SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. – Before the conversation ever turned to hitting, Bobby Pierce wanted to know what intentions Jeff Mathis had for the offseason.
Mathis was 34 and had just finished his 12th year in the big leagues. The Diamondbacks catcher would turn 35 three days into the 2018 season, and he was far closer to the end of his career than the beginning. Regardless of whether or not they can learn new tricks, Pierce knew, some old dogs prefer not to try in the first place.
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Little was stopping Mathis from cruising to the finish line. He’d never been more than a part-time player in the majors and he owned a paltry .198 career average at the plate, but he’d also never wanted for employment. One team or another always had valued his defensive abilities enough overlook his bat.
His work behind the plate had allowed him to carve out a nice big-league career. He’d earned more than $13 million so far, and another $2 million was coming in 2018. Not star money, but nothing to sneeze at. The game never told him he even needed to approach average offensive production in order to stick around.
So, Pierce wondered. The 58-year-old former college coach had known Mathis and his family a long time and had watched him grow up, but the two had never worked together. If Mathis wanted to do some hitting with him over the winter, Pierce needed to know what to expect.
“I didn’t know if he just wanted me to just throw him a little BP and say, ‘Attaboy,’” Pierce said, “or if he wanted to grind and get better.”
Mathis isn’t one for attaboys, it turns out. If he ever wanted to hit, he needed to change his swing. He wanted to grind.
To understand what led Mathis to Pierce’s batting cage, it’s important to understand just how desperate things had been at the plate. Mathis has a career OPS+ of 52, meaning he has been 48 percent worse than the average major-league hitter since he debuted in 2005. That’s the 14th-worst mark in major-league history, and the absolute worst of this century among all players with at least 2,000 plate appearances.
People around Mathis talk about it more gently. He hasn’t “become the best hitter he can be,” Pierce says. Mathis hasn’t had “a ton of success as a hitter,” as Diamondbacks hitting coach Dave Magadan puts it. Mathis is a little more direct.
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“I’d go home at the end of the season and I’d see my average hovering under .200,” Mathis said, “and hell yeah I’m frustrated.”
Mathis hit plenty in the minors, enough to be ranked the No. 22 prospect in all of baseball after his 2003 season. That year, he hit .315 with an .872 OPS between High-A and Double-A with the Angels. But he never even sniffed such success in the majors. His best single-season OPS as a big-leaguer is .642.
Other skills have kept Mathis in the game. Only in the last half-decade have pitch-framing metrics become widespread, although Baseball Prospectus had folded them into their WAR metric for longer than that. BP calculates Mathis as being worth 5.6 wins more than a replacement player for his career. (With the going rate of one WAR somewhere between $8-10 million these days, it could be possible Mathis is a bargain.)
In addition to those metrics, the Diamondbacks value Mathis for reasons beyond what can be calculated. They like how he calls a game and manages a pitching staff. They like the respect he garners in the clubhouse and his influence on younger players.
That half of his game seemed to be enough. It’s earned him the major-league pension that comes with at least 10 years of service time. But Mathis never was aiming to be just good enough.
“I’m not playing this game just to be half-assed or mediocre,” Mathis said. “Any opportunity there is to get better, I’m going to try to jump on it.”
Not-so-coincidentally, the idea to change Mathis’ swing dovetailed with the acquisition of J.D. Martinez last July. When it comes to career rejuvenation by way of swing overhaul, Martinez is the poster boy. Working with hitting gurus Craig Wallenbrock and Robert Van Scoyoc – the latter hired by the Diamondbacks as a hitting strategist over the winter – Martinez went from near-washout to one of the most feared power hitters in the game.
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Several Diamondbacks players have hopped on the swing-change bandwagon. Though it’s been popularly referred to as the flyball or launch-angle revolution, with players selling out to hit the ball in the air, it’s not quite as extreme as all that. It’s about the bat meeting the ball on the same plane, which maximizes the chance for contact in the zone. Since the ball is traveling slightly downward, the bat should be meeting it from a slightly upward trajectory.
Mathis had been doing the exact opposite.
“My swing was so steep,” he said. “Straight down like chopping wood.”
It’s hard to make drastic swing changes in the middle of the season, but Mathis and Magadan worked on some small tweaks. Though the alterations were minor, Magadan saw progress. Mathis’ OPS jumped from .542 in the first half to .724 after the All-Star Break, although it was undoubtedly inflated by a .457 average on balls in play. His contact rate crept upward, and his average launch angle jumped by more than three degrees.
He was on a roll — but then a foul ball broke his right hand in late August and knocked him out for more than a month. Mathis had logged 62 plate appearances with the new swing, too few upon which to draw any conclusions.
“I would have loved to be able to see him play those last five or six weeks,” Magadan said, “and see what he could have done.”
Pierce goes back even further with Magadan than he does with Mathis. The two played together at the University of Alabama and have kept in touch ever since. When he began working with the Diamondbacks catcher, Pierce was well aware of what Magadan had been teaching.
Swinging with a slight uppercut is en vogue now, but Pierce said he started teaching it 10 years ago when he was coaching at Troy. Over about eight to 10 sessions, Pierce slowly rebuilt the way Mathis swings a bat. Pierce would have preferred twice the time to work with his new pupil, but Mathis couldn’t jump into offseason work right away. The bodies of 34-year-old catchers need some time to recover.
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Still, Mathis showed up to spring training with a swing that felt natural and looked different.
“Way different,” said teammate Nick Ahmed.
Most notably, Mathis has lowered the position of his hands. They used to rest near his ear, but now they hover around his back shoulder. By the time his bat enters the strike zone, it’s already moving slightly upward.
It’s far too early to know what to make of the change. To start, Mathis has missed the last several days with a tight back, although the ailment isn’t expected to keep him out much longer. Beyond that, hitting is about far more than swinging upward rather than downward. A swing change won’t tell Mathis which pitches are strikes and which are balls, or which are fastballs and which will dart away at the last second.
But it should give Mathis a bit more margin for error, allowing him to make hard contact with more pitches even if he doesn’t time his swing perfectly. Neither he nor Magadan is willing to hazard a concrete guess as to how much better it’ll make him. Pierce said he conservatively hopes for a bump of 10-15 points and a few more runs driven in.
No one is saying Mathis will go from flailing to flawless at the plate. For more than a decade, the game had told him his hitting wasn’t all that important. Nonetheless, he’s determined to do better.
“No matter if I’m 25 or fittin’ to be 35,” Mathis said, “if there’s an opportunity for me to get a little bit better and for me to help my team win a ballgame in any way, I’m going to try to do it.”
(Top photo of Mathis: Jennifer Stewart/Getty Images)