LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. — After working with Jason Heyward since early January, seeing him make adjustments to his swing in Atlanta and watching him pound balls in the first week of spring training, Greg Walker seems convinced.
“It’s obvious his physical ability is off the charts,” the Braves’ new hitting coach said of the team’s prized right fielder. “And you get down on these fields [at spring training] and see the ball’s flight and the way the ball jumps off the bat. ...
“We’re just going to get those mechanical thoughts out of it and let him do it off feel now. It tells me, when you see somebody pick something up really quick, it tells me that’s who he really is.”
Slowed early last season by a shoulder injury that went from nagging to throbbing, Heyward hit only .227 with 14 homers, a .319 on-base percentage and .389 slugging percentage — down from .277/.393/.456 with 18 homers as a rookie phenom.
The Braves didn’t think last year was the real Heyward. Walker now seems in agreement the 2010 model J-Hey was the real one, the one that could be re-emerging now.
For Heyward, the body is again willing and the spirit — along with determination — are strong. He’s healthy and excited entering the Braves’ first full-squad workout Saturday.
In batting-practice sessions at Champion Stadium the past week, while the pitchers and catchers had official workouts on adjacent fields, Heyward showed that the offseason conditioning and hours spent working on his swing could soon pay big dividends.
“It’s fun getting back into it,” Heyward said after a round of batting practice with other early-reporting position players. “It’s good to be healthy. When you’re going through stuff like that [shoulder strain], you don’t know when it’s going to go away.
“It took a lot of hard work and dedication. It feels good to be back and just getting ready for the season.”
He got healthy in the fall, then got busy. He dropped about 20 pounds before Christmas — he felt he was too bulky last season — and worked with longtime personal hitting coach C.J. Stewart to break down his swing and get back to basics.
Then he met with Walker and new Braves assistant hitting coach Scott Fletcher,
“What we did first off, we met with Jason, had lunch, and we said, ‘We’re with you, we’re here to help you. We want to find out what makes you good.’”
After Jan. 1 they set up shop in the batting cage at Turner Field. Chipper Jones also sat in and offered tips at some of those sessions.
“We started watching Jason in early January, and like most [hitters] in early January he was a bit rough at that time,” Walker said. “But you could tell he’d really done a lot of work to get himself ready physically, and he was ready to start work.
“We started going in and saw some things. Chipper actually came in one day and we showed him some video from ’10, when [Heyward] was really good.
“We said to Jason, ‘We don’t want to reinvent Jason Heyward. We don’t want to change anything except we want you to do what you did in 2010. And this is what we see.’ He saw it, Chipper saw it, Fletch saw it, and we all got on the same page: This is what we want to accomplish. We want to get you back to what you did in 2010.
“We just started working with that as the goal. And to be honest with you, he went back and he got it really quick. ...
“And since he’s been down here we’ve been extremely pleased with where he’s at.”
Heyward looked relaxed and confident while pounding balls over the center-field and right-field fences all week at Champion Stadium, including one that caromed more than halfway up the 60-foot video board just to the right of straight center.
A few others landed on the red tents beyond right field — the “Heyward tents” that were erected after Heyward’s long shots damaged multiple cars during 2010 spring training.
It’s only batting practice, but Heyward is encouraged by results from the work on his swing.
“Yeah, man, I definitely feel that,” he said. “It feels like what I’m more accustomed to, what I’m used to — how it feels staying behind the ball, making the adjustments I need to make, basically going up there and hitting without thinking too much.”
For the first time in a long time, he’s hitting without pain — not in the thumb that slowed him in the second half of his rookie season, not in the shoulder, not anywhere.
“And we’re hoping it can stay that way,” Heyward said. “Aches and pains you can take, but an injury is hard to [overcome]. Unfortunately I’ve had them. Hopefully they won’t come back.”
“I don’t think he’s doing anything different today than what he’s done in the past,” Walker said, “and he did it some last year. Where he was in January, we didn’t feel like he was doing what he did in ’10. But immediately when we talked about it, he went back to doing it. So we said, ‘Hey, that’s who he is. That’s Jason Heyward.’”
