LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla. – Great athletes do this. They crush a home run in their first major league at-bat and raise expectations to levels of absurdity. They experience the inevitable market correction, struggle a little, get injured, try to adjust, start to learn, struggle some more. They hear boos for the first time. And then they become great again.
For all of those who leaped from the Jason Heyward bandwagon, only to do a swan dive into a mud pit, did that really take so long?
“For any player who has aspirations to be great, that first hurdle is an eye opener,” said Tim Hudson, the Braves’ elder statesman. “The great ones work through it in a great way. Some guys struggle for years after something like what Jason went through. But for him it just seemed like a distant memory.”
Heyward is 23. He is in his fifth spring training and fourth season with the Braves. He doesn’t feel old, he said, "just wiser. I feel like somebody who’s been around the organization for a while. ... It’s just about having more knowledge now."
The backdrop for this season is unlike any other for Heyward. His role is expanding from on the field to off it. Many of the Braves' veterans since he made his spring debut in 2009 are gone, including Chipper Jones. It would be overstatement to suggest this is Heyward's team now but he is expected to take on a greater leadership role. Hudson said, "I think it's a natural progression for him."
It's also good timing. Leaders can handle adversity. If we go through recent Braves’ history of The Next Great Thing, at least among touted right fielders, Heyward has proven everything that Jeff Francoeur couldn’t.
He had a breakout rookie season. But his second year was punctuated by shoulder pain, messed up mechanics and a .227 batting average (a 50-point drop). Jones, without really intending to call out his teammate publicly, said Heyward needed to learn what was an acceptable amount of pain to play with. (Quoting: "What Jason needs to realize is that Jason at 80 percent is a force [and] better than a lot of people in this league. And that there are a bunch of his teammates that are out there playing with discomfort…")
Heyward listened and learned. He also healed up. In year three, he hit .269 with career highs in homers (27), RBIs (82), doubles (30), hits (158), runs (93) and stolen bases (21). He was the first 20-20 player for the Braves since Andruw Jones in 2000. But none of those statistics is what gratified him most about last season.
“Playing 158 games," he said. "The more times you do something, the more you’re going to learn. I was able to learn more about my body. I could make adjustments quicker. I just had a better idea how to be on the field all year.”
He hit .348 in June with 16 extra-base hits. That came immediately following a late-May game against Washington at Turner Field when he was was booed for lackadaisically going after Bryce Harper's single and bobbling the ball, allowing Harper to go to second. After the game, Heyward took ownership of the mistake: "I said, 'My bad' out there, and I said 'My bad' when I came in[to the dugout].'"
These are growth moments for athletes.
Spring numbers don’t count for much. But Heyward's .294 average and team-high three homers at least suggest he's not going to slip back. He is also batting second in the order. Why? Because he can. The Braves are thin at the top of the order and overloaded with potential 3-4-5-6 hitters (Heyward, B.J. Upton, Justin Upton, Freddie Freeman, Dan Uggla, Brian McCann).
Heyward even bunted for a single against Washington’s shifted infield the other day.
“I’ll hit anywhere if it helps the team,” he said.
He seems more relaxed these days (although he prefers “wiser”). He feels thankful that in his brief career, he had the opportunity to play for manager Bobby Cox and with Jones before their respective retirements. "Those are two cornerstones I grew up watching," he said.
He remembers Jones encouraging him in his rookie season to ask for help, if needed, that the veteran was there to teach him.
“Chipper would ask me things like, ‘How do you feel today? How are you going to go about this? What are you going to focus on?’” Heyward said. “The point was to try to simplify things as much as possible."
It seems like Heyward has played longer than three seasons. It's easy to forget that he is only 23. To think some were trashing him at 22.
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