Cody Bellinger is standing at his locker at Yankee Stadium on Wednesday afternoon, the day after his manager made the relatively rare admission that his team’s offense was pressing.
Aaron Boone is not one to critique players at a postgame news conference, but he knows his guys, and he knows that their at-bats during Tuesday’s 4-0 loss to the Los Angeles Angels — the team’s third consecutive shutout — were beneath their capabilities.
That game extended the Yankees’ scoreless streak to 29 innings (it hit 30 before Jazz Chisholm Jr.’s home run in the second inning Wednesday).
“Pressing” is a tricky concept. Even for non-athletes who watch baseball every day, it is difficult to diagnose. The best evidence we can usually find of it is when players chase pitches out of the strike zone. But there has to be more to it.
Bellinger is a thoughtful and seasoned hitter, so it seems worth asking him: What is pressing, anyway? What happens to a hitter when he is doing it, and how does he know?
Bellinger thinks for a beat, then says, “The crazy thing about this game is that there’s so many variables. Your swing is feeling bad that day. The pitcher is making pitches on you. Did you swing at the wrong pitch — or the right pitch, and then miss it?
“That’s why it’s hard to explain these things, why you’re having success and why you’re failing. Sometimes I go back [over a game and think], I felt good, why didn’t I get any hits? Well, I only got one pitch in the middle of the plate and I missed it and I missed it.”
Bellinger stops to shake his head.
“Like, it’s insane,” he continues. “You did everything right and hit it right at them, right? There are just the variables in this game.”
“When,” I ask, “Do you know when you’re specifically pressing or trying to do too much, versus just dealing with one of those variables?”
“In the game, you don’t know,” Bellinger says. “In the moment, you don’t know. And then, maybe after a few games, you’re like, ‘Okay, I’m doing too much. Let me calm down. Let me go back to the basics. Let me figure out, what am I gonna do today to help the team win?’ Sometimes you have to go back home and reflect.”
“When it’s all happening at game speed, you don’t have time to reflect on it?”
“Yeah,” Bellinger says. “You’re in the competition. It’s more like you say to yourself later, ‘Yeah, I was probably getting out of myself a little bit just trying to do too much. My head’s at first base. I’m trying to hit the ball into the fourth deck, when, in reality, I don’t need to do that.”
“So it’s swinging too hard, trying to pull too much, things like that?”
“Potentially,” Bellinger says. “The crazy part is that it could also be mechanical issues. Am I late, you know what I mean? That’s why the game is amazing, though, too. There’s not another game like it, right?”
It can also be luck. We talk about a few well-hit balls in Boston that could have changed the entire narrative.
“You go back to the Boston series,” Bellinger says. “[Paul] Goldschmidt hit a ball that was foul by an inch, right? D.J. [LeMahieu] ’s ball was foul by an inch. He hit a 110 mile-per-hour ground balls — two of them — and they didn’t find holes.”
We haven’t even mentioned the weather yet. I note that the Yankees lost at least two or three home runs to the conditions during the first two games of the Angels series. Austin Wells hit one at 101 mph to right field in the seventh inning Tuesday. On a hot summer night, wouldn’t that ball have gone over the wall?
“That’s right,” Bellinger says. “The wind’s been blowing in, it’s a little misty, all that.”
He pauses again. “It’s a weird game, right?” he says. “It’s the craziest sport of all — for sure. Right?”
While we have this conversation, Bellinger is carrying a .125 batting average over his past seven games. A few hours later, he blasts his tenth homer of the season over the right field wall.
Go figure.
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