Kansas City Royals’ Michael Massey revived season by embracing lessons of early slump
In a hushed Royals locker room after a 13-10 loss to Baltimore on May 4 dropped them to 8-24, effervescent second baseman Michael Massey shared the internal battle he’d been waging from the team’s struggles and his own woes at the plate.
Even for someone of his upbeat disposition, he said in an interview with The Star, it turns out staying buoyant under duress takes some resolve.
“When you’re struggling, sometimes it’s tough getting out of bed in the morning. I’m sure you know how it is,” said Massey, who that day earned his third and fourth walks of the season and doubled to lift his average to .189. “That’s not just baseball — that’s life. But what are you going to do?”
If that sounds like a rhetorical question, it actually was more pointed: the start of speaking about what he did do about it. And his approach during the skid speaks to why that game became the second day of a seven-game streak in which he’s been batting .476.
In the series finale against the White Sox on Thursday at Kauffman Stadium, Massey punctuated his resurgence with his second home run in as many days en route to a 4-3 victory.
It was the Royals’ fourth win in five games after an 8-26 start with the young team that in many ways is embodied in the growing pains of players such as Massey.
Reflecting the subtle differences that at times change everything in baseball, Massey’s home run hit the screen on the right-field foul pole.
“Sometimes those balls hook, and sometimes they kind of stay straight,” he said Thursday. “Usually when I’m going right with my swing, that ball down the line stays true.”
That “going right” development is a reflection of better timing and thus better swing decisions, manager Matt Quatraro said. But that’s also indicative of the ol’ Yogi Berra-ism about 90% of the game being half-mental.
“The confidence level,” Quatraro said, is the root of the change.
And tough to generate when you don’t have much to inspire it in the recent past.
“It doesn’t matter how long you’ve played this game or whatever level you’ve played at,” Quatraro said. “Until you start seeing some balls hit the grass, it’s hard to believe that they’re going to keep coming. And the harder you try, sometimes the more elusive they are.
“But in his case, he stayed the course, (and) he came out the other side of it.”
He indeed stayed the course in terms of trusting the process.
But Massey also made some key psychological adjustments as he was grappling for traction and up against an alarming strikeout rate in his second big-league season — albeit still less than a year since he was called up from July 15-17 last year and then back in August for the rest of 2022.
As much as he stayed diligent working on his game, he was trying to embrace perspective.
“Obviously, I’m going through this for a reason, and I could either get angry and frustrated and miss the entire point of it,” he said last week. “Or I can just say, ‘Hey, you know what, me getting angry isn’t going to change anything.’ I’ve done that in the past, and I’ve done that during this, too.
“But it’s just like, what can I learn from this? So I can not waste this experience.”
So he took one thing he still believed — “every time that I’ve failed miserably in my career, I’ve come back as something better” — and he applied it to the current context:
Anger wasn’t going to help. Neither was pressing harder or squeezing tighter, he absorbed through coaches and staff and veteran voices.
What could help would be finding a way to let go a little and “try easier,” as the elusive notion goes, including by trying to leave his frustrations at the office.
“Early on in the season, the days just kept going,” he said. “There was no, like, Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday. It was just tough day onto tough day onto tough day, off day into tough day. I just never turned it off.”
To reset, he came to realize the best thing he could do was think in terms of “What did I give?” and controlling the controllables and being a great teammate — and maybe even exhaled somehow.
At some level, Quatraro said, Massey even became able to joke about his struggles.
“You take your job seriously, but you don’t take yourself too seriously,” Quatraro said. “And that’s what he was able to do.”
It’s only a small sample size in some ways, of course. And nice as it feels to get on a little roll, Massey is as measured about the uptick as he’s been learning to be about the downs.
With a smile, he referred to a line he heard the other day:
“‘Mrs. Humble Pie never runs out of pie,’” he said. “That’s a good quote.”
But as it is for any player, learning to mentally manage the inevitable ups and downs ahead for the 25-year-old is crucial to his long-term prospects.
And whatever tests and trials are ahead, he’s availed himself to this chance to grow.
Easier said than done, he’ll tell you.
Yet in the throes of his struggles, it says something that he learned the only way the hard times won’t help and mold him is “if I get angry and emotional and lose my cool” and miss the meaning before him.
“What a great opportunity for me to learn how to not have stuff go my way,” he said as he sought his way out of the slump, “and handle it.”