One day during the 2011 season, Josh Donaldson’s frustration over a rough stretch at the plate with the Sacramento River Cats, triple-A affiliate of the Oakland Athletics, boiled over, and he decided to try something different. When players struggle for an extended period, hitting coaches often suggest a change, maybe minor, perhaps more significant, as a way to get comfortable again in the batter’s box. This time, Donaldson needed no encouragement.
“He was like, ‘To heck with it, I’m going to hit like Gary Sheffield,’” recalls Todd Steverson, Sacramento’s hitting coach at the time who’s now with the Chicago White Sox. “I’m like, ‘What are you doing? That ain’t it!’ But he’d go up there and athletically, he’d do it. He’d wiggle, wiggle, wiggle, he’d do a lot of stuff. I’d be like, ‘Come on, man. Come on.’ You want guys to do something different, but understand why they’re doing something different.”
Eventually, Donaldson did come to understand why, a process that was as much about learning how to effectively channel the searing competitiveness that makes him one of baseball’s most compelling players to watch, as it was about learning the ins and outs of his swing.
Make no mistake, the 29-year-old is among the most analytical players in the game, approaching hitting the way one might prepare for the LSAT. But first he needed to find some balance on the field — Steverson admiringly says he plays like someone who wants to rip his opponents’ throats out — in order to apply his studies.
“He was always a high-strung kind of guy,” says Steverson. “You like that, but it is necessary to learn how to deal with the effort level that comes with that, you know what I mean? We went back and forth him and I in terms of how to rein that in, how to control his aggressiveness. There were times he’d get so mad he’d try to do too much.”
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Josh Donaldson returns to Oakland for the first time since his surprise off-season trade to the Toronto Blue Jays on Tuesday night, taking the field again at the dumpy stadium where he blossomed into the perennial MVP candidate he is today, and where in 2012, he stopped trying to do too much.
He had a stint with the Athletics in 2010 that didn’t go so hot, didn’t see the majors in 2011 and was up and down in ’12 before he was promoted on Aug. 14, never to see the minors again after slashing .335/.402/.598 in 51 triple-A games. With the help of coaches like Steverson and several others in the Oakland system, plus the likes of veteran outfielder Jonny Gomes, a key influencer, Donaldson began to learn how he needed to play.
“When I was younger in baseball, you’d waste energy on different things, whether it was being negative about something or allowing frustration to get the better of you to where it consumes you versus forgetting that and harnessing it and focusing it on something positive,” he says. “You hear all the time that there are guys in the minor leagues who are just as talented as guys in the big leagues but ultimately it comes down to your mentality and how you’re able to deal with frustration, negativity and really, failure. The guys who can’t deal with failure are the guys who don’t make it to the big leagues or stay in the big leagues.”
Pivotal in that process was Donaldson also learning the ins and outs of his swing, something private hitting instructor Bobby Tewksbary, who handled the pitching duties during this year’s home run derby, helped break down for him.
That time Donaldson said he planned to hit like Sheffield? Turns out it may not have been such a terrible idea, after all.
“I’m a huge believer in emulation, that a right way to swing has been shown to us throughout the history of the game,” says Tewksbary. “If you’re trying to emulate a good hitter, an all-time great hitter, there are good things there. You try to feel what they’re doing. Every hitter is an individual, and they need to find the style that fits their swing, their personality, their rhythm and their timing.”
In Donaldson’s case, the style that fit him was the big leg kick as a timing mechanism to start his swing, combined with the dropping of his hands to help set his load. As he worked his way up the A’s system, he did a variety of different things with his front foot — a tap, a double-tap, a tap-step — all while his good swing remained relatively static. Much like teammate Jose Bautista, someone he studied closely at the time, learning how to get the front foot down with the kick pulled the entire package together.
“He’s creating more depth now and getting inside the ball better so he’s able to create more drive to all fields, which theoretically increases power with more average when you do it right,” says Tewksbary. “And he’s doing it, he’s living it.”
More importantly, he doesn’t need to copy somebody else to try and find success at the dish.
“Honestly, and I think this is what a lot of people do, you’re searching for a quick fix that’s going to get help you get hits that day,” Donaldson says of the time he copied Sheffield. “The difference from then to now is then I didn’t have a great understanding of my swing and now I know my swing better than anybody. I understand the adjustments I have to make, where before I was hoping to get into something that works.
“If I was to tell you to go do a math test tomorrow, and you never did any homework or looked at your study guide or your equations that you have to plug numbers into, you’re probably not going to do well on the test. I feel like that’s how a lot of players go about hitting — they’re just really gifted and they haven’t looked at their swing as a math test, or a history test. I need to know my swing better than anybody so when I do scuffle I know exactly where to go in order to get me back on the right track.”
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The Chicago Cubs made Josh Donaldson the 48th overall pick in the 2007 draft out of Auburn, where he caught and played third base for the Tigers. Roughly a year later, he was traded to the Athletics along with right-hander Sean Gallagher and outfielders Eric Patterson and Matt Murton for Victoria fireballer Rich Harden and fellow right-hander Chad Gaudin.
Donaldson recalls Athletics GM Billy Beane saying he probably would have made the trade without him, had push come to shove. Basically, nothing was expected of him.
“They called me John Donaldson on ESPN, you know?” Donaldson recalls. “The Cubs fans didn’t know who I was. The only reason they know who I am now is because of what I’ve turned out to be. If I would have washed out three years ago, no one would even have remembered — they would have thought I was John Donaldson.”
Nobody’s making that mistake now, and it’s not just because of the gaudy numbers. Few players compete with the type of relentlessness Donaldson does — a great example was his dive into the Tropicana Field stands last month as Marco Estrada was bidding for a perfect game — and that’s a big part of his success. The intensity that at times could be a liability is now a key asset.
“If you ask anyone I’ve played against I think they know I’m willing to do whatever it takes to win the game,” says Donaldson. “If you look at me, and this isn’t some sob story, but I’m very average, six-foot, 210 pounds, I’m not the biggest guy out there, I’m not the fastest guy out there, but at the end of the day, I feel like I can focus and the competitive nature that I’ve always had, I’ve been able to harness it to focus on not only how I can help my team win, but also how my teammates can help us win.”
That element of his game, his leadership, was a commodity the Blue Jays sought nearly as much as his production. Rarely is Donaldson not surrounded by teammates in the clubhouse, chatting about different pitchers, different swing paths, different approaches.
As manager John Gibbons often notes with approval, he’s all baseball.
In that sense, he was moulded to some degree by the environment around him in Oakland, acclimating to all the demands put on him once he emerged as a star. Former teammates Gomes and Coco Crisp and coaches Mike Gallego, Ty Waller, Curt Young and Chip Hale are among those he credits.
“There were a lot of things kind of overnight in Oakland that I had to deal with,” says Donaldson. “One was having success in the big-leagues and two was trying to be the leader, as far as the media was concerned, of the clubhouse, to speak. I was never a big-time prospect where I had to deal with that, I didn’t have what I would say were huge expectations from other people except for myself.
“Now when you start having expectations, when you start having leadership roles and stuff like that, I had people I could talk to about it, like how do I need to go about this, is there something that I need to do, is there something I need to do better? I was always trying to ask questions.”
Now, he’s someone others seek out for answers.
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Todd Steverson is standing off to the side of the batting cage, watching his White Sox take their cuts, as the Blue Jays emerge from the clubhouse at U.S. Cellular Field to begin stretching. Josh Donaldson sneaks up behind him, puts a big bear hug on him and they exchanges pleasantries.
There are plenty of smiles.
“We had some stresses, we had some days. I was messing with him about it,” says Steverson. “But the one gratification for a coach is when the players that you’ve had get it. You keep banging them and banging them, and drilling them and drilling them and they get it but they don’t get it.
“Then you see them later on down the road and you’re like, ‘Oh, alright,’ and they look at you like, ‘Yeah, I got it.’ That’s the gratification for a coach. The big part is the process and as a coach, you’ve got to enjoy the process. You just hope it comes faster.”
What did the process produce in Donaldson?
“He goes up to the plate with bad intentions, but before, he didn’t know what to do with it. Over time, he’s figured out how to go about it,” says Steverson. “He’s able to drop negativity off, he understands what people are trying to do to him. Before games he’d be like, ‘This guy? If he hangs the curveball I’m going to smash it.’ Typically, he’d look for it and he’d smash it.
“He’s starting to learn now how to look for pitches, whereas before, it was hopefully I get a pitch to hit. He’s able to say I’m going to sit on this, or I’m ready for this.”