TORONTO — When Devon Travis was told he was being optioned to triple-A, he wasn’t exactly surprised. Surprise isn’t the right word for it. Dejected might be better. Or disappointed. Crestfallen yet understanding.
The Toronto Blue Jays second baseman had just completed a month of April in which he hit .148/.212/.246 with only three extra-base hits over his first 66 plate appearances. His 2:18 walk-to-strikeout ratio was bad. His 23.3 per cent hard-hit rate was worse. His 62.8 per cent groundball rate was glaring.
Travis knew he was struggling, knew he was optionable, and knew a demotion was a possibility if the circumstances lined up. He wasn’t expecting it to happen, but when it did, he was prepared for what he was going to hear.
“I mean, I can look at my numbers and understand, that’s for sure,” Travis said. “I want to play in the big leagues. And if you want to play in the big leagues, you better do your job well. And I wasn’t. It is what it is.”
Tuesday, he was recalled from his three-week minor-league sabbatical, and played nine innings of second base for the team he thought he’d be with all season. He went 0-for-3. He struck out twice. But it felt like progress.
“Obviously, 0-for-3’s not fun,” Travis said. “But I feel like I got my swings off. I didn’t swing at any balls. It’s going the right way. I’ve just got to keep working, got to keep working.”
It took some time for Travis to access this positivity. Upon his demotion, Travis had time — probably too much time — to dwell on it, with a three-day gap between his last game for Toronto and his first for the Buffalo Bisons.
“I probably had every thought possible go through my head. That was tough,” he said. “But I understand. I need to get better. And that’s something I woke up and had to tell myself every single day. I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t very, very hard. Some of the harder days that I’ve had in this game. But I’ve been through a lot and I try to take adversity and turn it into a positive.
“And, you know, going backwards sometimes could be a thing you need to spring you forward.”
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When he reported to Buffalo, one of the first people Travis met with was Bisons hitting coach Corey Hart. The 42-year-old’s eight-season professional career ended at triple-A in 2005, and after spending the last two years working with some of the younger, still-developing players in Toronto’s system with single-A Dunedin, he’s now trying to help older players right on the cusp of the majors.
And when Travis showed up, Hart had some ideas. He’d been watching the 27-year-old’s swings. Not just from the month prior, when he’d struggled, but from earlier in his career, when he’d succeeded and established himself as a big-leaguer. Something was missing.
When Travis has been his most locked in at the plate during his career, when he’s been making solid contact on time and on plane, he’s featured a small pause at the height of his swing. In April, for one reason or another, that pause was gone.
“It’s when I get back to the launch position — right before I fire,” Travis said. “I just wasn’t getting that pause as much. That’s it. That was the biggest thing. It’s just about being ready to hit earlier. It’s really simple stuff.
“And, you know what, sometimes just hearing things like that from someone who’s foreign to you — in the sense that we haven’t worked together before — is really helpful. It’s nice because they may not know everything about you. But they can tell you just what they flat out see.
“I think that’s the biggest thing about being a hitting coach at a high level — they listen, they take time to understand the player, and when they say things, they keep it pretty simple. I feel like that’s what Brook [Jacoby] does here and that’s what Corey does a very good job of there.”
Of course, that small tweak is not going to add 350 points to Travis’s .437 OPS. There are no panaceas in baseball. Progress is gradual. You try to find small improvements day after day. And for Travis, that’s what his time in Buffalo was all about.
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For 7:00 p.m. games, Travis regularly arrived at the ballpark at 12:00 p.m., so he could get into the batting cages for a couple hours with Hart. On days he wasn’t playing, he spent even more time working, trying to swing out of his funk.
“I just tried to do everything I needed to do to get better and get myself ready,” Travis said. “My mind was so all over the place — I just tried to keep everything very narrow. Just focus on getting better every day. And try not to worry about anything that you can’t control. That’s kind of where I had to have my mindset.”
One of those things Travis can’t control would be his playing time. But now that he’s back with the Blue Jays, you’re probably going to be hearing a lot about it.
At the beginning of the season, the Blue Jays endeavoured to give Travis a day off after every two consecutive games played. The routine was meant to lessen his work load and, in theory, keep him off the disabled list, where he’d spent considerable amounts of time during his career. Thus far, it’s succeeded to that end. But there’s some question as to what ancillary and undesirable effects the schedule had.
Could Travis’s early-season slump be at least partly contributed to his start-and-stop playing time? Would he have had a better opportunity to find his rhythm and timing at the plate if he was playing every day?
The questions are fair, but unfortunately Travis’s time with Buffalo didn’t do a lot to answer them. Travis definitely played more frequently than he was in the majors and even started six games in seven nights at one point. But a pair of rainouts last week coupled with scheduled off days forced Travis into a day-on, day-off routine for more than a week.
Interestingly, that’s also when the eight-game hit streak Travis finished his minor-league stint on began. Last Wednesday, he hit his first and only home run with Buffalo after having played only three times in the prior six days.
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And it’s probably beside the point. What Travis needed to do was what all slumping hitters need to do — make adjustments, find timing, swing at good pitches to hit, and don’t swing at bad ones. A bit of favourable umpiring and batted ball luck helps, too. Hitting a baseball is extremely complicated, no matter how often you’re in the lineup.
“I think it’s just an excuse,” Travis said, when asked if his playing time had anything to do with his results. “I felt good. I was ready to play every single day. I just didn’t have the success I wanted to have. That’s the bottom line.”
He didn’t have that success Tuesday, either, striking out on four pitches in his first plate appearance and three pitches in his second, before grounding out softly in his third. But he felt he had the pause back in his swing. And he made a pair of strong turns on double plays, looking every bit like himself at second base.
And the best part is that all those things happened in the majors. He was only gone for 23 days, but it surely felt a lot longer than that. And it’s surely a relief to have worked his way back. Now, Travis gets to work on staying.
“This is where I want to be,” Travis said, sitting at his locker in a big league clubhouse. “I’m just really happy that I can come back up here and enjoy a victory on the first day. That’s nice. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”
