As he pulled his hands back, lifted his left foot up, and readied to whip his bat forward, the sensation Paul DeJong felt this past season was not a swing he could trust.
He hovered there more on the verge of a trust fall.
Maybe this would be the time something caught him and stopped his tumble.
“Whenever I had my leg kick, it was like I was up in the air and I’m floating, and that’s not a great position to be in,” DeJong said. “When you watch old Albert (Pujols videos), when a guy throws at this head and he hits a homer, dead center, against the Cubs, he’s like corkscrewing into the ground. He’s so strong and using his feet and his rotation. That’s how hitting should be as opposed to this nebulous up in the air, falling forward feelings that I have been feeling.”
That feeling, that free fall, and the lack of results that followed dropped the former All-Star from the Cardinals’ lineup, sent his average plummeting below .200 again, and landed, hard, in Class AAA Memphis for a stretch. It also sent him to Jupiter, Florida, where he spent the offseason cocooned in what he called the Cardinals’ hitting “lab” so that he might emerge this spring with a retooled swing — ready to let fly, not float.
DeJong ditched the leg kick. He’s changed his follow-through. He’s measured improvements. He’s steadied his view of pitches. And that’s all because he can see what’s coming: As DeJong enters the final guaranteed year of his contract, the next two, decisive months will determine his immediate future with the Cardinals and whether he has a role with them in 2023.
Now, that’s some gravity.
“Paulie is getting after it, like really getting after it,” Cardinals manager Oliver Marmol said. “It’s easy to sit here, and if I’m being completely honest, well, we’ve done this before. He’s really working really hard, and he comes in and nothing happens. Yeah, that could happen again this year. Honestly, it could. But is he going about it different? Way different. Is he extremely open to everything that we’re wanting him to do and then making strides in the direction we’re wanting? Yes, 100%.
“This is the first offseason where I’m truly optimistic about the changes.”
Asked how best to illustrate those changes, DeJong shared a split-screen video Wednesday that had synced his new swing on the left to his abandoned swing on the right. The three-second clip showed the hours of work he’s put in over these winter months. Gone is the lift of his left foot, replaced instead with a twist for timing. From that moment it’s clear in the new swing how his head remains still, his sight-line level. What follows is a swing that keeps his torso upright, less lunging for balance, and then doesn’t snap forward until contact. His previous swing came down on the ball with a negative attack angle, as if chopping wood, instead of using the lumber to lift liners.
He finished his former swing by releasing his right hand for a one-handed follow-through. Now after a positive attack angle, he holds tight for a two-handed follow-through that maintains control through the entire sweep of the swing.
The results have been like the split-screen: On the old side, a ground ball spins off the end of the flicked bat as DeJong’s swing finishes high, straight-armed but body bent forward.
On the new side, a line drive escapes the barrel, his head and back upright not straying, as the bat finishes tucked tight to his back shoulder.
It might leave a pine tar streak. That would be familiar.
“My weight was flying forward. My head was flying forward, changing heights, and it’s just really hard to consistently hit the ball like that,” DeJong said of his previous swing. “Trying to keep my head as still as possible. Watching how (Paul Goldschmidt) hits, there are so many good things about his swing. I’m trying to emulate a little bit of that but also making it me. I’m not trying to be Paul Goldschmidt. Having a consistent body position is something I’ve really been struggling with before. I’ve made these changes. I’m pretty confident with where I’m at.”
At the Cardinals’ modern hitting facility on the Roger Dean Stadium complex, DeJong has worked closely with Daniel Nicolaisen, a minor-league coordinator recently promoted to the big-league staff as the third hitting coach. Turner Ward, entering his first year as the lead hitting coach, has also spent one-on-one time with DeJong this winter.
The stats from DeJong’s past few years are readily available. Since COVID-19 interrupted his strong 2020 spring training, DeJong’s production declined precipitously. In the past two seasons, he’s hit .182 with a .352 slugging percentage and a .621 OPS in 639 plate appearances. He had almost as many strikeouts (182) as total bases (199) in that stretch and finished 2022 on a 9-for-89 plummet with 40 strikeouts. He said recently that he felt like his body and mind were disconnected — “just not matched up.” He recovered from the virus and dealt with a few gnawing injuries (like a bruised hand) through recent years, but ongoing frustrations kept him from regaining full-strength confidence.
“When you struggle for that amount of time, it’s hard to wake up every day and come to the ballpark with enthusiasm and optimism,” Marmol said.
To rekindle confidence his stats could not, Nicolaisen and DeJong dug into the data deeper for solutions.
DeJong said Nicolaisen outlined how and where pitchers were challenging him and winning. In the heart of the strike zone, a square area where the league average is batting better than .310, DeJong could not cover half of it, according to Baseball Savant. He was hitting .200 in an area where the league average was .308, .077 in a square where the average was .292. Both areas highlighted what DeJong felt — that downward chop, that lack of balance, that wavering sight line that missed strikes in and mishit strikes away.
Together with coaches, DeJong used that information to re-engineer his swing, prioritizing limited movement and maximizing its reach through the strike zone.
December gave him time to experiment, retool.
January was time to make it muscle memory.
February is time to test it — against pitchers, with adrenaline.
“I think it’s games,” DeJong said. “I also think it’s trust. It’s got to come naturally.”
“It’s what he does in the batter’s box,” said John Mozeliak, president of baseball operations. “Feedback, right now, is he is working in Jupiter daily and has been extremely impressive. There is a saying that some people are 5 o’clock hitters and some people are 7:15 hitters. In this case, we need him to be that 7:15 hitter. I don’t think you really know that until you start playing games.”
Three years removed from setting the Cardinals’ record with 30 homers as a shortstop, DeJong is 29 years old and starting the final year of the contract that record earned him. He’s owed $9 million for the season with two more option years that total $27.5 million in salary or $3 million in buyouts. The Cardinals have affirmed (repeatedly) that Tommy Edman is their starting shortstop, and DeJong will get innings at other positions in spring as a utility infielder.
His contract has purchased him this time to rebuild his swing, to see if he can reboot his production. And, with Edman and others at the World Baseball Classic, there will be ample available at-bats for DeJong to show the new footing he’s found and hit his way onto the team and into a role.
Opportunity is in sync for him to prove his swing is too.
“More importantly, show myself that I belong here,” DeJong said. “All sorts of new feelings for me this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. ... And I want a lot of at-bats. I want to play, I want to learn things about myself, I want to feel confident in what I’m doing, and all of that takes reps and experience. It’s all timing up perfectly for me.”
