SURPRISE, Ariz. -- After a season of struggles with his swing and with his health, Michael Massey turned into a bit of a physicist this offseason as he aimed to rework his swing.
As Massey fully let his left ankle, right hand and back -- all injuries he sustained last year -- heal, he hit the books, studied articles online, talked with players who have experience with swing changes and even met with a former pilot who helped him understand the physics behind the way his bat moves.
“I thought that was interesting because it takes out the bias of someone who’s been in the game for a long time,” Massey said. “There’s really no denying it: How the object moves through space is how the object moves through space. Trying to learn that and then use my baseball experience to interpret it is what I tried to do.”
This is a crucial year for Massey, who went through his first offseason of arbitration eligibility and agreed to a $1.5 million deal with the Royals. That salary is going to continue to increase through the arb system, and the club will begin making decisions on how Massey fits on the roster.
He’s shown a willingness to maximize his versatility by learning the outfield, with manager Matt Quatraro saying several times this week that Massey looks like a “natural” in left field. The plan for 2026 is to have Massey bounce around from second base to left field, and maybe even some right field. More reps this spring have only made Massey more secure, and when he talks about his goals in the outfield, he brings up the story of Alex Gordon’s journey to learn the outfield with longtime coach Rusty Kuntz in 2010, which then turned into eight Gold Gloves and two Platinum Gloves.
“There’s the story of him and Rusty in Triple-A, and he tells Rusty, ‘Hey man, I don’t want to be a left fielder. I want to be a Gold Glover,’” Massey said. “That’s something I really want to work on, not just being a guy who can play second and left but being a guy who can win a Gold Glove in second and left. Being an asset anyway I can.”
For that to happen, Massey has to be playing. And for him to play, he has to hit. Even with the injuries in 2025, Massey struggled with his swing when he was on the field, hitting .244 with a career-low .268 on-base percentage, .313 slugging percentage and just three home runs in 77 games.
Massey knew changes needed to be made this offseason, so he tried to read and learn as much as he could about his swing and the physics behind it.
“Nothing is right, nothing is wrong: Everything is on the table,” Massey said. “Look at it from an objective view, and with the experience I’ve had in my career up to this point, let’s put the pieces back together.”
At its core, Massey’s focus was on the forces applied in a swing, both with his body and his bat, and how his bat needs to move to contact the ball consistently. In conversations with the pilot, Massey related the physics of flying a plane in a crosswind to swinging a bat through the zone. Massey first wanted the science behind all of it, and then he leaned on his own experience to apply it to his swing and in the cage.
“As nerdy as it sounds, physics is part of it,” Massey said. “That’s really all I tried to get into. It’s why I got out of the baseball world. I don’t want feels. I want what’s real, and I’ll find the feel based on my experience.”
There is a lot that Massey learned and is now applying, but the principle of his work is not unlike what you hear from other hitters and coaches: Get the bat in the zone, get on plane with the pitch and give yourself a bigger room for error as the pitch is being delivered.
Massey is embracing the entire thought process behind the mechanics that make all of that happen because that’s the way his mind works.
“I’m certainly more of an analyzer,” Massey said. “I’ve always been trying to push that away, and this year I’ve just kind of accepted that it’s the way my brain works. It’s the way I’ve done it for a long time. And just buy into it.”
Massey isn’t naive about all of this, either. He can have a perfect swing and still not hit the ball -- that’s the beauty of the game, of facing very tough pitching and of needing a good approach at the plate. But he’s hoping a new understanding of his mechanics will make it easier when he does step in the box.
“There’s other stuff that goes into hitting,” Massey said. “But mechanics are, to me, one of the things you can control. If you’re not going to hit, it shouldn’t be because of your mechanics.”