Chris Taylor I thought I was doing the right thing this offseason.
Coming off some dismal, injury-plagued and frustratingly inconsistent campaigns, the team’s former super-utility man has tried to get back to basics this winter.
He tried to rediscover his old, powerful swing.
Seven years after the big change he made at the beginning of his career Dodger career — which turned the lightly touted outfield prospect into an everyday player, a 2021 All-Star and the recipient of a $60 million contract ahead of the 2022 season — Taylor attempted to reverse engineer a similar process this offseason.
He and the Dodgers’ coaches identified the traits that transformed his hitting profile years ago; Before his time, age and injuries led to a steady decline in production.
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Taylor spent his off-season focusing on the mental cues, technical sensations and mechanical principles that once made him a star, trying to re-synchronize the timing of his leg shot, the placement of his hands and the path the club would take in the swing.
“I wanted to trust that it would eventually work,” Taylor said recently.
Instead, in a dismal start to what has been the worst season of his career, the 33-year-old looks even more lost than ever.
A quarter of the way through the campaign, Taylor has been one of the worst hitters in the major leagues.
He is four-for-56, posting a .071 batting average that ranks last (by 14 points) among the 360 big leaguers with at least 50 plate appearances thus far. He has 28 strikeouts, fanning at a higher rate than all but two other MLB hitters. And despite appearing in just 25 of the Dodgers’ first 43 games, he racked up a negative 0.7 in Wins Above Replacement, a shockingly low mark for a veteran who was once considered a key cog in the Dodgers’ powerhouse lineup.
“He is in the middle and uncertain”, manager David Roberts he said. “I would like to think there are improvements in his work. I know the effort is there. So, you know, we’ll see. I’m going to keep trying to find opportunities to put him there.”
But when it comes to playing time, Taylor’s performance has left Roberts with little choice.
Taylor entered the year as a part-time player, starting just 12 of the team’s first 22 games, but in the last month he was relegated to the bench.
He has made just five appearances since April 20th and just one since May 1st. Entering Tuesday, he hadn’t appeared in a game in a week, making his most recent appearance on May 7 when he struck out two hits as a mid-game reliever.
Taylor’s next start probably won’t come until Thursday, Roberts said, with the Dodgers scheduled to face two more right-handed pitchers in their current series against the San Francisco Giants (all but three of Taylor’s starts have been against lefties this year ).
And as an outfielder Jason Heyward nears his return from a back injury, Taylor’s position with the Dodgers has become a point of speculation.
When Heyward returns — which could be next week when he begins a rehab assignment at AAA Oklahoma City on Tuesday — the Dodgers will have to clear a roster spot.
Second-year slumping center fielder James Outman he could be a more logical candidate, as the club could choose him for the minors, where he would have more regular playing time.
However, Outman’s poor numbers (he’s batting .150 with 35 strikeouts in 100 at-bats) are still markedly better than Taylor’s. And while Outman has continued to have semi-regular at-bats of late (in part because he’s a left-handed hitter), Taylor has now gone five games without one.
“He’s a hot and cold guy,” Roberts said of Taylor. “He’s a streaky hitter, he always has been.”
In fact, when Taylor reinvented his game in 2017, it came with potential side effects.
The swing change transformed him from a bench player into an unexpected power threat, hitting 78 home runs from 2017 to 2021. But it also forced him to abandon the mechanics he developed moving forward. He was a better player. But also prone to high strikeout totals and prolonged slumps, especially when his “high maintenance” swing, as Roberts likes to call it, got out of control.
“When you make a swing change, it usually feels really good when you first do it,” said Dodgers special assistant Chris Woodward, who has coached Taylor on and off since the player’s days in the Seattle Mariners’ farm system. said about his swing last year.
“But once everything becomes normal, your body and brain adapt,” Woodward added. “You get a little numb to the sensation.”
That dynamic has underscored Taylor’s struggles in recent years as he has aged and battled the effects of multiple injuries, most notably elbow surgery in November 2021, which he underwent just weeks before signing his four-year contract at worth $60 million with the Dodgers.
“The last few years, it hasn’t worked out so well,” said Taylor, who hit just .228 in 2022 and 2023 combined. “It’s been harder to sync everything.”
This year, that “fight” has turned into an all-out war, with Taylor’s off-season work backfiring in distressing ways.
Instead of returning to his old form, Taylor began to develop more “bad habits” as he grew older during the spring.
“There were times when it was good,” he said. “But the end result was that it was difficult for me to repeat and be consistent with it.”
Ever determined, Taylor pressed on, desperate for something to happen, for his declining results to finally change.
“He’s getting under balls,” hitting coach Aaron Bates said. “He has a good idea of what he wants to do and what he wants to feel. But I think sometimes he [struggles] making sure your body can get to those positions, get to those ‘feels’.”
Lately, Taylor has finally resigned himself to making more changes, looking for anything that can help him reduce strikeouts (his current K rate is over 41%), hit fastballs (he’s batting .067 against the pitch this year) and provide some production for a Dodgers team looking to compete in a World Series.
“It’s always a risk when you make a balance sheet change,” Taylor said. “And it just didn’t happen the same way. Sometimes it’s harder to come back [to your old swing]. And I just threw it on the ground.”
The Dodgers have a few potential options when it comes to Taylor’s roster spot.
They could always ask him to go down to the minors to work on his swing, as the Houston Astros recently did with veteran Jose Abreu (although since Taylor has more than five years of MLB service, he would have to consent to such a request). .
If they discover there is some physical ailment contributing to his problems, they could place him on the injured list and send him on rehab assignment, something the club did with Max Muncy when he was struggling to return from elbow surgery. off-season in 2022 (however, there has been no indication that Taylor’s issues are injury-related).
The nuclear option would be to cut Taylor outright and use up the nearly $30 million remaining on a contract that runs through the end of next season.
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The likelihood of this, however, still seems relatively small. The Dodgers don’t like giving up veteran players and accepting dead money. And there’s no indication that their patience with Taylor’s crisis has run so thin yet.
“CT has been working hard,” Roberts said. “It’s tough.”
Something may have to give at some point — whether it’s when Heyward returns, or when other inevitable roster difficulties emerge later in the year, or if Taylor’s league-worst batting average continues to last well into the summer.
For now, Roberts said Tuesday, Taylor is “certainly not forgotten.”
But unless their numbers increase, this faith will not last forever.
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This story originally appeared on Los Angeles Times.
