Not three full days since he’d counted down the final World Series outs, those listless last minutes on a detention clock, A.J. Hinch sat in a pinstriped suit with a pale pocket square and became manager of the Detroit Tigers.
In his time away from the game, he’d turned 46, spent some weeks at a lake cabin in Michigan, contracted and then recovered from COVID-19, tended to his daughters, watched a lot of baseball and tried to remember the man he once thought of himself as. Then he went about trying to become that guy again.