DENVER -- Many baseball folks filled downtime with binge-watching during baseball’s shutdown. Rockies utility man Chris Owings tried. He gave hitting coach Dave Magadan viewing recommendations.
“I told ‘Mags’ about a show we were watching,” Owings said. “He finished it in a week or two. I still have yet to finish that series.”
Owings’ four months between the halt of Spring Training and now have been busy and rewarding. The latest reward was being informed Friday that, after signing a Minor League contract with the Rockies in December, he has made the Opening Day roster.
Owings and Garrett Hampson give manager Bud Black experienced right-handed-hitting options as infield/outfield utility men (important for this 60-game regular season) or for occasional starts at second base, where top prospect Brendan Rodgers also plays.
Owings’ career hit a wall in 2017, when, while playing for the D-backs, he sustained a fractured right middle finger that required two surgeries, one in July and another in November. He hit .206 for Arizona in ’18, and a combined .139 for Kansas City and Boston last year. But this spring, he was on his way to making the Rockies based on his strong Cactus League performance (.360/.429/.560 in 10 games).
Then, things went crazy, in conventional and in 2020 kinds of ways.
Owings left camp for Williamsburg, Va., for the March 7 birth of the first child for him and his wife, Brittany -- a daughter, Olivia.
“When I got back on the flight to Arizona is when the NBA season got shut down,” Owings said. “The next day, we got rained out, and then we got shut down, too.”
So, it was back home, where Owings' time was in demand.
“That describes my way right there -- being a dad and just working on whatever I needed to work on that day,” Owings said. “I’ll tell you what, we were busy during quarantine, that’s for sure.
“She keeps us busy for sure, but it’s also been a huge blessing to get that three months at home and watch her grow, and spend time with my wife.”
The baseball part took some organizing.
Owings often does offseason hitting at the College of William and Mary, but the field was closed there. A friend who had played pro ball arranged for him to hit at a local high school, where he put the finishing touches on long-needed swing corrections. His second surgery in ’17 kept him off the field until Spring Training 2018.
“I tried to make some swing changes in Spring Training,” Owings said. “I don’t know if it was the strength of the hand or what, but I kind of got into bad habits, and that carried on through ’18. In ’19, I tried to make some swing changes, and you see what my numbers were from last year.”
It turns out Magadan, who was the D-backs’ hitting coach for part of Owings’ time there, was hoping to help Owings return to form.
Between offseason work with Miami-based hitting coach Lorenzo Garmendia and reconnecting with Magadan, Owings returned to some principles that made him an extra-base threat with the D-backs, when he had 24 or more doubles each season from 2015-17, and had 11 triples in 119 games in '16.
Owings said he had to break a habit of opening his hips too quickly. Magadan noted that Owings was missing high fastballs that he was driving in the past, and being cognizant to that left him susceptible to sliders off the plate outside.
Improvement showed this spring on a March 3 homer off Cubs left-hander CD Pelham, which came on a 93-mph, first-pitch fastball, but his front hip did not spin quickly toward third base and the ball flew opposite gap.
“It’s just getting back to having length in his swing through the baseball, where he has more margin of error,” Magadan said. “When he’s out front, he still has a chance to drive the ball.”
Owings doubled twice in Friday night’s intrasquad game, pulling the first and hitting the second the opposite way. He also got a bunt down while the Rockies practiced some extra innings, which this year begin with an automatic runner at second base.
“He plays the right way, he’s built the right way and he has some good swings,” Black said. “He’s got all-fields pop. There’s right-center-field power. There’s pull power. He can play the little game.
“He’s got a strong arm. He can steal a base. He can win a game with his glove. He can win a game with his bat. I suspect he’s going to be a contributor.”