What has happened to Bellinger’s hitting?
The 2019 MVP has been in a batting freefall this season
LOS ANGELES >> The resemblance is uncanny.
He wears the same uniform, the same name and number on the back of the jersey, and has the same lean, athletic look.
But other than that, Cody Bellinger — the artist formerly known as the National League’s Most Valuable Player — does not look like the same hitter who won that award.
For the first two months of the 2019 season, Bellinger terrorized pitchers. He was still hitting over .400 through May 21, hit his 20th home run on May 29 and started June with an OPS over 1.200. It was enough to win him the NL MVP award (and did when 2018 winner Christian Yelich of Milwaukee suffered a fractured kneecap in early September).
But Bellinger couldn’t sustain that level of performance. After July, he hit .256 albeit with a .906 OPS and 13 home runs in his final 51 games (for a season total of 47 homers).
Last year, the dropoff continued. He hit just .239 in the pandemic-shortened regular season with a .789 OPS and 12 home runs in his 56 games. And this season it has turned into a freefall.
With a stretch of 25 hitless at-bats over the first week after the All-Star break, Bellinger’s batting average dropped to .161. Only one player in the majors with more than 165 plate appearances has been a worse hitter. Seattle Mariners outfielder Taylor Trammell was hitting .160 when he was demoted to Triple-A a little over two weeks ago.
Bellinger’s on-base percentage (.274) and slugging percentage (.282) have also cratered. The same hitter who hit 111 home runs in his first three seasons while winning the NL Rookie of the Year (2017) and MVP awards has hit just four home runs in his first 43 games this season.
So why isn’t he the same hitter?
“It’s tough. He’s young. He’s had success early,” says Brant Brown, one of the three hitting coaches on the Dodgers’ staff who have worked with Bellinger on a daily basis the past three seasons. “Dealing with all of that stuff is not as easy as we might think on a big stage. So we’re just trying to make everything smaller. Put it in a hallway, not in a grand ballroom. But we’re very confident that he’s going to respond.”
Simply put, Bellinger — who has missed 58 games with leg injuries (including a hamstring injury sustained Friday) — is not hitting the ball as hard or as far or as often this season.
Statcast figures show Bellinger has career-lows in hardhit percentage (the number of balls put in play with an exit velocity over 95 mph) and barrel percentage (the number of balls squared up on the optimal part of the bat). His average exit velocity this year (89.5 mph) nearly matches last year’s career-low (89.3). By comparison, during his MVP season, Bellinger’s average exit velocity was 91.2 mph. During both his ROY and MVP seasons, his hardhit percentage was 45.7.
During his first four seasons, 21.2 percent of the fly balls he hit went for home runs. This year, that number — like the fly balls themselves — has fallen far short. Just nine percent of his fly balls have turned into home runs this season.
Brown and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts both point to the same thing as the leading factor in Bellinger’s struggles this season — the surgery he had on his right shoulder last November.
“I think everyone needs to realize with the shoulder surgery he didn’t have the offseason that he normally has in the weight room and the ability to develop his strength in the way that he has in the past,” Brown said. “So you’re dealing with him trying to catch up or just maintain what he has. Then as he was building his strength, he gets hurt. He gets stepped on. So that goes. You can’t really do a lot when you have a cracked fibula or whatever it was. Too much movement of anything would rattle it. So he’s still in the development area of strength and conditioning, a tick off of where he’s been in the past.”
Brown describes the front shoulder as “the navigation system” for a hitter’s swing, providing “adjustability” to that swing.
Where once Bellinger feasted on fastballs (a .327 average and .661 slugging percentage during his MVP season), he is hitting just .140 with a .331 slugging percentage against them this season. Part of that is the “initial fire” of the swing that is lacking in a surgically-repaired front shoulder, Roberts says.
“This is not making excuses. It’s going to sound like one,” Roberts says of the lingering effect of the shoulder surgery.
At the same time, hitters are always tinkering with their swing mechanics and setup — some more than others. But Bellinger’s adjustments have led him farther and farther away from the swing that produced those
MVP numbers in 2019.
“I think that when you have success, the success that he had — hit 40-something homers — it’s like anything, the more you do something and then you do something unconsciously ... when you look back a couple months later, a year later, you’re like — what swing is that?” Roberts said. “For me, you’re hitting homers and you’re not trying to hit homers. You’re being a good hitter — which he was. Then it’s like I’m hitting homers so I’m going to keep trying to lift the ball, lift the ball, lift the ball. And over a month, two months, three months, an offseason — this is a distant memory of where you were.
“I know in spring training the next year (2020), he didn’t have the same swing. I don’t have video of it. But I know from my eyes . ... Coming into summer camp (last July), it was a different thing as well.”
Brown acknowledges that Bellinger’s swing has changed since 2019 but argues that does not make Bellinger unique.
“That’s the fight. You have a really good first half or more than first half and you lose a feel, you try to tinker and you go to things. That’s baseball,” Brown says.
“It’s really tough to google your swing.”
The current iteration of Bellinger’s swing seems a reflection of an obsession with hitting home runs. Again Statcast shows he is hitting with more loft than ever — an average launch angle of 21.7 degrees compared to 17.8 in 2019 when he hit 47 home runs — but turning a higher percentage of those into popups or fly outs.
“I think everyone does,” Brown says of chasing home runs. “We really try to create the narrative that – if you hit, you slug. If you slug, you’re playing with fire.”
Roberts says his message to Bellinger is to “go back to being a hit collector” who hits line drives into the gaps. If they start carrying into the seats — so be it.
“For Cody, when he was really good in ’19, he was a hitter first and the slug followed,” Roberts says.
“I just want him to focus on being a good hitter. Be a good hitter first . ... Be a doubles guy. He’s grinding. But I think the mindset, the approach to being a doubles guy, will benefit him far more than feeling you hit a homer so now you’re back. I think that consistently going forward he would be best served being a hit collector, driving in runs, using the whole field . ... You look at his at-bats. There’s a lot of swing and miss in the zone. I believe if there’s that mindset of doubles and use the whole field – a little flatter path – I think that will lead to success.”
Throughout Bellinger’s lost season, Roberts has emphasized the value he brings as a Gold Glove-level defender in center field and one of the Dodgers’ fastest baserunners (when he manages to get on base). With a three-team race in the NL West, however, the Dodgers cannot easily absorb a .161 average from one of their core players.
“I’ll take the over the rest of the way,” Roberts says.