Dodgers: Max Muncy Chooses Success Over Comfort or Personal Preferences

Back in late July, when Max Muncy's season was looking as hopeless as it could be, he and the Dodgers' hitting staff, led by hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc, had an epiphany in Colorado.

As Bill Plunkett writes in the Orange County Register, being in Colorado got everyone thinking about former Rockies star Nolan Arenado, who does something during the load portion of his swing that not many players do: He actually takes a small step backwards with his back foot.

Muncy, RVS, and the rest of the hitting staff had been trying all season to find a fix for Muncy's mechanical issues. They knew what the issues were, but every fix they found in the batting cage would go away when he got into a game situation.

“My shoulders were too uphill and my elbow didn’t want to get to the correct slot just because of the injury. It wanted to work in a certain direction that was not good for my swing,” he said. “It was just working too much underneath the baseball. That was causing my shoulders to be too uphill at the point of attack. We knew that was the problem and for a while in the cage we were doing drills to try and fix that. In the cage, it was going fine. Then as soon as I got into a game, it would revert back.

“Every time I got into the batter’s box, my body went back to what felt easy and comfortable. And that wasn’t what was correct.”

So, sitting there in Colorado and thinking about Arenado, they decided to try Arenado's step-back routine. As Muncy says, they didn't expect much.

“I took like three or five swings and the hitting coaches were like, ‘Wait a minute – this might actually work,’” Muncy recalled. “It started out as almost a joke but then, ‘Your body is in the perfect position every time and you’re not even thinking about it.’ The fact that I didn’t have to think about it gave us hope that when I took it into the game – because that’s the hardest part. When you get into the batter’s box, if you’re having to think about anything, then you’re already defeated. You have to have a free mind in the batter’s box. You can’t be thinking about mechanics.”

And in actual games? It worked there, too, so Muncy kept doing it. The results have been nothing short of mind-blowing. After posting a .609 OPS the first four months of the season, Muncy's OPS over the past seven weeks is .915, and he has hit 11 of his 20 homers in those 39 games. In short, he is Max Muncy again, the guy who hit 118 homers in his first 480 games in Los Angeles.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about all of this is that Muncy doesn't like it. He missed a few games after a cortisone shot in his knee to help some pain caused by the step-back. He's still not comfortable doing it.

But it works, so he continues to do it.

"We’re still at that point where I would like to get rid of it because I don’t like doing it. But why would I get rid of it when it’s working right now? ...

"It’s not a long-term plan. But at the same time, if it keeps working, why wouldn’t it be a long-term plan?"

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