San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
MYERS’ REWARD? QUIET OFFSEASON
He isn’t mentioned in any trade rumors after 2020 revival
Wil Myers is the Padres. After all the near trades and the slumps and the attempts to explain how things might get better, he is wearing brown and gold and seems like he might be as good as ever.
“It’s definitely been challenging the last few years,” said the man who has been in the organization longer than any of his teammates. “You learn a lot about yourself as a person, as a player. … To make some of the strides I did in 2020, it’s very special for me. It’s one of those things you can hang your hat on and be proud of yourself for. To sit back and know what this organization has been through, what I’ve been through, it’s really cool to sit here and see where we are in 2021.”
A full ’21 season with more ups than downs would be good. It is even necessary to leave behind any lingering questions about whether he will ever perform to the level of his talent and be able to make it through 162 games without blowing up and/or getting hurt.
But with a spectacular short-season revival, Myers has gone from payroll albatross perpetually about-tobe-shipped-somewhere to a rock in the lineup who is one more solid season from actually being considered worth
the six-year, $83 million contract he received before the 2017 season.
Following a 2019 campaign in which he finished with the second-lowest OPS (.739) of his career and an offseason in which the Padres continued (and intensified) their efforts to trade him and his contract, Myers in 2020 finished ninth in the National League in OPS (.959), home runs (15) and RBIS (40). He also cut his strikeout rate from once every 2.9 at-bats to once every 3.9 atbats.
He was rewarded by a quiet offseason. With all the moves the Padres made this winter, his name was not even mentioned.
“It was fun to sit back on a team and I wasn’t in a trade rumor,” said Myers, who turned 30 in November. “It was cool to watch these trades unfold and they became my new teammates instead of guys I was traded for.”
A lack of noise is a theme for him now.
Myers essentially eliminated movement everywhere but in his swing. Still head, still body, same powerful swing, with the quick hands that allow him to wait and sail through the zone on virtually any pitch. A side effect: He was immensely improved against sliders and change-ups.
And with much counseling from new hitting coach Damion Easley, he stuck with his approach rather than lapsing into his careerlong habit of overanalyzing and jumping from the hope of one fix to the possibility of the next fix.
“When you face bigleague pitchers for 162 games, it can be easy to get the wheels spinning in your head,” Myers said. “It’s great to have a hitting coach there who will hold you accountable and get you back on track. That to me has been a big deal.”
As long as he is right — and Myers has been so right for long stretches and so wrong for often-longer ones in his eight-year career — the Padres are exponentially
better.
“I think the year that he had last year, it went unnoticed because obviously we’ve got Manny and Tati doing their thing and having great years,” Eric Hosmer said, referring to Manny Machado and using the players’ favored nickname for Fernando Tatis Jr. “Wil had a great year last year that not enough people talk about — especially where he was at the beginning of spring to where he was at the end of the year. It was just tremendous to see that for him. Wil came to play every day last year.”
Myers has been a man of streaks almost his entire career. It’s pretty remarkable, really, that a player with a .776 career OPS can be so dreadful at times.
However, it would not be entirely accurate to describe his 2019 season as streaky. It was mostly just a six-month slump interrupted by a couple six-game hitting streaks, one 12-game stretch in which he hit .425 with a pair of homers and a decent finish in which he hit .279 with a .781 OPS over his final 168 plate appearances.
In 55 starts last season, he went more than one game without a hit just twice. He was hitless in three straight games the final week of the season, though he played just 16 innings and had eight plate appearances in that span.
“It was a lot of fun,” said Myers, who found a home in right field in ’20 as well after bouncing around the outfield and corner infield spots his first five seasons with the Padres. “(The 2020 season) was great, especially coming off 2019.”
He paused to chuckle. “It was quite a different season for everybody here,” he continued. “To be able to come off having a really tough year for the team and personally as well, it was great to come into 2020 to be able to execute the things I wanted to do, to be able to win and come together as an organization and as a team, to have that winning culture for the first time since I’ve been here. … Coming into 2021, it’s as good as it gets.”