Royals restructure hitting department to get most out of prospects like MJ Melendez
Last year, MJ Melendez came into spring training with seemingly every reason to puff his chest out after a stellar 2018 campaign which made him one of the gems of the Kansas City Royals farm system. He didn’t, but it wouldn’t have been terribly difficult to understand it he had.
Baseball America had ranked Melendez, a highly regarded catcher and second-round pick out of high school in the 2017 MLB Draft, the sixth-best prospect in the Royals’ farm system. That came after a 19-homer season in Low-A Lexington in which he also threw out a league-best 42% of base stealers and helped guide his team to a South Atlantic League championship.
After that, the 6-foot-1, 185-pound left-handed hitter with an athletic body frame spent part of the offseason training alongside Gold Glove catcher Salvador Perez in Miami. Then Melendez earned a non-roster invitation to big-league spring training at the age of 20 with 158 professional baseball games under his belt.
Unfortunately for Melendez, his year went downhill after he left big-league camp. He had one of his worst offensive seasons at any level and certainly the worst year of his professional career.
“That all just starts with confidence and comfort, and I don’t think I really had either of those throughout the season,” Melendez told The Star. “It was something that I was kind of trying to find during the season, which is tough when you’re trying to go out there and compete each and every day.”
One of the top two-way catching prospects in the game, Melendez spent most of the year in an offensive funk that included a slash line of .163/.260/.311 in 110 games at High-A Wilmington.
He spent much of this offseason working under the guidance of the Royals newly revamped hitting department, starting with a fall hitting camp in Arizona and continuing in Miami with workouts led by Royals special assignment hitting coach Mike Tosar.
“I know that soon I’ll be right there,” Melendez said last week, sitting in front of his locker back at big-league camp. “I know I’m on the right track, and I feel like I’m headed in the right direction.”
Seeing is believing
In the fall hitting camp, Melendez worked daily with newly named director of hitting performance and player development Alec Zumwalt, as well as minor league hitting coordinator Drew Saylor and assistant hitting coordinator Keoni DeRenne. Saylor and DeRenne, a former minor league teammate of Zumwalt’s, joined the organization this offseason.
After Melendez’s time in Arizona, he continued his training back home in Miami. That’s where he had an hour-long conversation with Tosar during which they watched video and Melendez saw why his swings had become so futile last season.
“The first thing, as a hitter, you have to be able to do is see the ball,” Melendez said. “It doesn’t matter how perfect your swing is or how bad your swing is, if you don’t see the ball you’re not going to be able to hit. So just being able to see the ball better, put my body in a good position, my head in a good position to where I always had both eyes on the ball is something I fixed this offseason. It’s helped me tremendously.”
The primary problem? He’d been “peeking at the ball” because his batting stance had become so closed off to the ball with his front foot crossed over his body that at best he’d see the pitch coming in with one eye. He has since opened his stance.
“It was something he saw and I never really noticed,” Melendez said. “I was crossed over a little bit in Lexington, but I was really able, this offseason, to realize how much better I could be if I could see the ball better.”
Royals manager Mike Matheny watched many of Melendez’s minor-league games last season, and he noticed the difference in Melendez early in camp. Matheny has seen a swing that’s less rotational with a shortened leg kick.
“I’m really pleased with the adjustments he made this winter, 100% what he needed,” Matheny said. “I think the adjustments started with Alec Zumwalt, Drew Saylor and Keoni coming in here and bringing that group of hitters in here and just kind of getting raw and real about, ‘Hey, this what you’ve got going on and here’s some data that’s supporting what we see. You’ve got a winter to make a difference and change.’”
Addressing a need
Before last year, Royals general manager Dayton Moore and assistant general manager of player personnel J.J. Picollo had discussed the best way to structure their player development staff.
This offseason with Picollo’s urging, Moore’s pulled the trigger on a restructuring plan aimed at a more all-encompassing approach to developing hitters and while not drastically changing the organization’s philosophies.
“So much of it is just getting more people involved in different areas and utilizing everybody’s expertise,” Moore said.
“There’s very few people in the game today that have a complete and thorough knowledge of all aspects of hitting and all the different areas that you have to address, and happen to be open minded and listen to performance science, the opinion of your biomechanists, the opinion of strength and conditioning, the opinion of analytics and so many different aspects of just managing this. We felt like we needed one person in the organization to simply focus on this in this department.”
After consultation with Picollo, senior director of performance science Austin Driggers, director of performance science/player development John Wagle, and assistant general manager/research and development Daniel Mack, Moore ultimately decided it was important to create a hitting performance department that incorporated more than traditional hitting coaches.
Zumwalt, a fourth-round draft pick in 1999, began his professional playing career for an Atlanta Braves organization that included Moore, Picollo and current Royals assistant general manager/major league and international operations Rene Francisco.
An outfielder and then a pitcher in the minors, Zumwalt joined the Royals as a scout and served as a major-league advance scout from 2013-17. He was promoted to director of baseball operations in 2018.
“We knew the challenges that were in front of us, some of the performance issues that we’ve had with our young hitters. In order to move forward, we needed to adapt,” Zumwalt said. “More than anything, I think we just needed to change the focus a little bit on how we train, how we’re preparing these hitters. …
“We have great baseball people. I never wanted that to get lost. Dayton didn’t want that to get lost. We have really good hitting coaches. Like I said, we needed to accept some of the challenges that were in front of us.”
Streamlined and shared
Zumwalt referenced major-league hitting coach Terry Bradshaw as the example he’s emulating to assure this restructured department maintains one message.
“It starts with Terry having the relationships he has with (Brian Buchanan), (Abraham Nunez), Jesus (Azuaje), Andre David, all the way down,” Zumwalt said, referring to the minor-league hitting coaches. “He set the bar for me really high in that his communication and relationship with all his hitting coaches was awesome to see coming in. I knew, ‘OK. We’ve got to keep this, this is good.’”
There’s a player development plan for each hitter in the organization, and the Royals have made some changes to their internal system, called “Monarch,” with how they utilize the system for communication and reports. Nobody will operate blindly or without an understanding of the other aspects of a player’s training.
The idea being to make sure everything is constantly shared across staff departments, including performance science, strength and conditioning, analytics and the front office staff all the way to the minor league coaching staffs.
That information will include everything up to and including in-depth statistical analysis, pregame routines, injury concerns, or training video sent from players to coaches during the offseason.
Zumwalt repeatedly praised the organization’s hitting coaches for their openness and welcoming Saylor and DeRenne into the organization.
“There’s no ego involved in any of our guys with this,” Zumwalt said. “Nobody is trying to take credit. Nobody is trying to take a player and just work with him (exclusively).”
Both the camp and the instructional league featured an emphasis on one-on-one work with players in the batting cages and on the back fields of the Royals complex. The players worked with multiple coaches during the course of the camp. Zumwalt and Picollo were also in uniform, as they have been during spring training.
The hitting staff met as a group and went over each individual hitter on a daily basis. At the end of the camp, players got individual plans of attack for the rest of the offseason.
The hitting camp featured players who had one issue or another last season that the organization felt needed to be addressed. That may have been as analytical as this hitter is missing on a high percentage of fastballs in the zone or as physical as a stance that’s limiting his vision.
In formulating a plan of attack, the staff even reached out to the scouting department for input from scouting director Lonnie Goldberg and assistant scouting director Danny Ontiveros on what they’d seen from these players as amateurs that perhaps wasn’t there last year in the minors.
“We’d seen them successful,” Zumwalt said. “We’d seen them not fully play to their potential. We saw them struggle a little bit. I think more than anything, having those conversations right from the get-go, going, ‘Hey man, tell me what you felt this year. Tell me what you feel like you need to get out of the program.’ Then the staff met in the middle.”
The game will be the “ultimate evaluator,” Zumwalt said. But he was happy with the open-mindedness the players like Nick Pratto, Khalil Lee and Melendez brought to the endeavor.
“They wanted to know,” Zumwalt said. “There was a lot of why. Why did I struggle with this? Why did I do that? Looking back and video and going, ‘I didn’t realize I’d gotten to this point.’”
Moving forward
Once the season starts, Saylor will take on a schedule similar to a traditional rover. He’ll be responsible for seeing the entire system from Single-A up through Triple-A while DeRenne will focus on the short-season clubs after the draft. Though DeRenne will likely also visit all the affiliates during the season.
Though the two came from different organizations, Saylor the Pittsburgh Pirates and DeRenne the Chicago Cubs, they already appear in sync to their colleagues.
“At times, it’s really funny because they actually quote each other,” Zumwalt said. “They’re always quoting movies and they’ve got a similar sense of humor.”
Tosar will spend time with Dominican Summer League and come through extended spring training to work with some hitters.
Zumwalt said the biggest asset they’ll all lean on going forward will be the minor league hitting coaches.
“They’re the key,” Zumwalt said. “They’re the backbone of this. We could bring Babe Ruth out of the grave and have him be the director of hitting, it’s not going to make us a better hitting organization. The backbone of our hitting department is our hitting coaches.
“Those guys are going to deserve all the credit because they’re the ones who are in there every single day working with these guys. Hopefully, through some of our refining of our processes I think that our guys are going to get better.”
