Why Royals’ Andrew Benintendi will benefit from return to roots as he settles into KC
Andrew Benintendi’s baseball journey began with idyllic innocence some 20 years ago in his backyard in Madeira, Ohio. To be more precise, the serene scene started with tennis balls his father, Chris, would hit by the bucket to the smallish 5-year-old who seemed to naturally run so fluidly. Soon, the boy wanted the balls hit higher and farther and to chase more, more, more.
Next thing you know, the father is hitting the ball as far and high as he could and marveling with his wife, Jill, at the diving catches and ability to track the ball that eluded the father even as a collegiate second baseman at Wittenberg in Springfield, Ohio.
While Chris worked with Andrew on finer points, such as the four quadrants of turning the glove to catch the ball, he never tinkered with a naturally sweet swing and batting approach … unless you count throwing a tennis ball behind his back once in a while to create some discomfort that may or may not have fazed him.
“I don’t remember batting much at all,” Benintendi said recently, smiling and adding, “But I remember those high popups.”
Those were cherished, fulfilling days in and of themselves, his father said on Monday, even if at the time he thought, “There was no reason to believe that he’d ever become a professional baseball player.”
As it happens, that foundation helped him morph into something special: Baseball America’s collegiate player of the year for 2015 at Arkansas; the consensus No. 1 prospect in pro baseball in 2017 and a key cog of Boston’s 2018 World Series triumph.
Now, he’s a potential pillar of the Royals’ future, set to debut with the team against Texas on opening day Thursday at Kauffman Stadium.
“I don’t believe we’ve seen the best of Andrew Benintendi yet,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said during spring training.
The realization of that hope in some ways hinges on a return to Benintendi’s roots, in more ways than one, as the intriguing player obtained in a three-way trade seeks to become a fixture in left field in the considerable wake of the retired Alex Gordon.
Perhaps appropriately enough, like Gordon, Benintendi typically is reserved and measured in his public presence and more prone to let his game speak for him than to overshare.
In part, his father said, that’s because he’s not motivated by media attention, good or bad, and fanfare so much as truly playing for the love of the game.
While Benintendi says he always enjoyed playing in Boston and retains a number of friendships with former teammates, when we spoke in Arizona a few weeks ago he also said, “A change of scenery for me, I think, was a good thing.”
The 26-year-old who has spent the last few offseasons living in St. Louis and knew Matheny before the trade through his son called his transition to the Royals “seamless, which is awesome.” Between his visit to spring training and what he’s heard from Andrew, Chris Benintendi thought the Royals’ down-home ways were reminiscent of the approach of the Midland youth organization in which Andrew once played.
So no doubt the welcoming culture in the Royals’ organization accounts for some revived sense of comfort. But so likely does his sense of anticipation of playing in the Midwest and all that might imply, including being closer to home, lifestyle, fewer media outlets and what might generally be considered a more hospitable fanbase.
He’ll put plenty of pressure on himself, of course. But that will be different than what he would be facing in Boston: “Immense pressure to perform right away,” as his father put it, and the question of, “Is he the 2020 guy? … Who is he?”
From where we sit, it’s plenty reasonable to dismiss the COVID-defined 2020 season in which Benintendi played just 14 games and hit .103 (four for 39) before suffering a season-ending rib injury as he tripped rounding a base.
Still, even Benintendi lumped 2020 together with the struggling end of 2019 and called the sequence a “bad 50 games” (despite a few injuries in late 2019 he didn’t expand upon).
It’s easy to say now, both in hindsight and in the spirit of opening day optimism, but his solution to that almost seems tangible: a return to the golden swing path he had from the start.
“Second nature,” he called it the other day. But you might even call it first nature, as much a part of his game as it came to be.
A sudden fascination with power and launch angle led him astray from what had served him so well for so long and led to a sharp increase in strikeouts (from 106 in 2018 to 140 in 2019), a droop in RBIs from 87 to 68 and a drop in batting average from .290 to .266.
Trying to hit for more power, he knows now, “was a bad idea for me.”
“I’m obviously not a huge guy,” said Benintendi, who calls himself 5-foot-9, 175 pounds. “So I think now that I kind of realize the player I am, I’ll run into a few but I’ll just be trying to hit the gaps and run.”
Matheny, who was riveted by Benintendi’s swing when he saw him playing in college against his son, Tate, observed the fruits of Benintendi striving to get back to where he once belonged in a streak of games a few weeks ago.
From simply applying his wrists to go the opposite way for a double to grinding through an eight-pitch walk, Matheny said, the Royals were “seeing what we were hoping to see and think he’s feeling what he was hoping to feel.”
Now he’ll make his true KC debut on a vast field he’s loved to play in before and that figures to be conducive to accommodating his game at its best … a version of it that conjures those halcyon days in the backyard and a return to the unselfconscious (and simple swing that came with it) that made this all possible.
This story was originally published March 31, 2021 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Why Royals’ Andrew Benintendi will benefit from return to roots as he settles into KC."