NEW YORK — At Fenway Park last July, while talking through the swing changes he was trying to implement in the middle of the season, Brandon Nimmo elucidated the challenges of hitting in modern baseball.
“It’s hard to put into words,” he said. “Every team has someone that is perfect for getting you out.”
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And no one in the league was better designed to get Nimmo out, he said, than A.J. Minter.
At that point, Nimmo had faced Atlanta’s Minter 10 times and collected one hit, one walk and six strikeouts. Nobody more consistently made Nimmo look — and more importantly, feel — lost at the plate.
“It’s just an angle we don’t see a whole lot,” Nimmo said of facing him.
On Sunday night, Nimmo smashed a 3-2 cutter from Minter over the fence in right-center field for a walk-off two-run homer in the New York Mets’ cathartic 4-3 win over the Atlanta Braves. It was the biggest swing of the young season for New York, and it was literally years in the making for Nimmo.
“It’s just like a culmination of a mountaintop,” he said. “You’ve summited a mountain you were looking to climb for a long time. That’s how it felt to me.”
Nimmo’s newfound success against Minter — he also hit a game-tying homer off the lefty in April — is the result of a swing change he started working on two years ago. He’d been having trouble with riding four-seam fastballs, especially from left-handed pitchers, and he wanted to shorten his swing path to be quicker to the ball. Being quicker to the ball, in turn, means more time to decide to swing or not.
Brandon Nimmo – New York Mets (6)
pic.twitter.com/MOVKR4CQ5N— MLB HR Videos (@MLBHRVideos) May 13, 2024
It took Nimmo a year and a half, all the way to August 2023, to feel that change take real effect.
“Some of the muscle memory that we had been working on finally was sticking,” he said. “I was having a cleaner path without having to really think about it. That in turn allows you to make better decisions because your mind is focused out there instead of on your swing path.”
The epiphany, he said, was his leadoff home run Aug. 15 against Pittsburgh’s Bailey Falter — another lefty with good extension and good ride on his four-seam fastball.
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“That was a turning point for me,” Nimmo said.
Nimmo now compares his different swing approaches against different pitchers like picking a club out of your golf bag.
“It’s as if you’re going from a 4-iron to a 9-iron. My intent is different here,” he said. “With the way the differences in the game are now and the different pitchers and how their movement plots are different, you have to be adjustable in this game now.”
The home runs against Minter this season validate that change and all the work Nimmo put into it. It came on the sixth straight cutter Minter threw him. Why so many cutters? Probably because Nimmo finally hit the fastball out back in April.
Nimmo had to go through 24 hours of therapy to nurse a sore intercostal muscle in his rib cage just to get into playing shape for Sunday night. He had to invite manager Carlos Mendoza to his pregame batting practice session in the indoor cages to convince him he should be available later in the day. The preparation to even get the at-bat was intense.
But the preparation to capitalize on it? That took years. And Nimmo couldn’t have been happier afterward.
“You set these goals and they take a long time to get to,” he said. “You’re able to accomplish something in a year or year and a half. That takes a lot of days of doing it over and over and over again. To see a tangible result out of that and to overcome an obstacle, that’s something anyone can relate to when you really do something you’ve been working on for a long time and come to the culmination of it.”
(Photo: Vincent Carchietta / USA Today)
