Is this version of Cody Bellinger real?
LOS ANGELES — A friend, a fellow ball writer, texted, “Is this version of Bellinger real?”
The return: “Was sorta hoping you’d tell me.”
Shrug guy.
Maybe. Something like it, anyway.
Cody Bellinger gets to decide, him and the pitchers he knocks off nightly, him and the work he puts in from here, him and the choices he makes, him and the folly that is guessing what’s next for any of them.
This is, after all, the same Cody Bellinger who a year ago seemed hardly able to string three reasonable at-bats together, who for the first two years of his major league life sprinkled in a walk for every two-plus strikeouts, who for the past two months has walked more than he has struck out, who appears to have blossomed at 23, long before most, after he blossomed at 21. We have, after all, seen parts of this Bellinger before, if not all of this Bellinger before, and it is possible this is what a gifted hitter and athlete looks like on the other side of his first 1,200 big-league plate appearances. That is, better. More thoughtful. And willing to change, if that’s what it’s going to take.
At a time when strikeouts are the price of doing the business of baseball, especially if power comes along with it — in fact, honored as long as power comes with it — Bellinger is managing the line that is power and contact. He’s matched the back-leg oomph with the slider-down-and-in sensitivities, the stand-up vulnerability with the strike-zone management, and this is either a temporary (if 220-some of anything is temporary) blessing or a ticket to unfathomable riches, and the best answer is it’s real enough today.
The particulars of why this and why now would seem to lie in his handling of the pitch -- typically a slider from a right-hander -- down and in, a hail of such pitches having had their way with him in the past. He seems to see those coming anymore, and has devised a way to get to the next pitch and then the next, and pretty soon that pitch isn’t going to be as perfect, as the game doesn’t do a lot of perfect. He’s batting .294 with two strikes against him, nearly 100 points higher than last season. Across 53 games Bellinger has 20 home runs and is batting .382 and slugging .770, and even in a recent mild cooling (.250 over eight games), he’s still walking more than he’s striking out. He’s still swinging hard. He’s still hitting balls hard. He’s still dealing expertly with the down-and-in devil.
“Am I?” he said with a grin.
He’s funny when it comes to autopsying a swing gone wrong, immortalizing a swing gone right, the sort of daily give and take that comes with being the latest greatest player in the game. The runs and the dead spots are enough, probably, when they are on their own, held just between him and them. So he doesn’t offer much. Maybe he thought this was where it was headed all along, to a place where he could be at least as productive as anyone else and more productive than most, to where he didn’t simply play a game but could run it, could even spin it on his finger some nights.
Maybe, first, he had to earn it.
“I mean, you love the game and you hate the game,” he said Wednesday evening. “Then you understand the game owes you nothing and no one’s going to feel bad for you. So you try to snap it back into reality and go out there and play and perform.
“That’s exactly what the game is. It’s probably the most humbling sport in the whole world. Nobody’s gonna feel bad for you, though. So, you just gotta go out there and play.”
There was an at-bat, just a couple days back. New York Mets starter Jacob deGrom was the pitcher. The Los Angeles Dodgers had runners at first and third. There was one out. Bellinger was the batter. The count was one ball, two strikes, the at-bat having gotten there mostly with fastballs on the outer half, three of them fouled off. The fifth pitch arrived.
“Changeup,” Bellinger said.
deGrom shook his head.
“Fastball,” he said.
Middle away, according to a website that tracks such things.
“In,” deGrom said.
A good pitch.
“Yeah,” deGrom said. “That’s where I wanted it.”
Bellinger spun out of the batter’s box in a fit of frustration. The ball hung in the air harmlessly over the right side of the infield. He raised his bat two-handed over his head, menacing the ground in front of him.
“I honestly didn’t pay much attention to it,” deGrom said.
Bellinger drew back, opting against sacrificing a perfectly good bat. He trudged toward first base, dutifully. The pitch was there for the taking.
“I could have,” he said. “I should have.”
And this is the part about being real or not. Sometimes a pitcher throws the exact pitch he wants to throw. And sometimes it is the exact pitch the batter expects to hit. The rest is where the ball lands, who’s cornered whom, and where all that leads for next time. Two innings earlier, Bellinger had homered against deGrom, this on a pitch deGrom absolutely hated.
It’s an imperfect process in a mercurial game, where one man’s best is another’s opportunity, where his worst is measured in hundreds of feet, and the result is a 23-year-old with superior skills comes to find a way to own it more often than not. So, this version of Cody Bellinger? Is it real? It’s the only one he’s got.
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