WHICH GRISHAM?
“I think it was somewhat of a necessary evil to go through it.” Padres center fielder on his 2022 struggles Padres center fielder learned lessons enduring a lost season at plate — and by coming through in October
A couple mornings before he began what has so far been a spring uprising, Trent Grisham reclined in the chair in front of his locker here and talked candidly and dispassionately about a year he’d like to forget but knows he needs to remember.
With time has come some perspective, some understanding and some resolve.
“There’s a bunch of ‘what ifs’ and how you think it is,” Grisham said of the spiral of 2022. “I mean, the pressure of it, it’s your dream, the 25 other guys relying on you, playing for a city, playing for yourself, playing for family back home. There’s a lot of different things that can contribute to it. I can’t say that any one of those was the reason. It’s probably because it’s day to day, every single day, once you get into it, it’s hard to really continue to be self-aware of what’s going on.”
What a nightmare the ’22 season was for the Padres center fielder.
Grisham entered the year with a .243 batting average and .334 onbase percentage through 962 career plate appearances and proceeded to post the lowest batting average (.184) and eighth-lowest OBP (.284) among qualifying major league hitters.
April became May and then June, pretty much a relentless plummet to an average that ended up lower than all but 22 qualifying players had posted since 1900.
A nice guy became surly. Easygoing turned into moping. Confidence was extinguished.
“It’s tough to stay positive through that,” Grisham said. “I’ll admit I wasn’t. I let it get to me, and it made me not the person I wanted to be in the clubhouse every day. I think I learned from that, to be able to, when I’m struggling this year — because it’s gonna come, it’s inevitable — that I can keep my keep my same presence in the clubhouse, come to the field with the same attitude every day.”
He is not quite to the point he is thankful it happened. But it happened, and so he has reached a place where he accepts it as an important and informative part of a journey.
“I learned a lot,” Grisham said. “It was tough to go through. And if it would have been my choice, I definitely wouldn’t say I want to struggle this much and really get beat down. But I think I’ve learned a lot from it — stuff that I’m gonna be able to apply into this year and going forward in my career. I think it was somewhat of a necessary evil to go through it. So I’m just really excited for what’s to come.”
There was hope at the end. After a season that hardly could have been worse, at the time when it was more important than ever, Grisham was one of the Padres’ best players.
His solo home run in his first atbat, in the second inning of Game 1 of the National League wild-card series put the Padres up 3-0 in a
game they would win 7-1. In the Padres’ Game 2 loss, he tied the game 1-1 with a homer in the third inning. In a 6-0 Game 3 victory, he walked and scored their first run in the second inning, drove in their second run with a single and singled and scored their final run in the eighth.
He was 4-for-13 with two walks and another home run in the NL Division Series. The homer was the deciding run in a 2-1 victory in Game 3, and his single was the first of four consecutive hits in the seventh inning of Game 4, as the Padres turned a threerun deficit into a 5-3 lead that would stand and send them to the NLCS.
“It just showed me that I can do what I think I can do in this league,” Grisham said of those first two postseason series. “I can play well under high scrutiny, under a lot of pressure, and I can help the team win on any given night. So just that after all that struggle for almost six months, it felt good to be able to help the team in that way.”
The 2023 season doesn’t begin for another month, and what good Grisham took
from a bad year won’t begin to be revealed until then.
But in his first couple spring training games, Grisham has exhibited the traits of his much better former self, the guy who had a more-than-acceptable .808 OPS in in 2020 and averaged an extra-base hit every 10 atbats in ’21.
It was at least a start. Leading off against White Sox right-hander Lance Lynn on Saturday, Grisham grounded a single through the right side. After striking out on a check swing on a full count in his second at-bat, Grisham reached out for a 2-2 fastball on the outer edge of the strike zone to yank another single in his final atbat.
Sunday, he sent the second pitch he saw over the fence in right field. After a pop up to shallow center, he finished the day with consecutive full-count walks.
Grisham has swung at 10 of 14 pitches in the strike zone in two games. That seems at least indicative of a commitment to be selectively aggressive. Grisham watched a higher percentage (58.1) of pitches in the zone than all but two players in 2022. His single on the first pitch Saturday was a rarity
as well, as he swung at the first pitch of a plate appearance that was in the strike zone a meager 27.8 percent of the time in ’22.
Grisham has seen 29 pitches in seven plate appearances this spring, about on par with his average of 4.16 pitches per plate appearance over the past three seasons, the 14th highest average in the majors. He has watched 14 of 15 pitches outside the zone, signaling he was concurrently not sacrificing the discipline that has seen him rank fourth best in the majors in chase rate (21.6 percent) over the past three seasons.
The incongruity of Grisham’s ability to recognize and track pitches and his inability to swing at good ones last season was astounding. Instead of his skills translating into a high on-base percentage, he appeared frozen. Instead of the swagger that is part of his game, Grisham often looked like the kid who didn’t want to be playing Tball.
“I was (too) focused on what pitchers are trying to do to me as opposed to what I’m trying to do,” Grisham said. “I got caught up. I understand a lot with the new era of how pitchers are
trying to attack and what their plan is. But I got too caught up in that as opposed to worrying about myself and what I’m going to do.”
In other words, forget about their strengths and rely on his.
“I want to use that to my advantage and not to my disadvantage,” he said.
A third winter of working with new teammate Matt Carpenter near their Fort Worth, Texas, homes provided some assurance. A veteran of 12 seasons, Carpenter has always been impressed by Grisham’s bat-to-ball prowess.
“My message to him since I’ve known him, and especially since I’ve watched him play (in the major leagues), is he’s a really talented, physically gifted player,” Carpenter said. “And when you have the knowledge of the strike zone and you have the physical gifts he has, there’s really not much left to do. You just kind of let it happen. When you get yourself in trouble is when you start thinking too much. For him, it’s getting back to just being athletic in the box and trusting in the fact that you know your strike zone, and let the rest of it take care of itself.”
Spring training words often mean about as much as spring training results. Grisham came to camp last year feeling as if he had fixed some things that ailed him in 2021.
So to be sure, he has six months of a season through which to grind before we will know which Grisham the Padres have.
But he is adamant he won’t waste the lessons of 2022, which did include his tying for second on the team with 17 home runs and winning his second Gold Glove award for his play in center field.
“I learned where my focus needs to be,” Grisham said. “I put my focus on a lot of things externally that I shouldn’t have been focusing on. I learned what it is to struggle and how to stay in it as opposed to get out of it. I learned that a lot of guys have my back no matter what I’m doing at the plate, no matter how I’m playing. I also learned that I can also help the team win games (while) struggling — so not put too much pressure on myself when I’m going through those times and be able to come out of them sooner.”