Thompson hopes numbers go north versus southpaws

Dodgers outfielder focusing on improving hitting left-handers after breakout season.

PHOENIX — After a dream resurgence in the major leagues last season, Trayce Thompson has bigger goals in mind this year.

It’s why the Dodgers outfielder has been watching old video of himself, trying to address an important hole in his approach against lefthanded pitching.

It’s why he wanted to play in next month’s World Baseball Classic, hopeful the intensity of the competition will help catapult him into the Dodgers’ season.

And it’s why he didn’t sound fully satisfied last week, even in light of his breakout campaign.

“I know I had a step in the right direction last year for myself and my career, helping this team,” Thompson said. “But in my opinion, I wasn’t very good. I was really inconsistent. There’s a lot more room to grow.”

It might seem like a surprisingly harsh self-evaluation from a player who not only batted .268 with 13 home runs, 39 RBIs and a sterling .901 on-base-pluss-lugging percentage in 74 games with the Dodgers, but also did so after languishing in the minors for most of the previous five years.

Thompson knows the fleeting nature of success in the majors.

His promising first stint with the Dodgers in 2016 was derailed by a back injury. After being cut by the team two years later, he struggled to find another steady home, bouncing around eight organizations as a triple-A player.

Those struggles made his reemergence with the Dodgers last season one of the team’s biggest feel-good stories, as Thompson nailed down a nearly everyday role after being traded back to the club in late June.

But as the 31-year-old re-

flected on his performance this winter, he fixated on areas in which his game could improve — ways he could cement his place on the Dodgers roster more permanently.

The biggest focus has been improving against lefthanded pitching.

Last year, the righthanded-hitting Thompson had unusually stark reverse splits, doing significantly better against right-handed pitching (.308 batting average, 1.010 OPS) than lefthanders (.174, .621).

“It really boiled down to not hitting the fastball versus lefties,” he said. “I really struggled versus the fastball.”

Thompson still managed strong numbers overall, but he knows “crushing lefties [is] the whole reason I got traded here.”

And it’s a trait that should only grow in importance this season, with Thompson likely to split time with left-handed-hitting David Peralta in a leftfield platoon.

“It left a bad taste in my mouth on the year,” Thompson said. “It’s something that — I want to be the guy versus lefties …

“So there’s a lot of work to do.”

That process led Thompson to watch old film of his rookie season with the Chicago White Sox in 2015, when his ability to punish lefthanders helped him break into the league.

He noticed that back then, he set up a little farther away from the plate. As a result, he did more damage on inside pitches.

“Last year, I feel like I got tied up inside a lot,” he said. “I wasn’t able to control that inside part of the zone.”

The trade-off, he noted, was that he felt more comfortable against right-handers, who no longer could get away with pounding the outer edge of the plate.

So this spring, he’s trying to find a happy medium, confident that the right setup will allow him to succeed against all pitchers.

“I’ll still bet on the fact that there’ll be an uptick — significant uptick — versus left this year,” manager Dave Roberts echoed last week. “He’s smart enough to know that one piece of value that he can add for our club is to be more productive versus left-handed pitching.”

Next month’s WBC will present another opportunity for Thompson, who was eligible to play for Team Britain because of his father’s roots in the Bahamas — a commonwealth nation still associated with the United Kingdom.

Although Thompson got approval from the Dodgers to play the event — which will keep him away from the team’s camp for at least a week during group stage play at Chase Field in Phoenix — Roberts hinted that Thompson’s participation could cost him valuable time in camp.

“I’m never going to discourage guys from playing for their countries,” Robert said.

“But getting a lot of atbats in front of us, I think, is helpful.”

Thompson took extra time to weigh his decision, conscious that he still is jockeying for playing time in the crowded outfield even if he’s all but assured of breaking camp with the team.

“I want to be here, I want to be a Dodger, and I want to solidify a role and everything,” he said. “But the way I looked at it was, it’s gonna be intense, it’s gonna help me prepare for the season … and it’s just down the road. So I feel like all the stars kind of lined up.”

While discussing his opportunity with the British team — Thompson has never been to the U.K. but is hoping the squad can “squeak out a win or two” to help grow the game there — he mentioned that he’d previously been approached to represent the country in WBC qualifiers in the spring of 2020.

That opportunity enticed the outfielder too. Only, it came when he still was trying to claw his way back to the big leagues.

“I wasn’t professionally in a place where [I could do it],” he said. “I was trying to make a team.”

To Thompson, it’s another reminder of how much his career has changed over the last year — and why he’s wary of not squandering his second lease on big league life.

“That equity, he’s earned,” Roberts said. “I can’t speak right now to what the role is gonna look like on opening day, what it’s gonna look like in the middle of the season … But we’re gonna need him.”