Twins Video
Some players shy away from the word "yips". Some call the hideous, mortifying, often career-ending disease of mind and body that robs a pitcher of their control and makes them a laughingstock at whom no one can even bring themselves to laugh "the thing," instead. "Yips" is too cute. The reality of being one of the best athletes alive and suddenly losing contact with that talent isn't cute. It's eviscerating, emasculating, and excruciating.
It also only really happens to pitchers, and to fielders. There's a lot of time, when you're out there on the mound or when you pick up a routine ground ball and just need to throw out a plodding runner. There's too much time. Sometimes, things from far beyond the diamond creep into the mind of a player holding the ball. Sometimes, they feel calm and focused, but their body refuses to accept that message. In either case, though, when a player utterly loses the ability to hit (or even approximate) a target, it quickly becomes a problem of thinking too much. Throwing is a complex physical movement, especially in the ways it has to be done on a baseball diamond. Our bodies learn to do it, and then we code it into an unconscious set of instructions and try to compartmentalize it. When the conscious mind comes back into the throwing motion, it sometimes begets a spasm--a fit.
That can't happen to hitters. A hitter can be thinking too much at the plate. In fact, that happens often. We don't call it the yips, though, because a hitter who's thinking too much rarely takes huge, uncoordinated, lunging and tumbling swings. No, when a hitter is thinking too much at the plate, it looks like this.
And even more often, it looks like this:
Edouard Julien had to go down to St. Paul earlier this season because his sophomore campaign came completely off the rails. Why? He was thinking too much. This is not a chime-in with the old-school ex-players and retirees who lament that the game is too obsessed with analytics, now. It's just the reality, for this one player. Julien got badly confused in his approach this season, as he tried to adapt to the complexity of the interactions between himself and big-league pitchers in the wake of their latest round of adjustments to him. When he came back up briefly last month, it looked worse than ever.
There were a few occasions during July, as in the first video above, in which Julien did guess at pitch type and location and take a hack, but he didn't come especially close to the ball, because he wasn't really seeing and reacting to it. He was trying to think in concert with the pitcher, forgetting that the pitcher's whole objective would be to subvert that attempt to harmonize.
Very often, the effect was something like watching a boxer without any serious training in the sport. Julien still had his physical tools, but he looked like no one ever taught him to defend himself--to keep those hands up and watch for the hook.
The clips above all came amid a stretch, from Jul. 13-30, in which Julien had 34 plate appearances divided between Triple-A and the majors. In those trips to the plate, he struck out 18 times. He swung at under a third of the pitches he saw, yet whiffed on 40% of his swings. Almost two months after being sent down in the hopes of being fixed, he was more broken than ever.
He's back.
If you can take the anxiety of another potential strikeout out of it, two-strike hitting is the surest cure for hitters' yips. You're never more reactive, never more natural and intuitive, than when you're simply trying to see the ball and meet it. Julien got himself far off track early this year by trying not to make that adjustment in those counts, and instead continuing to seek maximal damage. Then, the anxiety came. The hit above is symbolic of the journey back to himself that has taken place over the last few weeks.
Since Jul. 31, Julien has had 70 plate appearances between Triple-A and MLB. He's batting .271/.386/.475. His swing rate is up to 42.9%, and his contact rate on those swings is up to 72.4%. He's still striking out at a relatively high rate, but it's nowhere near what it was before that, and it's come with more walks, more authoritative contact, and an ability to defend himself.
Last night, Julien had an early hit, and two hard-hit outs early in counts. Then, in the top of the ninth, with the Twins down to their last out, he worked a full count against triple-digit strike thrower Robert Suarez. It was precisely the kind of moment in which he'd have crumpled in defenseless fashion at this time last month. Instead:
That pitch wasn't quite where Suarez would have wanted it, but it's just the kind of offering that would have frozen Julien before. And then on the next pitch:
It looks like nothing. It's just a foul ball. But Julien fought off two straight 100-mile-per-hour pitches, when failing to do so would have meant the end of the game. The walk he drew on the next pitch, just the 10th one Suarez has issued all year, was almost a formality. At the end of a great night of at-bats, after a weekend of some encouraging signs, this battle served notice: Julien's gotten back out of his head, and into the saddle.
That doesn't mean he should start every day for the next fortnight. it doesn't mean he won't continue to strike out at problematic rates. It doesn't have to mean any of that, right now. Julien has seen The Thing, and he's survived his encounter with it. Whatever struggles are ahead, the Twins' young hitter has put a little bit of existential terror behind him. That's a big deal, and even though it didn't quite lead to a comeback Monday night, it made a difference in the game. Suarez might not be as available for the rest of the series as he would have been if Julien had gone down feebly. The Twins found a bit of consolation at the end of a tough night. And the yips no longer waft through their clubhouse.
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