AN OUTSIDE-THE-BOX MENTALITY HAS HELPED MARK CANHA REBUILD HIS HITTING APPROACH
Mark Canha decided it was time to stop overthinking the art of hitting. Why not instead go minimalist: shrink his zone, wait for his pitches and make pitchers work harder? So far, so good.
It’s a spring training day in mid-february and Mark Canha is deep into conversation about his approach to hitting — or, more accurately, his approach before hitting. Canha turned in a breakout season at age 30 and figures to occupy the middle of the A’s order again this season. The premise of the discussion: How? It’s not often a guy overhauls his approach nearly a decade into his professional career. Even rarer: to do it with the success of Canha. You’ll hear him credit the mental side. He describes himself as “methodical” and says his time at UC Berkeley was the best thing that ever happened to him. Then he drops the word “academic,” which might conjure in your mind images of analytics and Billy Beane — the new-age baseball stereotype.
But what Canha is talking about has nothing to do with numbers.
“I think you could argue that the analytics actually take thinking out of the game,” Canha says. “A lot of the analytics are just computers telling people what to do.”
His is a different brand of baseball IQ, one that applies its cerebral nature to the margins of modern baseball statsheets, that isn’t afraid to try new things. It’s a product of a childhood spent in Silicon Valley and, most of all, the four years he spent at Cal. (“He went to Cal, of course he’s a cerebral guy,” joked manager and fellow alum Bob Melvin.)
Canha craves to know the why and the how. The underlying reason why one swing is successful and another isn’t. He compares his career in baseball to a Rubik’s Cube, a continuous puzzle he’s trying to solve.
“I think a lot of the way I think about things is probably unconventional,” Canha says. “I’m not
afraid to try things or experiment. I think I got outside the box and just started thinking, well what do you have to lose?”
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Before last season, Canha took an introspective look at himself as a hitter.
A career spent, as he describes it, without much help in the minor leagues even more deeply instilled the independent, creative mindset he was first exposed to in Berkeley. Throughout his five years in the Marlins’ farm system, he would spend hours in the cage, trying anything from hitting with his eyes closed to standing on one foot.
Erik Goeddel’s career took a similar trajectory. The two kids from the South Bay were teammates at Bellarmine Prep and both went on to play Division I — Canha at Cal, Goeddel at UCLA — and entered pro ball the same year. Goeddel, who’s since hung up his spikes to pursue a Master’s in engineering at USC, remembers conversations they had over dinner after facing each other early in their minor-league careers.
“He felt like he was definitely getting slowed down, I felt that frustration from him,” Goeddel said. “Because he was always hitting but moving (through the ranks) kind of slow. … It seemed like with Mark, whenever he was frustrated, he would just turn that into working harder. He used that to his advantage.”
Ask Canha who he credits with his success, and he says himself. Goeddel, who’s watched him put in the work, would say the same.
“Mark kind of always had his approach,” Goeddel said. “He’d listen to what coaches were saying, but not everything. He always had his certain things that he did and that worked. It stuck with him.”
The summer before being drafted, Canha and Goeddel were assigned to the same team in the amateur Cape Cod League. As a pair of 20 year olds in between their junior and senior years of
college, they stayed with host families. Neither had access to a car. The nearest gym was five miles away. Both were frustrated with how the summer was going.
But that didn’t stop Canha from making it to the gym every morning. He picked up a bicycle — and convinced Goeddel to get one, too — and would meet up with Goeddel to ride the five miles there and back.
“No one else on the team wanted to do that,” Goeddel said. “After a few days I was kind of getting tired. Mark wasn’t gonna slow down. He was going to make sure we kept doing that.”
It took Canha four years to reach Triple-a, but the work paid off with 20 home runs and his first pro season with a batting average over .300. But that offseason, Miami, the team that drafted him, left him unprotected in the Rule 5 draft. Once he got to Oakland, he began working with hitting coach Darren Bush and got the consistent instruction he had been missing.
The way Canha thinks about the game isn’t something Bush sees in every player. He admitted the first year or two was full of trial and error, deciphering the right approach to take with a guy who “analyzes everything that he does,” Bush said.
“It’s made him into the player that he is,” Bush said. “Some guys, they’ll just swing until they say, ‘OK, I got it.’ He takes his time. He thinks about each thing individually. He really looks at it . ... Sometimes you have to use different tools in your tool belt to help that guy move along.”
As a Rule 5 player, he spent the entire 2015 season on the A’s roster and immediately impressed with a respectable rookie year, hitting 16 home runs in 441 at-bats. But, between one season-ending hip surgery and trips between Oakland and Triple-a Nashville the next two years, Canha struggled to match that initial success.
Canha has long obsessed over his swing, pinpointing anything he could in his mechanics, but he had never paid much attention to the other aspects of hitting. Every player has heard it: Even the best hitters are going to fail seven out of 10 times. Canha was trying to cover the whole plate and fend off every pitch.
He realized he couldn’t be perfect.
“It’s too hard to do,” he said. Last offseason, he came up with a plan, inspired partly by Matt Joyce, who played the 2017 and 2018 seasons in Oakland. Joyce never batted higher than .243, but posted on-base percentages of .335 and .322.
“I looked to myself, like if I can walk more, I don’t even have to do anything,” Canha said. “I just have to not do it. I just have to not swing the bat a little bit more and be more selective and get better pitches to hit and I’ll walk more. I don’t even have to have a high batting average.”
“Then I did that and look what happened,” he continued. “My batting average went up.”
Canha nearly doubled his walk rate, from 8.3% in 2018 to 13.5% in 2019 (and from 3.7% in 2017). He went from chasing balls outside the strike zone on 31.1% of pitches in 2018 to 25% in 2019, according to Fangraphs data. He’s even been more selective on pitches in the zone.
Just as he has realized he can’t be perfect, neither can the pitchers.
“Now,” Canha said, “I’m more like, I want the pitch down the middle and I’m going to be aggressive in the middle of the plate.
“Because just because the pitcher’s trying to throw outside doesn’t mean it’s going to go there.”
The new philosophy — “shrinking the zone,” he likes to call it, or in other words “more hitter’s pitches and less pitcher’s pitches” — resulted in career-bests in batting average (.273), home runs (26), on-base percentage (.396) and slugging percentage (.517) in 2019.
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Believe it or not, Canha hasn’t always had the diverse, developed palate from which 20,000 followers wait to see his latest culinary expedition. And it may surprise in the ways his Instagram foodgasms and “Bat Flippin’ Season” T-shirts intersect with his mindset on the field.
Psychologist Robert R. Mccrae, in part of a 1987 study that developed the theory behind the
popular “Five Factor” personality tests, was the first to show a link between openness to experience and creativity. From creative batting techniques to exotic cuisines, Canha is willing to try just about anything.
Raised in the quiet San Jose suburb of Willow Glen and a three-year varsity letter winner at Bellarmine College Prep, Canha credits his time in Berkeley to opening his eyes to a variety of perspectives.
“You meet all kinds of different people and everyone’s so smart,” Canha said. “Everyone thinks of things a little differently … I like people who are weird and talking to people that are strange and have different ideas. I like to embrace that.”
He points to the book by Tim Ferriss, “The 4-Hour Workweek,” which he calls one of the most interesting books he’s ever read and “a testament to thinking outside the box.”
Maybe the only thing Canha was hesitant to try was fish. He used to think it looked “yucky” and wouldn’t eat his parents’ freshly prepared sushi. As he remembers it, he was 10 or 12 years old when he tasted sushi for the first time.
“It was like Safeway, grocery store sushi,” Canha remembered. “I couldn’t believe how much I liked it, and this was a kid who wouldn’t eat fish. … Now sushi is my favorite food there is.”
It was, in fact, Melvin who “hooked him up” at triple-michelin-starred Chicago restaurant Alinea last season. The two “go back and forth” with restaurant recommendations.
View this post on Instagram Alinea in Chicago... you just have to go and see for yourself. Thank you @grant_achatz and @ thealineagroup for an experience we’ll never forget #stayfoodie #alinea #michelinstars #chicagoeats #chefstable
A post shared by Mark Canha (@bigleaguefoodie) on Aug 26, 2019 at 12:07pm PDT
One dinner that didn’t make it onto the @bigleaguefoodie page came back in January. Canha was in line to receive the Santa Clara Valley major-leaguer of the year award at the annual Hot Stove Dinner at the San Jose Elk’s Club.
He starred for three years at Bellarmine Prep, where he finished with a career .415 batting average and one Central Coast Section championship. Gary Cunningham, who coached him all three years, said he was “mature beyond his years” in high school.
He was tasked by organizer and former Archbishop Mitty baseball coach Bill Hutton to inform Canha of the award and to try to get him to attend. Some miscommunication led to Canha getting less than two week’s notice. But he was their top award winner and keynote speaker.
Canha had grown up around the corner from Hutton before going on to terrorize his Mitty squads in high school. A year after losing to Mitty in the Central Coast Section title game, Canha and Bellarmine beat Mitty for the trophy the next season. Cunningham recites Canha’s high-school stats from a paper he now has at the ready (batting averages of .380, .426 and .434, with 26 homers in three seasons) and keeps in touch with the occasional text message during the season.
After realizing the mistake, Hutton called Canha and said, “We need you here,” Cunningham remembered. Canha told Hutton that his wife, Marci, had a doctor’s appointment the following morning (the couple is expecting their second child).
And yet…
“Here’s what Mark did: He says OK I’ll be there.”
Canha caught a late-afternoon flight from his home in Scottsdale to attend the banquet and accept the award, with a speech about what his Bay Area roots mean to him, before flying back that night for his wife’s doctor’s appointment in the morning.
“Not many guys would fly all the way from Phoenix to give this little 10-minute talk,” Cunningham said.
As he keeps showing the baseball world, Canha is not just any other guy.