TORONTO — When you go through a slump, like Devon Travis did for essentially the entire month of April, you’ll do a lot of things to get out of it.
You’ll stay late after games, taking extra swings in the batting cages. You’ll show up early, dissecting your swing to its most minor mechanical elements with your hitting coach. You’ll watch endless video of your unsuccessful plate appearances, trying to identify what’s going wrong, and even more video of your successful ones, trying to figure out what went right.
You do all that because you have to do something. You can’t stay stagnant. But sometimes, like in Travis’ case, a good hitter simply hits his way out of it.
"I don’t know, man," Travis says, when asked what he did to turn his season around. "You can look at video a million times and you can see a swing on a homer and a swing on a strikeout or a pop-up that don’t look too different. A lot of it, honestly, has been from [Blue Jays hitting coach] Brook [Jacoby] and guys in this clubhouse continuing to motivate me and pump me up through tough times. I’m just thankful things are starting to turn my way a little more."
Are they ever. After hitting a pair of doubles in Tuesday’s loss to the Atlanta Braves, Travis now has 13 in his last 17 games after hitting only one over his first 19 games of the season. He’s raised his batting average, which was .130 heading into May, nearly 100 points. His OPS, .388 at the end of April, is now .582 only 14 games later.
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His first double Tuesday came in the fourth inning, when he smoked a first-pitch fastball from Braves starter Jaime Garcia 377 feet to the left-centre field wall, driving in his team’s first two runs of the game. His second came two innings later, when he was the first Blue Jay to face hard-throwing reliever Jose Ramirez and welcomed him to the game by lining a 97-m.p.h. fastball to the wall in right-centre. That’s the Travis the Blue Jays are used to seeing—a threat to all fields.
Suddenly, he has the second-most doubles in baseball, and his 12 in May have set a new franchise record for the most in a single month by a Blue Jays second baseman. The club still has 13 games to play before June.
"I’m seeing the ball pretty good," Travis says. "Early on in the season, I was seeing the ball fine, too. It’s just results. Maybe my swing wasn’t how I liked it. But it’s been better lately, for sure."
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Travis tried everything you can think of to break out of his early-season slump, from adjusting where he stood in the batter’s box to picking the brain of Los Angeles Angels slugger Albert Pujols when he was in Anaheim late last month. Blue Jays manager John Gibbons wondered aloud last week whether weight loss due to Travis’ off-season knee surgery was holding him back, and limiting his ability to drive pitches into the outfield gaps.
Of course, the most likely outcome of Travis’ slump was always him coming around in a big way. And that’s because throughout his down April, Travis’ peripherals were all remarkably consistent with where they’ve been throughout his career.
He was walking and striking out at the same rate as he did last season; he was making similar amounts of soft, medium and hard contact; and he’d actually improved slightly in several areas, making more contact, chasing six per cent fewer pitches outside the zone, and lowering his swinging strike rate a full percentage point.
He had the plate discipline profile of a pretty good hitter—he simply wasn’t getting the results, something that likely had a lot to do with a batting average on balls in play that still sat below .200 less than a week ago. Now, Travis’ BABIP is up to .248 as the hits have begun falling all over the park, which is a new school way of saying that a talented hitter fought through a funk.
"Well, you know, Devon can hit. Really, he’s hit since he got here two years ago," Gibbons said. "I think he’s a guy who, if he stays healthy, has got a chance to be one of the better hitters in baseball. He’s got that ability.
"But it’s been a tough go for him. He buried himself early. But he’s on a nice little roll. He’s starting to drive the ball a little bit better. It comes down to confidence, too. But, health-wise, he’s feeling fine. So, that’s the big thing."
Now, it’s extremely unlikely Travis will continue hitting at this torrid of a pace. There’s a reason he’s the only Blue Jays second baseman ever to hit this many doubles in a month (we don’t need to remind you that Roberto Alomar played for this franchise, right?). But even when he cools off, it will be a boon for the Blue Jays to have Travis simply hitting like himself, especially if he keeps it up—and stays on the field—through the end of the season.
"I’ve been feeling better. I’ve had a huge collective group of people help me in here," Travis says. "Things are just starting to click a little bit."
