers uses is “mental affects the physical.”

As he reviewed Braves game video from last season, it was a problem that he saw crop up, such as when injuries moved players up in the batting order and led them to see their roles differently.

“There’s a lot of players, they get up there and they’ve got runners in scoring position and (they’re) just probably getting away from themselves,” Hyers said.

He did say something promising about 2023 National League MVP Ronald Acuña Jr. as he comes back from a torn ACL.

“One of the things (Acuña) said to me, he used the word ‘stable,’” Hyers said. “He feels strong in his lower half. When he feels strong, a lot of good things are about to happen.”

Saturday morning, Hyers watched Acuña, center fielder Michael Harris II and outfielder Carlos D. Rodriguez as they rotated in a batting cage. Hyers did not say much, sometimes taking video on his phone. He spoke with Harris as he waited for his turn.

The players sometimes performed hitting drills, such as holding the bat with just one hand and hitting while holding a semi-inflated ball in the crook of the back elbow. (Fans would be pleased to know that all three helped pick up the balls scattered about the cage when the session was over.)

Judging by the way Acuña howled as he departed the cage after some of his turns, it went quite well.

The Braves’ first spring training game will be Saturday.

“That’s the fun part for me, is getting in the battles with them and see how they react and helping them out with maybe some new thoughts, some cleaner thoughts and see if we can get this thing going,” Hyers said.

The new hitting coach can begin to show his value then.