Major
League Baseball side Milwaukee Brewers have fired hitting coach Andy Haines after the team
managed to score a total of just six runs in their four-game National League
Division Series loss to the Atlanta Braves.  Haines had been with the Brewers as the hitting coach for the
last three seasons.

Haines’
contract will not be renewed, the Brewers announced on Wednesday. The team
has also asked assistant hitting coach Jacob Cruz to explore other options
while the Brewers search for a replacement for Haines.

“Andy
is a very good coach and he contributed to a lot of wins here, and he deserves
recognition for that. At the end of the day, we felt like this was the right
time to make a change. This was the right time for a new voice, maybe a little
bit of a different message, and really that’s why we decided to go in this
direction,” the president of baseball operations for the Brewers David Stearns
said.

“We
tried to take the NLDS out of it a little bit. It was four games. And it’s tough
to draw much from four games,” Stearns added.

Stearns noted
that he anticipates that the rest of manager Craig Counsell’s staff will return
for the next season.

The Brewers
appeared in the playoffs for the fourth straight season this year but ranked
just 27th out of 30 major league teams in batting average and 20th in OPS. The
Brewers still manufactured runs well enough to rank 12th in scoring.

But the
postseason magnified the shortcomings of the offense. The Brewers went
scoreless in 33 of 36 innings and were shut out in Games two and three.

Haines has
a long history with 2018 NL MVP Christian Yelich from their years in the Miami
Marlins organization. Haines coached and managed in Miami’s farm system from
2008 to 2015. Yelich was selected by the Marlins in the first round of the 2010
draft and remained with them until the Brewers acquired him in January 2018. After
leading the NL in batting average and OPS in 2018 and 2019, Yelich has tailed
off dramatically in the last two seasons.

Yelich went
.248 with nine homers and 51 RBIs in 117 games this year and struck out looking
with the tying run on first to end the Brewers’ NLDS loss to the Atlanta
Braves. He will make $26 million each of the next seven seasons, though $4
million of that will be deferred each year.