Twins’ Brooks Lee turns things around at plate — with a little help from dad
It was no secret Brooks Lee was, as he put it, “grinding.”
The night before, he had had a 30-minute phone call with his father — a collegiate baseball coach — in which he said he tried to get things off his chest rather than keep all of his frustrations bottled up inside.
At that point, Lee was hitting .167 with a .385 OPS. Nothing was coming easy, not at the plate and not defensively. When he stepped to the plate with the bases loaded in the eighth inning of a tied game on April 9, Lee quickly fell behind 0-2 in the count before working it full.
He then smacked a single past a diving second baseman and into right field. It looked, at the time, as if a weight had been lifted from him. And since that point, the shortstop hasn’t stopped hitting.
Heading into Friday night’s contest, Lee had driven in runs in each of his past seven games, dating back to April 9. He had just two RBIs in his first 10 games of the season. He also entered Friday’s game having hit three home runs — two from the right side of the plate, one from the left — in his last six games as he starts to flash his power, as well.
“Sometimes it takes one little thing that kind of nudges you over, whether it’s a home run, whether it’s a ground ball that you beat out, that just gives you that little bit of sigh of relief and I think we’re seeing that with Brooks,” manager Derek Shelton said. “Brooks can hit. I mean you don’t hit 16 home runs in the big leagues without being a good hitter, but I think we’re seeing that confidence really start to stem back.”
That hit, Lee said, had “emotional momentum,” for him.
But more than that, he credits his recent string of success to a change he made at the plate with his left-handed swing, adjusting his hand positioning, moving them back further. He said he had bat tilt that he felt resulted in him taking extra time getting the barrel to the ball, which he addressed.
“Just try to get the hands away from the midline a little bit, lower them and then get the bat away from my head,” Lee said. “I feel like those movements being smaller helped me see the ball a little bit longer and make better decisions.”
It was something Twins coaches had mentioned to him.
So did Larry Lee.
“I didn’t even ask for help and he was like, ‘Alright, this is probably what you need to start doing,’” Brooks said of his father. “So I was like ‘Alright.’ I tried it out and it worked. It usually does.”
Lefties keep coming
The Twins faced their 12th left-handed starter of the season on Friday when the Cincinnati Reds sent Brandon Williamson to the mound. Saturday, the Reds will throw Andrew Abbott , another southpaw. In contrast, they’ve only faced right-handed starters in eight games.
“It’s extremely strange, especially as left-handed that we are,” Shelton said. “I think the one thing that it has been helpful for is normally when you come out of spring training, especially if you’re doing platoons, those guys don’t get — like Austin Martin wouldn’t get this many at-bats, (Victor) Caratini wouldn’t have this many right-handed at-bats, Brooks wouldn’t. … It’s interesting there but it would be nice to get back into a normal flow. I think this is really uncharacteristic.”
Briefly
The Twins will send Taj Bradley (3-0, 1.25 ERA) to the mound on Saturday. The Reds will counter with Abbott (0-2, 5.85 ERA). The Twins have won all four of the games started by Bradley this season.
