Uggla’s year of extremes

Maybe it would be a better idea, he decided this year, to actually hack away at some of the plumper offerings.

“I’m finding out now [with the old approach] it took me longer to be on time with the fastball. I didn’t take into my thinking if I’m barreling up the first fastball, that’s half the battle right there — be on time with the fastball. Then you can make your necessary adjustments to off-speed pitches.”

The report of this conversation made the Braves manager arch an eyebrow.

“He’s talking hitting? Danny’s talking hitting?” Fredi Gonzalez questioned.

“There are three things you don’t talk about: religion, politics and hitting with Danny Uggla.”

More focused

Anyone studying Uggla’s first season with the Braves would have seen few hints of a scientific method at work. Put an ax in his hand instead of a bat, and he’s Lizzie Borden. His swing can be broken down into fourths: 1. See it; 2. Try to hit it; 3. Unscrew himself from the batter’s box clay; 4. Repeat.

But there has to be more at play than is outwardly visible, especially after such a season as 2011, one as eccentric as the main room at DragonCon.

Anyone would feel the need to get a little contemplative after catapulting between the extremes of a frigid start and a 33-game hitting streak. Thus has Uggla this spring given the impression of a man willing to try anything to even out Braves season No. 2. Even if that involves thinking at the plate.

“Seems like he’s a lot more focused and prepared. He’s not going to let what happened last year happen again,” Chipper Jones said.

The spring training numbers, meaningless from the moment of April 5’s first pitch, seem to indicate Uggla’s onto something. Through 17 spring games last week, he was hitting .311 and leading the team with five home runs and 12 RBI.

“The way I feel right now is a lot better than the way I felt in years past,” he said.

The needed result here is for Uggla to not spend the first couple months of this season in a statistical coma. This team cannot afford to wait on him again.

He came in last season wearing a contract extension — five years, $62 million — like an anvil. Hoping to prove his worth, Uggla instead began sucking the air out of the stadium with each at-bat. He had experienced slow starts before, but nothing like this. This was the slump that he couldn’t scrape off the bottom of his cleats.

Things get weird

Last Fourth of July, he was hitting .173, with little power. He wandered up and down the lineup looking for a comfortable spot. Nothing worked.

But, as Hunter S. Thompson once put it, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

And the season was about to take a very odd, abrupt U-turn. On July 5, Uggla got two hits — a double and a home run — against Colorado. Over his next 32 games, the player who had been the second worst-hitting regular in baseball went on the sixth-longest hitting streak of the past three decades.

“Weird things happen to me. Like the way I got to the big leagues,” he said, pulling out the résumé of a player who never rose above Double A in his first five years with Colorado, was cast off as a Rule 5 reject, then was an All Star his next year (2006) with the Florida Marlins.

Uggla’s first Braves season was an enigma, one in which he’d splice a career-worse batting average (.233) onto a career high in home runs (36).

The one certainty his teammates discovered over the course of Uggla’s wild ride was that he had a promising second career in crisis management.

Gonzalez, who managed Uggla in Miami, already knew that. “Mentally, he’s probably one of the toughest people I’ve been around,” he said.

“When a guy hits .170 for three months, you learn about his true colors,” Jones said. “He kept running it out on every ground ball and belly flopping all over the field on defense. He didn’t let the fact that he was hitting .170 affect the way he played the game.

“If I hit .170 for three months, I’m going to be hard to live with.”

There are players, Uggla said, who try to inflict their struggles on their teammates, who actively recruit others to join in their misery. Players, he said, who get phased out like yesterday’s cell phone. Uggla was determined to not be one of those guys.

“I was not about to come to a new team and try to drag somebody down with me,” he said.

“Mac’s [Brian McCann’s] locker is right next to me. He’s a very caring person and it would have been very easy for me to drown him in [his slump],” Uggla said. “That’s the last thing he wants to listen to.”

Now that it has been established that the Braves have a stand-up second baseman, it would be good going forward to know they have one who can provide seven months’ worth of punch.

Uggla’s reputation as a slow starter is not entirely clear-cut. Nothing is simple with this guy. “Maybe it’s just an every-other-year thing,” he suggested.

Indeed, his batting average through May during even-numbered years (.295) is nearly 80 points higher than that during odd years (.218).

This just in: 2012 is an even-numbered year. Expect better things of Uggla.

“I don’t know what this year is going to bring me, but I’m feeling great right now, and I’m kind of excited about it,” Uggla said.

“Last year is behind me. If I have another hitting streak, that would be awesome. If I struggle again at the beginning of the season, I’m going to battle through it.”

A truly dependable, useful season lives somewhere between the extremes.