At a picnic table under the spring training sunshine, in what seems like a lifetime ago, Kolten Wong talked about the battle of batting.
“You get basically one pitch (to hit) in an at-bat,” the Cardinals second baseman told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “You miss that one pitch, you’re battling the rest of the at-bat.”
There were many things frustrating about the Astros’ cheating scandal, in which the 2017 World Series champs used video to steal catchers’ signs and banged a trash can to alert the hitter. We can talk about the integrity of the game, and we can talk about the message it sent to young fans and all of that. But, simply: It’s really, really hard to get a hit in baseball. A hit is an earned accomplishment that, as the old line goes, even some of the best players can’t do seven out of 10 times. And the Astros rigged the system and made a mockery of the hitting process.
So, how hard is it to actually get a hit? In this conversation during Cardinals’ camp, Hilo’s Wong provided a little peek into his process, a morsel of his mind. After all, he hit .285 last year — and .322 from June 1 until the end of the season.
Here in April 2020, as we yearn for Cardinals baseball to talk about, here’s a Cardinal talking about baseball.
Q: Explain how much goes into getting a hit? What goes into planning for an at-bat? And when you step in the batter’s box, what’s going on in your brain?
WONG: Before every game, you obviously go through a pitcher, you get your game plan on how you want to attack the pitcher. So, say I’m looking at my first (at-bat), I’m always hunting his fastball. You can ask every player that. It depends on the pitcher, obviously, but for most time you’re always hunting a fastball. And then from there on, you started to create a plan for the next couple (at-bats). Because I mean, we can’t hit everything.
It’s impossible to literally sit there and say, ‘I’m going to be ready for the fastball, curveball, changeup, slider.’ You know? And hit all of them? That’s impossible. So, you use a process of elimination. You start to break down, ‘OK, I know he’s got a fastball, obviously. What’s his best secondary pitch that I’m going to have to be the most worried about?’ You create your game plan from there. Most guys have four pitches to command, but two really good ones? So you try to figure out what those two are.
And there are situations you’re studying before the game — like a 2-0 count, what does he throw? Because we have you know the charts of percentages of what these guys throw in certain situations. But from then on out, man — it’s just competing. You know when you step into to the at-bat what I’m looking for and the situation out there. And then it’s about competing and sticking to your plan.
Q: With figuring which pitch could be coming, is it almost like cracking a math problem?
WONG: Right. When you’re a kid, it’s just — ‘I’m gonna hit a ball.’ When you get to this level, the biggest thing is — every pitcher has their tendencies. How they attack guys and their strong pitches in certain counts. So you start to really look at the numbers and you start to realize patterns. Then when you step into the box, usually your first (at bat), it’s trying to figure out, ‘OK, is he using this pattern against me or is he attacking me a different way?’ And then you’re challenging the guy like, ‘OK, I’m trying to guess you’re going to do this. OK, maybe I think you’re going to come with this pitch next.’
There’s always a routine to what they do. If they go fastball up and in, they’re probably going to go with a change away. Most pitchers do. You know, if they throw a curveball in the dirt you take it. They’ll throw one in a little higher that’s going to be in the dirt, to see if you chase that one. There’s always different ways that guys are attacking you, and it’s just about you finding out which way they’re attacking you — and sitting on that pitch you know they’re going to throw. Eventually, if you’re in the right-enough flow, you start to figure out, ‘OK, I’m about 70% sure that the guy’s going to throw this right here.’ And 70% is pretty good in baseball, so you take that chance. And if it’s not the pitch, you know, you tip your cap.
Q: Or there’s the times you make a perfect swing, hit the heck out of it … and it’s into a shift, right?
WONG: Or you line out right to a guy and you’re like: ‘AHHH.’
Q: But in those situations you can’t say that you were happy, because an out is an out. How do you approach it in your head?
WONG: I always tell myself like, ‘I won. I won that at-bat.’ Regardless of how the outcome was. Like, did I stick to my plan? Yes. Did I get a good pitch to hit? Yes. Did I hit the ball hard? Yes. That’s it, that’s all I can control. At the end of day, you’ve got to really just focus on things that you can control, and all the other stuff, if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be. If not, it is what it is.
Q: So if you’re trying to hit a line drive, but you hit a squibber that gets through for a single, clearly you’re pleased you’re on first base. But are you pleased with yourself?
WONG: Oh, any time you get a hit, you’re pleased! But to take it a step further as a competitor and as a big-league baseball player, it’s like, I don’t care really about the outcome — obviously, it’s huge because it determines how we get paid and how we stay in the big leagues. But I just want to have good swings every time. And I know that I can go home and go to bed well because I know that I was locked into my battles, locked into my approach, locked into my swing. And things just didn’t go my way.