It has been a turbulent week for the Detroit Tigers.
The franchise announced on Tuesday, May 5, it has fired Triple-A Toledo manager Gabe Alvarez, less than 24 hours after the team announced Tarik Skubal will need surgery on his left throwing elbow.
The Tigers said Alvarez was fired “due to a violation of club policy,” with no further details about why he was let go.
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He will be replaced by Mike Hessman, who played 1,436 games at the Triple-A level and hundreds more at lower levels. Hessman has been a hitting coach with Toledo since 2023 and worked with the Tigers before that, accepting a demotion to the minor-league staff after the 2022 season.
“I talked to Hess this morning to establish the cadence that goes on with him,” Tigers manager A.J. Hinch said before Tuesday’s game against the Boston Red Sox. “Obviously, I don’t have a comment on the whole thing. In terms of my confidence in Hess and the transition, he’s going to handle it very well. He communicates. He’s got the trust of the players. He and I talked regularly already, even as he was the hitting coach. Now as the manager, the conversations change a little bit, but we have full confidence in Hess being able to continue on in making our players better and communicating to me and my staff what he needs to in order to get the players who come up here ready to play.”
Alvarez was named as the Tigers manager ahead of the 2025 season after three seasons as Double-A Erie’s manager before that, where he had a 232-178 record and three division titles.
“We will have no further comment,” the Tigers said in a statement.
Contact Andrew Birkle via email at abirkle@freepress.com.
Free Press sports writer Evan Petzold contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Tigers fire Triple-A manager Gabe Alvarez for violation of club policy
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