USA TODAY International Edition
Unheralded Olson slugging home runs at a Ruthian clip
At the start of the 2016 major league season, Rockies shortstop Trevor Story opened his big-league career by hitting seven home runs in six games en route to swatting 27 over the first four months of the season.
Soon after he hit the disabled list that year, Gary Sanchez joined the Yankees and hit 20 homers across his final 47 games of the campaign.
Last season brought similarly impressive outbursts from rookies including Aaron Judge, Cody Bellinger and Rhys Hoskins.
This is a fact of life in a contemporary baseball landscape: Improved player development combined with service-time concerns means players arrive in the majors better prepared than many of their predecessors, and widespread changes in plate approach and hitting mechanics — plus, likely, the baseball itself — mean guys just hit a lot more home runs in general now.
But even by the lofty standards established by big-swinging rookies in their home run binges over the past couple of years, what Athletics first baseman Matt Olson did in 2017 stands out.
Olson, who barely registered on lists of Oakland prospects entering the campaign, hit 24 home runs in 59 games in his rookie season, an otherworldly pace.
“I don’t think you could ever expect what I did,” Olson said this month at camp. “I knew I had the potential to do something like that, but it kind of had to happen for me to actually believe it and get the confidence from it. It was definitely a big run for me.”
Olson hit 37 homers in the California League in 2014 and 24 across 79 games in Class AAA in 2017, so it’s not like the power surge came from nowhere. It’s the magnitude of it that stands out.
By isolated slugging, only four players in major league history with at least 200 plate appearances in a season have finished with marks higher than Olson. They are Babe Ruth, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
The only players who ever averaged fewer at-bats per home run than Olson across a full season — McGwire and Bonds — hit at least 70 home runs that season.
“That’s pretty good company, right there,” Olson said, when presented with that information. “It’s something you kind of have to do in order to realize you can do it at this level. Coming up, getting my first chance to be a starter, I can’t say that I was like, ‘OK, I’ll come up and hit home runs at this rate.’ ”
“He got on a roll,” manager Bob Melvin said. “He’s certainly capable of doing that. It was his first everyday opportunity. We’ve had him up and down, which can be tough, and you certainly don’t expect consistency when he’s not playing enough. It was the first time he was able to know he’d be in the lineup every day, and he took advantage of it.
“The power has always been there — defense, power, walks, on-base, all that stuff. We always felt like he’d be our first baseman of the future, and that time is now.”
Rendering Olson’s achievement especially curious is this: While homering in nearly half his games, the 23-year-old hit only two doubles at the big-league level all year.
Power hitters tend to wind up on second fairly often when the ball doesn’t leave the yard, and no player before Olson has hit at least 20 homers and doubled so infrequently. Olson hit at least 30 doubles in every full season in his minor league tenure.
“They kept going over the fence instead of to the fence,” Melvin explained.
Said Olson: “That was a fairly small sample size. I don’t see that kind of ratio happening again. It’s just kind of the way my swing was at the time. I had a little more of a fly-ball swing and I was seeing results from it, so I just rode it out. Because I was seeing results, I wasn’t too worried about the lack of doubles or anything like that.”
Because of the Athletics’ last-place finish, the particulars of the market and the fact that every instance of a rookie entering the big leagues with a flurry of homers makes the next one a little less surprising, Olson’s outrageous 2017 display did not generate as much hype as those that preceded it.
“I think those guys probably did get a lot more attention than I did, which I was OK with at the time,” he said. “I was coming up and getting my first taste. It was nice to not have to deal with a ton of media stuff and just get settled in and play the game. As far as the coverage, that’s out of my control — we’re kind of a small market, some other teams get more attention, and being on the West Coast doesn’t help either. But that’s OK, it’s all part of it. I’d rather be on the quieter side anyway.”
Smiling, Olson admitted he would happily accept more attention if he draws it with his power in 2018. But his manager cautioned against levying Ruthian expectations on a player who has not yet endeavored a full big-league season.
“You feel like younger players are going to get incrementally better,” Melvin said. “In Matt Olson’s case, at least the power numbers, I don’t know that he’s going to hit 80 home runs. But he’s certainly got the potential to be one of the better power hitters in the game.
“You’d hate to put the expectation level that he’s going to follow up the amount of homers in the amount of atbats that he had last year. But if he comes anywhere close, he’s going to have a heck of a year.”
“We always felt like he’d be our first baseman of the future, and that time is now.”
Bob Melvin A’s manager, on Matt Olson