Washington's CJ Abrams Is Learning to Walk Again

The young Nationals shortstop spent the winter committed to controlling the strike zone and is now becoming one of MLB’s most valuable hitters.

Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports

Washington Nationals shortstop CJ Abrams already has six doubles, four triples and seven home runs, but the loudest roar he received from his teammates in the first month of the season came on March 30, when he looked at a fastball just off the outside corner for ball 4—and for his third walk of the day. 

“Whoa!” shouted second baseman Luis García Jr. “Barry Bonds!”

Abrams understood his friends’ surprise: Only 10 qualified hitters walked less often than his 5.2% last year. This season he’s above average at 8.7%, and he’s also reduced his strikeout percentage from 19.2 to 17.3. The underlying numbers suggest he’s still swinging at too many balls, especially over the past week or two, but he’s also making contact with them, and the Nationals will take it: By wins above replacement, at 23 and in his second full season, Abrams has been the ninth most valuable hitter in the sport. 

Did he always know he was this good?

“For sure,” he says. “I just had to play my game.”

Well, actually, he had to change his game a bit. Abrams’s problem has long been that he’s such a talented hitter that he believes he can do damage on any pitch, no matter how close to the strike zone it is. 

“Whenever I’m seeing it and I’m swinging it well, I kind of expand my zone,” he says. “I feel like I’m seeing the ball better, so everything looks good, but maybe it isn’t. I need to get back to getting my pitch.”

This is new vocabulary for a young man who never gave much thought to his swing decisions before he debuted in the majors at 21. Last July, manager Davey Martinez approached his young star, the jewel of the return for his previous young star, outfielder Juan Soto, who’d been traded to the San Diego Padres a year earlier. Abrams was hitting .233 and had walked 11 times against 66 strikeouts in 289 plate appearances. 

“You’re going to lead off,” Martinez said. “But it’s up to you. If you can handle it, great. I think you can, but you’ve gotta make it yours.”

“And obviously he ran with it,” he says now.

Those results didn’t come immediately. Abrams was only slightly better the rest of the year, but he committed himself this winter to controlling the strike zone. He has taken two paths toward that goal, one focusing on his approach and one on his mechanics.

The approach method is fairly simple: The Nationals have instructed their batting practice pitchers to try to get Abrams to chase pitches outside the zone for the first two rounds, then serve up meatballs for the last two, so he can see the difference. 

“You gotta simplify it,” Abrams says. “The game’s already hard.”

And indeed, he spent the winter working on the harder part. His agency, Roc Nation, put him in touch with Tyler Krieger, who played six years in the Cleveland and Atlanta organizations, topping out at Triple A, before retiring in 2022 to open a training facility in Atlanta. Abrams trained at Maven Baseball Lab every day this winter, focusing on getting Abrams into a good position to hit. 

“You want to work on your mechanics, and there’s a time to work on your game plan,” Krieger says. “I’m a firm believer in having a good game plan. I just think that it’s like showing up to a gunfight with a squirt gun. You’ve gotta have good mechanics in order to have success. You can have the best game plan in the world, but if you’re not in the right spot to hit, it’s going to be hard at seven o’clock.” 

So they attacked Abrams’s balance first; he had a tendency to jump onto his front leg, which wasted some of the power he could be generating with his back leg. Then they worked on his bat path. 

“He would flatten and pull the bat more across his body,” Krieger says. “His bat would kind of fall more behind himself and get trapped behind, where then he had to start to rotate really hard and throw the bat more out and around his hands. He wasn’t able to really pull his hands toward the pitcher.” They did one-hand drills, “learning how to let the bat release itself rather than have the barrel go in front of his hands,” Krieger says. “That’s been big for his adjustability, being able to have the barrel come at the last second, not be the thing that leads his swing.”

Essentially Abrams found more time, which he has used to make better choices.

“When you have good mechanics, in my opinion, it allows you to make decisions later, and probably more accurate decisions,” Krieger says. “So [mechanics and approach] go hand in hand.”

Attitude helps, too. Martinez sees a much more comfortable Abrams this year. The kid who once looked unsure of his role recently now napped in the clubhouse 45 minutes before a game while García snapped photos. 

“Gets his uniform on, gets ready, makes a play in the field,” says left fielder Jesse Winker. “Then, first pitch of the game, homers.” 

Abrams just smiles. That was a pretty good game. Almost as good as the game he walked three times.