This first month after the regular season is big for San Francisco Giants third baseman Matt Chapman. He needs it to fully heal from strained ligaments in his right hand, an injury that bothered the Gold Glove winner for much of the season and impacted his production.
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Once he’s able to swing a bat pain-free, Chapman can get down to the real work. He needs to right some things at the plate, especially his two-strike approach. Chapman hit .144 with two strikes, second worst on the team among players with at least 225 at-bats; Patrick Bailey was worse, at .128.
Some of that was because Chapman, like other members of the lineup, was trying too hard as the team went through long stretches without scoring much. That meant swinging out of the zone a little more often than usual, grounding out more, using the whole field less and finding opponents even better positioned for those grounders as a result.
“I want to refine my two-strike approach, drive the balls I’m supposed to drive,” Chapman said. “I want to be more efficient with my swing. I want to get back t
o doing what I do well.”
Chapman’s injury compounded things; gripping the bat wasn’t easy much of the season, and he couldn’t really choke up even slightly with two strikes thanks to a hole that opened in the heel of his left hand after diving onto Oracle Park’s hard infield dirt. Chapman could hold the wound off the bat if he gripped it right at the end, but any higher and it was in contact with the wood.
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Chapman’s injury, suffered while diving back to first base against the Braves on June 8, came at a terrible time for him and for the team – after starting the season batting around the .200 mark, he’d just caught fire, hitting .395 with three homers in the 11 games before he was hurt.
“I was starting to get really, really hot, I’d just put together two weeks of baseball where I said, ‘OK, here I go, going to get hot for the second half,’ and then all of a sudden, boom, I missed five weeks with the torn ligaments in my hand,” Chapman said. “Then I wasn’t able to string it together when I came back. I wasn’t able to just be consistent, because I haven’t consistently felt healthy with my hand.”
His hands hurting much of the time, Chapman felt he wasn’t catching up to fastballs as he should. “Then I started rushing, cheating to get to the fastball,” he said.
The Giants placed Chapman back on the injured list in August to try to help things heal, and he received a cortisone shot, but he never was really himself. Next year, with healed hands, sliding gloves on both hands when he’s on base, and, he hopes, a softer infield, Chapman should be back to the 25-plus homer presence he’s been in previous years, and he hopes his average ticks up, too.
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“I’m better than a .230 hitter,” he said. “I could strike out less, I could hit more line drives. But I need to have two hands.”
This article originally published at Giants’ Matt Chapman focused on healing his hand, then fixing his approach.
