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Josh Donaldson has a lot in common with the Twins. He’s as dedicated to hitting the ball hard in the air to his pull field as they are, and thus, he’s a perfect philosophical fit for the team. Several years ago, however, the team muffed its chance to get the best out of Chris Colabello, the first player ever to thrive under the tutelage of the hitting coach who would similarly help Donaldson. A new book on the baseball industry’s changing understanding of the swing makes clear that, while Colabello could never have become the player Donaldson is, it’s not a coincidence that he broke out only in the season after he departed Minnesota and joined Donaldson on the Blue Jays.
Out Tuesday, “Swing Kings” is a book by Jared Diamond, the Wall Street Journal baseball writer. It chronicles the influential roles of several independent hitting coaches who, from outside the structure of organized baseball, changed the way the game is played at the MLB level by bringing a new offensive philosophy to the fore. Among those coaches is Bobby Tewksbary, a former player who topped out in the independent Canadian-American Association. He was a teammate of Colabello, there, and the two are the same age. They became friends, and when (after giving up on playing himself) Tewksbary discovered some counterintuitive and highly valuable things about the nature of the swing, he made Colabello his first guinea pig.
Colabello began smashing the Can-Am Association to bits, finally drawing the Twins’ interest. As the book explains, however, neither Colabello nor Tewksbary considered the team a perfect fit for Colabello’s newfound, power-centric swing and approach. Tewksbary called the team, then run by the old guard that surrounded Terry Ryan and the rest of his front office, “anti-progressive.” No sooner was Colabello brought into the ranks of affiliated ball, than the Twins’ minor-league coaches were trying to change him.
One number helps tell the story of Colabello’s frustrating failure with the Twins, and his subsequent success in Toronto. With Minnesota in 2013 and 2014, Colabello swung at the first pitch just 28.6 percent of the time. With his overall contact rate (just over 65 percent of his swings resulted in contact during his Twins tenure), being that selective early in the count spelled disaster. He struck out 30.9 percent of the time while he was a Twin, which torpedoed his overall performance.
In 2015, when Colabello hit .321/.367/.520 for the Blue Jays, he swung at the first pitch in 43.5 percent of his plate appearances. That early aggressiveness not only allowed him to avoid strikeouts better, but removed the danger that he might let the most hittable pitch he would see go by. He pushed his ground-ball rate down and consistently drove the ball for the first (and last) time during his big-league career, because the Blue Jays allowed him to take the aggressive approach that suited his swing.
At the time, the Twins were not only behind the analytical curve, but strikingly rigid in their approach to advising players and building in-game strategies. They were wrong about how to best approach big-league pitching, but more damningly, they were highly confident that they were right, and they allowed no quarter to players who wanted to do things a different way.
All of that has changed. Tellingly, the Twins not only sit on the cutting edge of the industry’s advancements in understanding all phases and facets of the game, but treat every player as a unique case. They permit, and even encourage, different approaches from different players, rather than applying any single principle with a broad brush.
Donaldson’s arrival is the payoff for that evolution. Another, unheralded Tewksbary client (who initially heard about him because of Colabello) introduced Donaldson to Tewksbary prior to 2013, and Tewksbary so helped Donaldson emerge as an MVP-caliber slugger that, in 2015, Donaldson brought Tewksbary along as his pitcher when he competed in the Home Run Derby.
A player of Donaldson’s personality, with his drive and his confidence in the way he does things, would not have signed with the Ryan-era Twins, even if they had made him the most substantial offer. He’d have seen their unreceptive attitude toward unusual approaches, their inflexibility, and their lack of imagination as disqualifying. Diamond’s book stands as a reminder that the Twins have moved from the back of the pack to the front, or very nearly so, where analytical savvy is concerned, but also that they paid a price for taking so long to get here.
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