John Mallee

by Jon Greenberg, Wed, August 10th

But Maddon switched it up and picked a different kind of swing.

“Um, it’s hard to … obviously there’s days or maybe a week or 10 days where he shortens up and utilizes the entire field,” Maddon said before a game last week. “But other times, he’s pretty much John Daly, you know. That’s about as close as you can get.”

Maddon cracked up the interview room. While he’s a sure fielder, Baez swings fast and he swings hard like Big John and when he connects he can send a white ball a long way into the horizon.

But here’s the thing about Baez’s famous swing. When you strip away the old bat waggle and tone down the exaggerated timing mechanism and forget about the bat speed, well, the swing is a pretty sight to behold.

Don’t believe me. Just ask his swing doctor.

“I think technically, he’s got one of the best swings in baseball,” Cubs hitting coach John Mallee told me.

Back in 2014, when Baez was striking out every other at-bat, his swing was dissected by everyone from Gary Sheffield to a Chicago youth baseball coach (who hassince written for The Athletic).

After the 2014 season, Mallee, Baez’s new hitting coach, started to pick through the flaws and helped direct Baez to a more streamlined approach that showcases this technically sound swing.

“Sequence-wise, direction-wise, and everything,” Mallee said. “Sometimes you see it and looks real big to people because he has such bat speed. And a lot of times he’s right in the right position, but when he swings and misses the body has to decelerate the swing at some time and if there’s so much force going through it, it’s hard to stand there and stay balanced.”

Baez used to go up to the plate, hoping pitchers would make a mistake in the strike zone, but willing to hack at anything. Now he’s going up with a base of knowledge built through self-improvement and experience.

“It’s completely different,” Baez said. “When I came up [in 2014], I was just ready to swing. Now I’m ready to swing, but with a plan.”

Mallee and assistant hitting coach Eric Hinske helps come up with the plans before every series, but he doesn’t want the credit for Baez’s ongoing hitting maturation. Over the course of a five-minute interview, he stressed several times that Baez is solely responsible for the changes he’s made.

“He’s quiet, he listens very well and he wanted to make the adjustments and he made them on his own,” Mallee said. “He just shortened up is what he did.”

Baez talks about how his coaches revamped his swing and he credits organizational hitting consultant Manny Ramirez for getting him to focus on his timing and hitting to right-center field.

“I haven’t changed,” Baez said. “It’s just my approach. Last year, talking to Manny a lot about my approach, how to keep it right-center and to keep the same plan the whole at-bat, it’s been helping a lot.”

While most of Baez’s power is still on pulled balls to left field, 36 of his 79 hits are to center field or right field. Going into Wednesday’s game, he’s hitting .277 and has been successful turning grounders into singles; he has a .340 BABIP (batting average balls in play).

After he moved from the Houston Astros to the Cubs following the 2014 season, Mallee flew to Puerto Rico to work with Baez. Any hitting coach worth his fungo bat knows you can’t force hitters to take your advice. Trying to change major leaguers, even the young ones, is a complicated process.

Fortunately for Mallee, and Baez for that matter, the young hitter wasn’t obsessed with his minor league success.

“Shoot, I hit 39 homers in Double-A, that don’t mean nothing,” Baez said. “You’ve got to hit them here.”

(It’s a good quote, but Baez actually hit 20 homers in 54 Double-A games in 2013, but he also hit 17 in 76 High Class-A games that year, so he was pretty close.)

Baez made his Cubs debut in 2014, and he gave fans a reason to watch another lost season for the Cubs, the last losing season of Theo Epstein’s rebuilding plan. He represented hope. But after watching him, he also represented the risk of rebuilding around young hitters.

In 229 plate appearances as a rookie, Baez struck out 95 times. He had 36 hits and nine homers in those 52 games. That means he struck out 41.5 percent of the time and 25 percent of his hits were home runs. After pitchers got ahead of him 0-1, Baez struck out 58 percent of the time.

Mallee saw what everyone saw when he watched the tape, but he had some tips about covering the holes.

“The pre-swing movement, the big leg kick, the big bat tip, the covering a lot of ground during his stride,” he said. “Now he’s shortened them. He has the same movements, but they’re all smaller, which bought him more time so he can make better decisions in the box.”

After four months in the majors, the strikeout rate is just under 25 percent (24.8).

“The thing was we wanted to take his natural movements and just make them smaller,” Mallee said. “So he didn’t have to change his swing, just have the same pattern, but smaller movements to give him more time to recognize pitches and do those things.”

Baez isn’t even known for his power anymore; he has 11 homers and 15 doubles, giving him a respectable .446 slugging percentage. It’s his defense that excites fans and inspires countless GIFs and announcer spasms.

“Yeah, I think my defense is pretty good,” Baez said. “I mean, not to try to show off, but when I play defense I just try to find the ball. As soon as I can get it, I throw it.”

Baez is also an excellent baserunner who shows great creativity avoiding tags.

“Instinctively, on the field, he’s one of the best I’ve ever seen,” Mallee said.

Baez has been a whiz defensively playing mostly second base and third base, with a little shortstop and cameos at first base and left field.

There was a play Baez made at third base last week that Maddon was still talking about the next day and it shows how his defensive prowess is linked to his hitting promise.

“If you really watch that play last night, he comes in and I’m just watching his hand and his wrist,” Maddon said. “How’s he going to make this throw? You see just see how the wrist is so supple and it’s moving and you can see the ball jumps out of his hand. There is a natural fast twitch or whatever you want to call it. He’s just that guy. Everything moves very quickly in his hands. That’s where the bat speed is, that’s where the tag speed is.”

The hands can start working too fast before the swing begins, rocking the bat back and forth. He really gets in trouble when the bat goes parallel to the ground.

“Sometimes I don’t feel when I do it during my swing,” he said. “They remind me to slow it down.”

Baez is a much more controlled hitter this season. The exaggerated leg kick is gone and there are fewer at-bats that end with him corkscrewed into the ground.

He still has the highest strikeout percentage on the team at 24.8 percent, but it’s not outrageous compared to his peers. Addison Russell’s strikeout percentage is at 24.4 percent and Kris Bryant is at 23.5 percent.

But Baez is dead last in walk percentage at 3.6 percent and it’s not close. His walk rate will go up, but Baez will never be Bryant. The Cubs are confident he’ll find a happy medium.

“The game is teaching them how to play,” Mallee said. “We don’t teach them how to play.”

It wasn’t long ago that Baez looked like trade bait. After all, he wasn’t a “Theo guy,” having been selected in Jim Hendry’s last draft in 2011. But he looks like a big piece on a World Series contender. His positional versatility makes him a playoff weapon and his bat gives him late-inning opportunities. At 23, he has a lot of room to grow. Baez will likely end up at second base on a full-time basis, just like Ben Zobrist did after playing a super-sub role. He told me he likes trying out a few positions now to prepare him for that future.

“You look at him two years from now, you’re not going to recognize him,” Maddon said. “Even right now compared to the beginning of the year, there are moments where it’s completely different. This is who he is, man. He’s going to hit homers. He’s going to make extravagant plays offensively and defensively. But there’s been a more of a consistent approach to his game this year, at times better than I had seen last year.”

No, Baez is not a different player, he’s just better. He still swings at pitches outside of the zone, but he makes contact with them.

“I still swing hard now,” Baez said. “But I’m seeing the ball really good and swinging under control.”

With two strikes, Baez is slashing .179/.220/.364 with a 47 percent strikeout rate in 159 plate appearances. He’s hit eight of his 11 homers, four of his 14 doubles and four of his 11 walks with two strikes.

Those numbers aren’t great, but Baez laughs when he thinks about how he hit with two strikes in 2014. Back then, his two-strike slash line was .097/.160/.201. He struck out in 66 percent of his two-strike plate appearances.

“I was swinging about 99 percent of the time,” he said.

It wasn’t just opposing pitchers that were giving Baez headaches the last two years.

“I had so many things going on either on the field or out of the field,” he said. “But you know even I didn’t realize what was going on until everything happened.”

Last season, Baez dealt with a tragedy as the season began. His sister Noely passed away at 21 from spina bifada. She got to watch him play for the Cubs in 2014 and he said he still feels her spirit today.

“I thank God he let me have her for 21 years,” Baez said. “Hopefully she keeps watching over me and blessing me.”

Baez took time off to mourn last April and then got injured in Triple-A, breaking his finger sliding into second base in early June. He missed seven weeks and returned to the Iowa Cubs in late July, rejoining the big league Cubs on Sept. 1. His defense was strong and he picked up four hits in five at-bats in the divisional series against the Cardinals, led by a three-run homer that gave the Cubs a 4-2 lead in the Game 4 clincher.

Baez didn’t have much to worry about this spring. He knew he was going to make the Cubs as a super-utility player. Now he’s up for good and he’s one of the most popular players on a first-place team with World Series dreams.

“This year everything is clear, you know,” Baez said. “I got lot of things out of my head and I’m just playing the game.”