In the hours leading up to first pitch on Tuesday night at Oracle Park, Giants hitting coach Donnie Ecker was out on the field training with outfielder Mike Yastrzemski.
“The (hitting coaches) are so good at figuring out the things that keep us good and get us back on track when we’re not going the way that we want to,” Yastrzemski said. “We were working on my (bat) path all day and keep everything moving toward the middle of the field.”
With the Giants trailing 8-5 in the eighth inning against the Arizona Diamondbacks, Yastrzemski stepped to the plate with the bases loaded and two outs against right-hander Humberto Castellanos. After lining the first and fourth pitches of the at-bat foul down the right field line, Yastrzemski saw a changeup from Castellanos and hooked it into McCovey Cove.
His go-ahead grand slam barely stayed inside the foul pole, but Yastrzemski said he was able to keep the ball fair because of the way he trained pregame.
“That was the exact swing we worked on there,” Yastrzemski said. “Got a pitch that was middle-in and didn’t try to do too much with it. Didn’t try to yank it, just tried to stay through it and I just put a good swing on it.”
The Giants know Yastrzemski can be a tremendous asset to their lineup when he’s at his best, but for much of the 2021 season, the third-year outfielder has been searching for a more consistent swing. A pair of stints on the injured list and a couple of hard crashes into outfield walls have put a lot of stress on his body, but he’s been determined to find a rhythm.
The work he did an hour before any other teammate took the field on Tuesday with the Giants’ hitting coaches clearly paid off. Yastrzemski’s desire to continue improving is also emblematic of a larger pattern across baseball as players are constantly looking for ways to gain an edge, even when they’ve already found success.
“I think players are hungrier now for information than they ever have been,” Kapler said Wednesday. “They’re hungrier for feedback and cues and ways to be better than they ever have been. In the past, players have wanted it to be very simple and now they’re asking for more robust information, they’re asking for more high-intensity training and they’re asking for more challenging practice because it’s going to lead to better results on the field.”
Players want a challenge, but the Giants didn’t necessarily want the type of challenge they faced on Tuesday. After falling into a 7-0 hole after two innings, the Giants needed a strong collective effort to pull off their largest comeback since overcoming an 8-0 deficit in Cincinnati against the Reds on May 3, 2019.
Despite the team’s early woes, several Giants said they never felt as if they were out of Tuesday’s game.
“I think every single person in that dugout had the mindset we were going to come back and win that game,” Yastrzemski said. “That’s how we are. We’re willing to put in tough at-bats and hand it onto the next guy.”
Brandon Belt, who had three hits including a leadoff double that ignited the Giants’ four-run eighth inning rally, echoed that sentiment.
“The thing that was most fun was it was really a full team effort,” Belt said. “It took every single one of us to go out and grind our butts off to come out with this victory. We could almost sense it going through the game, we never really felt like we were out of it.”
The cause of the Giants’ comeback was a furious rally that featured contributions from nearly every player in the lineup, but the effect of a game such as Tuesday’s can be a critical building block for a club that’s already proven it is resilient.
When the Giants fall behind opponents in future games, players and coaches can point to their seven-run comeback as an example of what they’re capable of when they do get the lineup rolling.
