Austin Hedges gave one of the more candid, and humorous, self-assessments in recent memory a few years back while with the Rangers.
"I've kind of been in an offensive slump my whole career," Hedges quipped.
But when the career .186 hitter stepped into the right-handed batter's box for his first plate appearance Thursday -- on a night he nearly helped guide Parker Messick to the club's first no-hitter since 1981 -- a shocking performance measure flashed on the giant Progressive Field scoreboard: .350. Hedges' batting average.
Yes, it's early.
Yes, it's unlikely Hedges is flirting with a .300 batting average in September.
But what if a career-long slump is over?
What if Hedges is now a different hitter? A hitter who is closer to league average. For his career, Hedges owns the second-worst average, and sixth-worst wRC+ (50), all-time among the 2,453 players with at least 2,500 plate appearances. Cy Young posted a career 45 wRC+, ranking fourth worst, but he hit .210.
Hedges reached 10 years of service time earlier this season, joining an exclusive club that comprises fewer than 10 percent of players to ever step on a Major League field. Given that 23,656 players have reached the Majors, it's estimated fewer than 3,000 have reached the service-time mark.
Hedges has survived this long because of his elite defensive skill, and his humor in the clubhouse doesn't hurt either. He once heard Paul Goldschmidt say the best thing to do when in a slump is be a good teammate. Hedges has been exactly that for a long time.
But now he's hitting.
Yes, it's very early. But he also hit .250 in Spring Training, and .267 last September, when he had begun addressing some of his challenges with the club's new hitting coach Grant Fink.
Perhaps the most important shift is how Hedges allocates his training time. There are only so many hours in a day, especially for a catcher with extra responsibilities preparing game plans for pitchers.
"Minimizing the slow, the easy stuff, and training the hard stuff," Hedges said.
That meant less traditional hitting prep like on-field BP and no more flip drills.
It meant less practice of the variety when he knows what is coming. It meant more time facing the club's Trajekt hitting machine, new technology that mimics actual MLB pitchers' velocity, movement and arm action via a video screen synced to the machine's ball release. It splits out different pitch combinations randomly.
Hedges experimented with it last year but made it a focus to integrate it into his routine beginning this offseason when he spent four weeks in Cleveland working with Fink.
"You go off the Trajekt machine and you face a real pitcher throwing 98 mph. In order to have success off of that, you have to have a really good plan," Hedges said. "So being able to practice at game speed, I think, was probably the biggest thing. ... Being OK with failing -- it's not going to be sexy.
"You're gonna fail a lot against Trajekt because it's like facing a real pitcher. When you're taking (traditional) BP, you're trying to hit 10 barrels out of 10 pitches. Whereas if I can go 3-for-10 off Trajekt I feel like I'm the best hitter ever. So just learning how to reward myself for what success is, even if I don't have a good swing -- if I was committed to my plan and I got my swing off -- treating that as a win."
In addition to batting average, it's the underlying improvements -- statistics that stabilize in smaller samples -- that suggest something has changed.
Hedges strikeout rate entering Sunday sat at 18.5%, which would be the lowest of his career. He owns a career 27% strikeout rate, never finishing a season below 22%.
He's cut his whiff rate. His zone contact has jumped to 94 percent, an elite mark he's never approached. Among hitters with at least 180 plate appearances last year and 25 this year, his improvement in zone contact ranks sixth-best.
A natural reflex is to dismiss this as small-sample noise. But he showed similar gains in 30 spring plate appearances, and in the second half of last season, when he posted a 15.4% strikeout rate over 78 plate appearances -- cutting it in half from the first half.
Contact rate stabilizes after roughly 100 plate appearances, so perhaps this is real.
Moreover, after a career of elevated infield pop-up rates -- batted balls that essentially carry a .000 average -- he has not popped up once this season. He's eliminating easy outs.
Hedges' stance is a bit different this year -- more open, his bat and attack angle flatter -- but he downplayed physical changes.
"There's not a whole lot of swing stuff," Hedges said.
The other key is not physical, he says, rather, the mental game, which Fink helped change.
"When you are as smart as Austin Hedges, sometimes in the box you out-think yourself," Fink said. "One of the things we've talked about is focusing on what you are trying to execute. Don't try to think along with the game. ... He has a plan that he tells me before he goes to the box before every at-bat. His entire goal, and what he values success-wise, is his ability to execute that -- not if he got a hit."
In other words, don't try to out-think the opposing catcher-pitcher battery on every pitch. Process over outcomes.
"My brain can get a bit chaotic at times, I start thinking like a catcher in the box, and that's not doing myself any favors," Hedges said. "So, I just tried to really turn my brain off and simplify what I can do to beat this pitcher and only think about that. Grant Fink has done a really good job of holding me accountable to that simplicity. It's not easy, but it's not complicated.
"There's a plan before I get in the box. It might be a location, it might be a pitch type, it might be a shape. It truly depends on the pitcher and what I can handle. And all the thinking happens before I get in the box."
Other than trying to be more contact-oriented with two strikes -- he's hitting sixty points better (.179 vs. .119 career average) with two strikes -- he said there's no conscious trade-off of power for contact.
I asked Hedges why so much time behind the plate doesn't translate to elite plate discipline. After all, no one is closer to the strike zone than a catcher.
"When I'm catching, I call the pitch. I know what it's supposed to look like. I know where it's gonna go," Hedges explained. "I'm in a straight-on view, two eyes on the baseball, and I'm just catching it. Catching the ball is significantly easier than hitting it on a barrel. Just the different perspective of standing sideways, not knowing what's coming. The chance of a dude throwing the baseball at your face is real. Every hitter has to deal with that. ... These are really, really difficult things. The unknown is the difference. Catching, you know everything, you're in total control."
Hitting is the opposite of being in control. Hedges is perhaps learning to let go.
If Hedges' career-long slump ends -- and if Bo Naylor's promising underlying data begins producing better outcomes -- the Guardians could finally address one of the game's more glaring weaknesses in recent years.
Their catchers have combined to hit .186 over the last five seasons. It's the only position group in the Majors to sustain a sub-.200 batting average over such a stretch.
It's the fifth-worst such stretch of all time among catcher groups, rivaling the 1900s Brooklyn Superbas catchers who combined for the four worst five-year periods on record. Brooklyn produced a not-so-superb .173 combined average over the 1906-1910 seasons. Superbas catcher Bill Bergen owns the worst batting average of all time (.170), minimum 2,500 plate appearances.
It's been a historic, long-running issue. But maybe it's coming to an end. And should that happen, it began with a single motivation: Hedges never accepted he could not improve.
"I haven't stopped trying to be the best hitter I can be," Hedges said. "I have tried a lot of things. It hasn't been easy for me. I've had a little success and a lot of failure."
After all that searching perhaps a career long slump is being snapped.