3rd baseman finds swing after slump
There’s no surefire formula for breaking a slump, but the A’s Ryon Healy might be on to something.
In two weeks, Healy has raised his batting average 136 points, to .279, after Sunday’s 2-for-4 effort.
How did he do it? His explanation sounds simple.
“Being able to slow my body down, slow my mind down and slow my eyes down,” he said, “to get me to swing at better pitches and give myself a better opportunity.”
Sunday’s 11-1 loss to the Mariners snapped the A’s winning streak at five games. Healy was in the middle of quite a bit of that five-game stretch of success.
Even with Friday’s 0-for-4 night against the Mariners, Healy went 8-for-16 during the streak, with a home run and six RBIs.
His surge is reminding A’s fans of the second half of last season, when Healy shot up from Double-A Midland to hit 13 home runs in 72 games for the A’s.
Healy was the A’s only bright spot in Sunday’s loss. He had two of the team’s five hits and scored its only run.
“I felt like I was seeing the ball pretty well,” Healy said. “The last at-bat (a groundout to second) was probably where I swung at a pitch I was committed to.”
“Even the (first-inning) strikeout I had, I felt balanced. I felt good.”
That hasn’t always been the case this month.
He had two home runs and three RBIs in the season’s first four games, then went cold.
In the next eight games, Healy was 5-for-36 and didn’t drive in a run. After an 0-for-4, three-strikeout game against Houston on April 15, manager Bob Melvin benched Healy for two games.
“Sometimes the younger guys have a little bit more of a difficult time handling that,” Melvin said. “We gave him a couple of days off. He worked hard during those couple of days off and he’s back doing those things we’ve seen him do since he’s gotten here last year.”
He pinch-hit in each of the games during his benching and got a hit each time.
Instead of taking dozens of practice swings to work out the kinks, Healy said he took a different approach.
“I swung a lot less,” Healy said. “I spent like two weeks in the cage searching for a mechanical issue when realistically, it wasn’t. It was more mental and just approach.”
He also got valuable advice from teammates.
“I tried to explain to him that everyone’s got your back,” Trevor Plouffe said. “We’re not looking at you and saying, ‘Hey, this guy is struggling.’
“We’re looking at you like ‘Hey, man, we’re going to pick you up. We know you’re going to come around. We want you in the lineup. We need you in the lineup.’ ”
Healy even got advice from Houston outfielder Carlos Beltran.
“He said you have to fall in love with the process,” Healy said.
And now Healy’s average is the highest it has been since the second game of the season. Why? It’s simple. “You have to expect to come to the yard every day ready to work and be committed to every step of your work,” Healy said.