They would ride together in a golf cart during spring training.
Royals president of baseball operations Dayton Moore would swivel the steering wheel, while chairman and CEO John Sherman would peer out at the back fields in Surprise, Ariz. One brisk morning, they parked the golf cart down the third-base line at a field where numerous Royals big leaguers were taking batting practice.
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One of those players was Hunter Dozier.
The 30-year-old was in an interesting spot. In 2019, he posted a .870 OPS with 26 home runs and 84 RBI in 139 games and earned an All-Star finalist nod. Then, in the shortened 2020 season, Dozier’s numbers dipped dramatically with a .736 OPS in 44 games. Some questioned whether 2019 was a blip, but few knew about his COVID-19 case in the summer of 2020 that required him to use an inhaler throughout the season. The Royals knew, though.
That is why on March 1, days after Moore and Sherman watched Dozier take batting practice, the club announced it had signed Dozier to a four-year extension worth $25 million.
“We’ve known for a long period of time that Hunter is a foundational piece for our organization,” Moore said.
That deal is part of what put such a spotlight on Dozier’s underwhelming 2021 season. And it’s also why so many folks have questions about Dozier’s future. What position will he play? Will he be able to hit the way he did in 2019? What will the Royals do with his contract?
In all, Dozier batted .216/.285/.384 in 2021 and finished with a negative WAR (-2.6).
Dozier, speaking recently, didn’t want to supply any excuses. In the waning days of the season, he spoke with The Athletic about the ins and outs of a challenging season. He talked openly about the year, starting with the optimism of March.
“I thought it was the best spring I’ve ever had,” Dozier said.
Think what you may about spring training numbers, but they back Dozier up: In 45 at-bats, he posted a 1.106 OPS with five home runs and 13 RBI, with 13 strikeouts and six walks. Then Opening Day arrived, and this happened:
Looks like a normal jam sandwich, right? Dozier thought so, too, until his hand started to blow up as if it were a pufferfish.
“It got super fat,” Dozier said.
The Royals termed the injury a “right thumb contusion” at the time. Neither Dozier nor manager Mike Matheny made a huge deal out of it. He sat for a few days. The club debated whether or not to place him on the 10-day injured list. Dozier, wanting to help his team win the way the Royals had talked about doing all offseason, did not want to sit.
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So he returned on April 7 and went 0-for-4 in Cleveland. He wore a batting glove on his right hand to protect the thumb. He went 0-for-3 on April 8 in Chicago. So he toyed with a thumb protector. He went 0-for-2 a few days later, also against Chicago. And 0-for-3 a couple of days after that at home against the Angels.
“Nothing felt right,” Dozier said.
Subconsciously, he believes now, he was trying to protect his thumb. And in doing so, the mechanics of his swing shifted. In Dozier’s words, he “didn’t want it to hurt. I didn’t want to get blown up again. Then I started doing stuff in my swing, trying to not get jammed. Coming off the ball, creating bad habits.” His inability to hit showed in the form of a .474 OPS in April, and the lack of results dented his psyche.
He searched for things to change. He was willing to do anything to lift him out of his funk. He would enter the stadium, beeline to the cages and grind through swings in hopes of finding his stroke. An 0-for-4 performance would send him to his car, tormented by endless doubt.
The cycle was vicious.
“The effort and the work ethic wasn’t a question,” he said, “it just, it wasn’t clicking.”
As if his own self-doubt wasn’t enough, folks spammed his social media counts with hateful messages.
“It was every day,” he said. “Multiple people. I would try not to read it, but it would pop up on my page, and then you start thinking about things. It can get to a dark place.”
His wife, Amanda, son, Bodhi, and daughter, Blake, uplifted him nightly, and in July he felt as if the tide began to turn. One afternoon in the cages, he compared two of his swings on video — one from 2019, and one from early in the 2021 season. He’d played a spot-the-difference game all year because he had problems “coming off of his backside,” he said. Essentially, the weight distribution in his lower half throughout his swing was off-kilter. Sometimes, to feel a difference, you have to see it. Nothing had popped up. That afternoon, though, he noticed that in 2019 his stride was much shorter.
Wow, he thought. I don’t even have a leg kick (in that 2019 video). I just put my foot up, put it down. The movement is shorter. Everything is shorter.
For reference on the difference, here’s a video from September 2019:
Notice the quick left lift? Now here’s a more drastic one from April 2021:
Reverting back to old swing mechanics calls for retraining of muscle memory. That’s what drill packages are for, so Dozier went to work and in July began to find success. He posted a .833 OPS that month. And after a difficult August, he posted a .928 OPS in September.
His opposite-field approach told the story of his strides, too.
Here’s his spray chart from May:
And here’s his spray chart from September:
Now, you might be asking: What about his defense? Neither the eye test nor the numbers do him any favors here. Among 240 qualified defenders per outs above average, Dozier ranked 237th. He was above average at first base, which might provide insight into where he could play in 2022.
Except that Dozier might be the foundational piece Moore mentioned as a designated hitter. Dozier proved that in 2019, tallying a 2.9 WAR (which, per FanGraphs, was valued at $23.6 million.). Rolling your eyes? Well, take what he did in September of this season, for example. His 0.8 WAR (valued at $6 million) for the month ranked better than Nolan Arenado, Matt Olson and Yordan Alvarez.
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Asked about September in general, Dozier said: “It was the first month where I felt like I was back to where I was in spring training and in ’19.”
To compete further in 2022, the Royals are going to need more dangerous middle-of-the-lineup bats. Dozier believes he can become one, and these last two seasons have only enhanced his motivation.
“I feel like I had to go through all this adversity to understand what makes my swing work,” he said. “That’s the way I’m looking at it.”
(Photo of Hunter Dozier: Ed Zurga / Getty Images)
