How a meeting with Torey Lovullo helped Diamondbacks' Josh Rojas break his slump

WASHINGTON — On the morning of the Arizona Diamondbacks’ series finale against the Atlanta Braves last week, Torey Lovullo asked Josh Rojas to come into his office. Wanted to talk to him. The Diamondbacks’ hitting coaches had spent the previous month working with Rojas on tweaks to his mechanics, trying to break him out of a miserable slump. Lovullo saw something else. Something mental.

By now, Lovullo knows the best version of Rojas is a player defined by his aggression. So the manager gave his third baseman a question: “What happened to that old two-strike bunt attitude you used to have?”

A year ago, Rojas’ willingness to break conventional wisdom and lay down bunts at any moment epitomized not just his aggression, but his intelligence — two tenets that helped make him a 3.2 WAR player. A few hours after his meeting with Lovullo, that was back. With the Braves’ infield playing deep, Rojas dropped down a bunt to the right side in a 2-2 count, beating it out with ease.

“It makes me look like the most unbelievable coach and that's what I went over and told him,” Lovullo said. “I said, ‘You just made your manager feel like a million bucks because you listened to him and executed and it worked.’ That's what it's all about for me.”

Rojas only played once in a weather-shortened series against the Nationals, but his past two games have now featured some of his best at-bats since April.

In the month before Rojas’ meeting with Lovullo, he hit .159 with a .480 OPS. After going 2 for 3 with a walk in the finale against the Braves, he went 2 for 4 with a sacrifice fly and another bunt single in his lone game against Washington.

“The talk with Torey, that actually really helped a lot,” Rojas said. “Because yeah, I was still getting put out there every day but you start to feel the pressure of the guys around you. You feel like you're not helping the team win and going up to the plate, it started to become, don't-make-a-mistake type of feel. Don't do anything to make yourself look bad. Don't make a mistake.

“Which is not how I play the game. It's not where my success comes from. My success comes from playing aggressive, doing stuff out of the box, out-thinking the other guy, doing things that teams are least expecting.”

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Of course, two good games do not a turnaround make. It would also be overly simplistic to reduce Rojas’ improved results to one meeting with Lovullo.

Early in the season, even as Rojas was hitting over .300, he felt that he was getting away with “some deficiencies” in his lower half. When he began slumping at the end of April, he worked to address those issues, which were causing his bat to come out of the strike zone too quickly.

These are the type of adjustments major league hitters are constantly making, working to perfect every motion of their swing. Typically, those tweaks take hold in a few days, going unnoticed outside the clubhouse. On the rare occasions where they don’t, they can send a player spiraling.

That’s what happened to Rojas. Nothing he tried felt right, only worsening his mindset at the plate.

“When you're trying to fix those mechanics but also compete at this level, it's a tough thing to do,” Rojas said. “When you step in the box at this level, you've gotta be 100% focused on what pitches you're gonna get, what the guy might be trying to do to get you out.”

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While Lovullo saw Rojas’ aggression come back in that game against the Braves, hitting coach Joe Mather saw his mechanical changes take hold on a line-drive single two innings earlier.

“We see it in his work in (batting practice) as well where he's using the whole field,” Mather said. “And the stuff he's saying, it's the same, it's all adding up to, okay, he's feeling it, he's about ready to take off.”

All of it has helped Rojas get to a place where he’s free of mental clutter. “I have a routine going right now that allows me to step in the box and not think about those things,” he said.

Even during the peak of his struggles, he stayed in the lineup all but once against right-handed starting pitchers. Emmanuel Rivera and Evan Longoria, the Diamondbacks’ other options at third base, are both riding hot streaks, but Lovullo has preferred to get them in the lineup by other means, at least against righties. Sometimes, that’s at designated hitter or first base. Other times, Rojas has played second to free up a spot at third.

That usage speaks to both Lovullo’s confidence in Rojas and the other things he has brought to the team — Gold Glove defense, crafty baserunning and an ability to work long at-bats. Still, it became impossible to ignore how his struggles were impacting the lineup, prompting Lovullo to move him from the leadoff spot to the ‘6’ hole.

Now, he might just be finding the necessary groove to move back up.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Josh Rojas finding groove for Arizona Diamondbacks