HOSMER BACK TO BEING PLAYER HE WAS IN K.C.
Padres veteran regains confidence from his old ways, new skipper Melvin
CLEVELAND
Eric Hosmer was a pretty good baseball player for a long time. And then he wasn’t.
The Padres first baseman tried a whole bunch of things to become better. None worked.
“I’ve definitely tried the reinventing thing,” Hosmer said.
He tried to pull the ball more. He tried to get the ball in the air. He tried to get under the ball, behind the ball. He tried and tried and tried.
“Oh, I’ve tried everything,” he said.
So, really, this is a story about a guy who essentially gave up on being a certain kind of modern ballplayer and went back to being himself — and, importantly, was given the freedom and confidence to do it.
“Something that is refreshing with having Bob (Melvin) here is he kind of has that old-school mentality of baseball,” Hosmer said. “You know, guy is on second, get the guy over; guy on third, you get him in. And, you know, I think maybe it kind of got away from that for a while. It was a lot of the launch angle, a lot of the get the ball in the air and all that stuff. So maybe I kind of got away from that a little bit.
“But I think that’s what is really refreshing about having him and his coaching staff is they preach playing the game, because they want to win. So maybe a little credit to that.”
Here is Hosmer, a little more than an eighth of the way through the 2022 season, leading the major leagues with a .382 batting average and ranking fourth with a .447 onbase percentage.
Hosmer hit .318 with a .385 OBP in 2017 and had a .284 average and .342 OBP through his first seven major league seasons. He has some history to suggest this isn’t a fluke, even if he did hit .264/.323 in his first four seasons with the Padres.
No one has hit higher than .348 in a full season since 2011, so it seems unlikely Hosmer will continue to
hover around .400 for the entirety of 2022. But the start to this season at least suggests he could finally be the player the Padres have been paying for, at a rate of $20 million a year. And it might be because he is OK being the guy they got before the ’18 season, and they seem to be OK with him being that guy.
He’s hitting the ball on the ground as much as ever. His 59.4 percent ground ball rate is third highest in the majors. That rate was 55.4 percent (11th highest) while he hit .294 with a .359 onbase percentage from 2015 to ’17 with the Kansas City Royals.
The knock on him even in those heady times, when he was part of two World Series teams and got on base more than all but 36 major league batters, was that he didn’t hit enough home runs. He hit the ball hard enough, the thinking went, he should accidentally be hitting more homers. It has been chronicled how he went to work trying to create the vaunted launch angle.
He said last year he was throwing out all the metricsbased stuff, just going to be who he was. And it went well for a while, as Hosmer was batting over .300 into late May.
It didn’t turn out to be so easy. There was always the suggestion he wasn’t doing enough, always the tinkering to try to get the ball in the air more often. He had fallen from favor with the people upstairs. A player with an average launch angle of 3.3 degrees would make any analytics person queasy.
And then came the trade talk. This has been extensively chronicled, as well, but bears a little revisiting.
The guys he plays with, many of whom call him the best teammate they have ever had, didn’t like that he was almost moved. By all reports, Hosmer kept it classy both inside the clubhouse and in his comments for public consumption.
He was more affected
than he let on. He acknowledged that this spring and expanded recently on how it would hurt to not finish the process he was brought here to accelerate.
“You want to be wanted, and you want to stay on the team, especially when you get close with certain guys and build relationships,” he said. “… Manny (Machado) has become a leader on this team, and I think for his legacy, to see him have a championship, that will solidify his legacy. Manny and I have become great friends. He was in my wedding. I want to see that for him. And just a bunch of other things. With Craig (Stammen), I’ve gotten really close with him. Just everybody I’ve been here with, building a lot of relationships. I know how special it is to win a championship, and I know how close
it brought my guys in Kansas City, and I want to have that here with these guys.”
As the passage of time has allowed Hosmer some perspective, a new manager and new coaching staff have allowed him to feel freer.
Hitting coach Michael Brdar has worked with Hosmer to maximize his strengths. Hosmer is laying off more of the pitches in the locations that had him missing and making weak contact. He is missing less.
“Maybe it got to a point where I was kind of just listening to too many people instead of just kind of sticking to what I do or sticking to those one or two voices that kind of helped me,” Hosmer said. “I can’t credit one thing about what I’m doing differently. I just know I’m swinging at better pitches. I know I’m much more relaxed in
the box. Maybe that kind of leads to seeing the ball a little better, putting better swings on it.
“It just comes down to you executing your plan and really sticking to it. That’s something me and Brdar have been really good at and on top of. I’ll kind of let him know what my plan is before going up to an at-bat, just to kind of hold myself accountable to it and just have no second-guessing or anything like that. I think it’s just the stuff that Brdar and (Ryan) Flaherty really break down and simplify — a lot of things for us to game plan against guys. I’ve really trusted in that, and then mechanically I feel like I’ve been getting good swings off.”
It’s almost impossible to quantify confidence. But if it were to be done by counting the times Hosmer has
brought it up recently, then there might be no overestimating its importance, either.
And to listen to Hosmer, it might be gleaned Melvin has had no bigger impact so far than in his work helping his first baseman believe. From their first conversation and all through a spring training filled with talk Hosmer was headed elsewhere, Melvin made it clear to Hosmer he was valued.
“I definitely feel more secure here with Bob,” Hosmer said. “I’m not really checking my phone every two minutes to see where I’m gonna end up. He’s made it clear that he wants me here. The coaches and my teammates, they’ve made it clear that they want me here as well. That’s given me a lot of confidence.”