Dickerson, Giants both rolling since they came together.
Giants have seen both sides of Dickerson in short time with team
Tito Polo, a 24yearold outfielder who has toiled in the minors for eight years, might have saved the Giants’ season.
In an April 17 TripleA game between the El Paso Chihuahuas and Tacoma Rainiers, Polo hit a grounder to short. He ran up the line and spiked the El Paso first baseman, leading to a league suspension. The Mariners released him two days later.
The Chihuahuas’ bloodied first baseman was Alex Dickerson, who believes the leg injury caused by Polo’s spikes affected his swing and thus his numbers when the Padres promoted him to the majors, which, in turn, led San Diego to designate the .158 hitter for assignment and trade him to the Giants on June 10.
Giants executive Farhan Zaidi’s shrewd pickup breathed instant life into the Giants in a way that no other player has in recent memory. Marco Scutaro comes to mind, but the 2012 Giants already were an offensive dynamo when they traded for Scutaro. The 2019 Giants certainly were not.
On a chart, you could overlay the Giants’ rise toward respectability with Dickerson’s arrival June 21, when he hit a grand slam and drove in six runs in an 115 win at Arizona.
Dickerson suddenly provided manager Bruce Bochy a fearsome cleanup hitter. Dickerson carried into Friday night’s game at Petco Park a .405 average with a 1.289 OPS, six homers and 22 RBIs in just 88 plate appearances with the Giants.
The 29yearold San Diegoarea native flooded the offense with highoctane fuel and gave his new San Francisco teammates a reason to party in the dugout. Every big hit still ignites a chant of “Dick! Dick! Dick!”
The Giants were 3142 when the front office summoned Dickerson from a short stay at Sacramento. They are 219 since then.
“I always thought about baseball being the ultimate team sport, where one guy can’t make that much of an impact, but he’s making me feel pretty dumb,” Zaidi said. “Players mentioned it. Boch mentioned it. When we got to Arizona and he hit that grand slam, we got a little bit of instant energy in the dugout.
“It’s very easy to identify that as the turning point in the season.”
Dickerson is not shy about his abilities. He considers himself qualified to hit cleanup in a majorleague lineup. He is surprised only by the opportunity, given his recent career arc.
He is not wearing the savior cape comfortably.
“It sounds good to hear that,” he said, “but I don’t really feel like it comes down to, ‘I showed up and it all happened.’ ”
Giants fans who have enjoyed Dickerson’s power at the plate also got a quick reminder of his downside. He has not been able to stay healthy.
That twoyear gap in Dickerson’s bigleague stats fuels the fear that he is too good to be true. After three weeks of perfect health upon his arrival, Dickerson left a July 12 game in Milwaukee with back spasms that led to compensation pain on his right side. Bochy has tread carefully since then, starting him on consecutive days just once, not wanting to kill the golden goose.
Batting coach Alonzo Powell worked for the Padres and instantly knew what the Giants were getting.
“When he’s healthy, he’s a feared hitter,” Powell said. “He’s very smart. For a guy who slugs, he doesn’t strike out a lot. He uses the whole field. He can hit multiple pitches.
“The only concern with Alex is being on the field, being healthy.”
Dickerson was an upandcomer with the Padres when a 2016 collision with teammate Travis Jankowski changed everything. Dickerson landed on the warning track and reinjured his back, which had troubled him since high school.
Dickerson thought that with rest and rehab over the winter he could return healthy in 2017. He was wrong.
As soon as he started swinging a bat again, his back went into spasms, a problem that lasted for months and forced him onto the operating table.
He underwent a micro-disection to remove disc material, costing him the 2017 season. His back was fine as he approached 2018 spring training but he started to throw too much too soon.
“Throwing has never been a big tool of mine, anyway,” Dickerson said. “I probably should have been lobbing balls.”
On the second formal day of camp, Dickerson heaved a throw from left field and felt his left elbow snap. He tore his ulnar collateral ligament and required Tommy John surgery. There went 2018. In 2019, Dickerson rejoined a different game than he had left in 2016, with uppercut swings the norm, everyone talking launch angle and bullpens stuffed with pitchers throwing 97 mph up in the zone.
Dickerson felt like he had taken a Rip Van Winkle nap.
“All of a sudden, now you’ve got a card in your back pocket telling you where to play,” he said. “That wasn’t even a thing when I last played. It’s funny how the subtle things like that changed over two years.”
However, before he bade the majors farewell for two seasons, Dickerson started to sense a shift in the way hitters were being pitched and changed his mental approach from the old way (“Look for the ball low and away to drive.”) to the new way (“They’re going to throw high in the zone. Get on top of it quickly.”)
Two years on the injured list afforded Dickerson time to watch the evolution from the dugout, gaining insights that are harder to ingest while grinding through atbats.
Now, the Giants are benefiting from Dickerson’s trials and education, hoping his recent physical setback is fleeting. He insists it will be because the structure of his back remains sound.
Dickerson is under team control for three more arbitration seasons. That’s a lot of opportunities for dugout chants before he can become a free agent after the 2022 season.
Zaidi is a believer. He would have taken an .800 OPS from Dickerson and instead got a nearly 500point bonus.
“You watch him and it doesn’t seem like a fluke,” Zaidi said. “You see the power. You see the atbat quality you need to put up those kind of numbers.”
For the record, Polo was hitting .276 in Mexico, where he got a job in early June.
Giants fans who want to send thankyou cards for the spike should send them to Los Rieleros de Aguascalientes. Maybe they can forward the messages. They released him Thursday.