BRADENTON, Fla. -- Kevin Newman’s 2020 season ended the way no player wants it to: On the dirt and in pain.
On Sept. 19, an erratic 97 mph fastball from Genesis Cabrera struck him in the left knee, ending his season. Nothing broke, but he sustained a contusion to the peroneal nerve, and he said he lost some feeling down his leg for about a month and a half.
It was a rotten way to end a rotten year.
“Just kinda flushing it, honestly,” Newman said of that year over a Zoom call. “As a whole, the year didn’t go the way I wanted it to, the way a lot of guys wanted it to. Just putting it behind us.”
There’s not much more Newman can do other than flush it. The year prior, as a rookie, he hit .308 with a dozen homers and an .800 OPS, one of the best offensive seasons a Pirates shortstop has enjoyed in decades. In 2020, his average dropped to .224, he went deep only once and his OPS fell to .556.
If there was anyone who knew what he was going through, it was Bryan Reynolds. After finishing fourth in the National League rookie of the year voting in 2019, he batted just .189 with a .632 OPS the following year.
Sticking with the water metaphor, Reynolds said last year is now “water under the bridge.”
“I'm not just going to pretend like it didn't happen,” Reynolds said. “I thought about it, I looked at some things in my swing… So it's not completely gone, but it's just water under the bridge at this point, and 2021 is a new year."
There are a multitude of things to chalk up last year to. The drastically shortened sample size, which had players pressing to try to dig their way out of early slumps. The pause in the season was jarring, and players couldn’t prepare amid a pandemic the same way they could in a regular offseason. In-game video was barred. Routines were disrupted. Even when the season got started, the schedule was paused, without warning, several times.
So dare we chalk up any of last year for Reynolds and Newman to a sophomore slump? After all, those are real, right?
“I don't know if it's a real thing,” Derek Shelton responded. “Some guys thrive in the second year because they have information,” Shelton said. “Some guys struggle because guys adjust. I honestly think if there is any variation of the sophomore slump, you cannot use it [for] a 60-game season.”
Real or not -- and old baseball adages would suggest the former -- there’s no denying the two struggled in 2020. They were far from the only Pirates to do so, and the challenges of the season caused plenty of players to have down years. But their slumps were, like everything else in 2020, unprecedented.
Since the start of the live ball era in 1920, 62 Pirates rookies have recorded at least 400 plate appearances in a season. That includes Reynolds and Newman. Going by OPS+, which takes a player’s slash line and puts it on a scale where 100 is average compared to how the rest of the league hit that year, they had the two biggest second-year dropoffs over the last 100 years of Pirates baseball:
Bryan Reynolds 2019-20: 58 point drop (130 to 72)
Kevin Newman 2019-20: 56 point drop (110 to 54)
Gene Freese 1955-56: 40 point drop (95 to 55)
Johnny Rizzo 1938-39: 37 point drop (140 to 103)
Gus Suhr 1930-31: 32 point drop (106 to 74)
Part of that was because Reynolds and Newman had great rookie years. Their ceiling was higher, giving them more room to fall off. As the Pirates endured the worst record in baseball last year, not having those two bats play to their potential certainly cost the team wins.
And while they’re both putting 2020 behind them, they’re going into 2021 with different standings within the organization. Reynolds is guaranteed to stay in the starting lineup, with the only question being whether he will set up in center or left field. Newman is fighting for the shortstop job with Cole Tucker and Erik Gonzalez. It’s been a competition the Pirates have been very open about over the last few months, and Shelton said Saturday there is no frontrunner for the job right now.
This offseason, Newman worked on being more direct and short to the ball, feeling his swing got too long last year. Defensively, his focus was on his first step.
“Personally, I’ve felt a difference in my first step and my range,” Newman said. “That’s obviously a really good feeling when you go and really work hard on something like that to get out there and feel a difference. That’s been great.”
It’s hard to undersell the importance of defense in that shortstop competition. It’s a strength for Gonzalez and Tucker, but Newman struggled with the glove as well in 2020. He made eight errors -- five at shortstop and three at second base -- and had -3 defensive runs saved at shortstop.
It was a microcosm of the Pirates’ defense last year. Their shifts were effective in that they usually had a fielder in the right spot to field a ground ball, but a high amount of errors negated the analytical advantage.
“Yeah, we’re gonna change that,” Newman said.
For Newman, the way to change that starts at the first step.
“The routine play is important for him,” Shelton said. “That's something we've talked about — minimizing errors and first-step efficiency. I know he did a lot of work on that this offseason and I give him credit because we challenged him on it when he left [last year].”
Some of that comes from the read off the bat. Some of it is anticipation, setup, positioning.
“We're working through all those things, trying to make sure that we maximize not only Kevin's ability on that, but everyone's ability,” Shelton said. “Ten years ago, we couldn't gauge it. We called it what’s your read or your break. That's why we're doing some new drills for that with our entire group.”
TERRY RODGERS / PIRATES
Bryan Reynolds prepares for batting practice at Pirate City.
For Reynolds, it’s hard to understate how out of character his 2020 season was. Since starting at Vanderbilt at 19, he had hit at least .300 at every stop in his rise to the majors. College, summer ball, the minors. He raked everywhere.
So to bat below the Mendoza line was uncharted territory.
"My timing was just way off,” Reynolds said, reflecting on the year. “Wasn't getting started early enough. Wasn't getting in position soon enough so I was rushed and not seeing the ball well.”
When asked about Reynolds’ troubles at the plate last season, Shelton usually responded that it was a timing issue. It’s a problem that’s easy to identify. Fixing it, however...
“That’s honestly the million dollar question,” Shelton said. “That’s not just a question for Bryan Reynolds… There’s no magical fix to it. When your timing gets thrown off, it throws off everything else that happens in your swing.”
Towards the end of the year, Reynolds identified some things he wanted to work on this offseason to rebound. He didn’t jump right into it, though, taking some time off to unplug, like normal.
“I took probably three weeks, maybe a month, just to kind of reset and forget so that I can step in a cage and hit athletically how my body wants to swing,” Reynolds said.
Watching him take live batting practice in Pirate City, it looked like vintage 2019 Reynolds, spraying line drives all over the field and driving balls to his pull side.
The Pirates are going to need him to regain that rookie form, not just for 2021, but the future. The team is in the very early stages of a rebuild, and while the farm system is on the rise with some high quality prospects, it will be a couple years before they are in the majors. Reynolds should still be around by then.
“We’ve got a good, young group here,” Reynolds said. “Everybody saw what Ke’Bryan [Hayes] can do. He’s going to be big for us. We’ve got young pitchers and all the young position players and up and down in our bullpen... I think we have a good group, a good core. As I’ve been saying this whole time, we’re going to go out there and we’re not going to roll over. We’re going to fight, fight and have a good ’21.”
The best way to have a good 2021 season, or at the very least prevent the 100+ losses many prognosticators are predicting, would be for Reynolds and Newman to bounce back. It would also speed up the rebuild if the team can count on a couple more quality hitters near the top of the lineup.
They’re expecting that to happen.
"I'm confident that we will be the players we are,” Reynolds said. “You can't judge anyone on 2020, a 60-game season. We'll go out there and we'll have a full season and we'll hit how we hit."