How the Kansas City Royals’ Nicky Lopez got his swagger back at the plate
Nicky Lopez failed at being Nicky Lopez.
That’s the best way to describe the Kansas City Royals infielder’s first 200 games in the majors.
This season, Lopez has gone from a hitter who seemed confused and lost at the plate to one of the most consistent hitters in the Royals’ lineup.
A combination of a mental reset, a clearly defined offensive role and some pointed veteran guidance have helped the left-handed hitting Lopez find his way back to being the hitter both he and the Royals envisioned.
Friday night in a win against the Baltimore Orioles, Lopez drove in four of the Royals’ first eight runs. The second of two hits, a two-run double, came on a line drive into the left-center field gap.
“That last at-bat to me was just one of the better at-bats he has taken,” Royals manager Mike Matheny said. “He’s fouling off marginal pitches, not trying to get pull-happy, not trying to think power. The next thing he knows, he hits the opposite gap with some juice. That is what has been the difference.”
Entering this season, Lopez’s offense had lagged behind sorely. A Gold Glove finalist at second base last year, his offense threatened to keep him off the field.
From his debut on May 14, 2019, through the end of the pandemic-shortened season, Lopez batted .228 with a .279 OBP with 36 walks, 92 strikeouts, 59 runs scored and 43 RBIs in 159 games.
Through 85 games this season, Lopez has batted .270 with a .355 on-base percentage, 31 walks, 37 strikeouts, 39 runs scored and 19 RBIs while hitting in the No. 9 spot in the batting order.
What he has done this season falls much more in line with his production throughout the minors.
“As we watched him through the minor leagues, he’s a guy who would get set, trust his hands and then trust his eyes to know the strike zone,” Matheny said. “That’s a rare gift that he has. If we can keep him in that place to where he doesn’t feel like he has to generate more and doesn’t try to do more than what he has been doing, you’re going to see hard hit.”
Fighting his own nature
During his 352 games in the minors, Lopez posted a career batting average of .296 with a .378 OBP.
He walked more times (167) than he struck out (139). He displayed great plate discipline and a knack for putting the ball in play on a consistent basis.
That wasn’t the hitter he’d been since coming to the majors. After getting his introduction to the majors in 2019, he’d spent that offseason adding weight, aiming to get bigger, faster, stronger and change his offensive game accordingly.
Except that tanked his production.
The things he’d been known for such as making contact at a high rate and drawing walks were no longer his strengths. The aspects he’d try to add to his game were fickle at best.
Worst of all, he’d changed the type of hitter he’d been on his own whims, not those of the organization.
“There’s so much outside noise in this world right now that sometimes it’s hard to go on social media and you see that you’re not hitting for power and all this stuff,” Lopez said. “I tried to gain weight and the swing got a little long.”
On one hand, it seems illogical that the 5-foot-11, 180-pound middle infielder who’d always excelled at making contact, putting the ball in play, spraying the ball around the field and being an all-around tough out would all of a sudden decide to hit for power while playing home games in cavernous Kauffman Stadium.
After all, he’d already punched his ticket to the big leagues.
Why would he change what got him to the highest level less than three years removed from his final college game at Creighton University?
Well, part of what propelled him to his success came from using all those knocks against him as the undersized and underestimated player as fuel.
Being hard-wired to want to prove that he could do whatever others thought he couldn’t, that’s what helped him become a fifth-round draft pick in 2016. It’s also what helped him make his way to the big leagues.
“That’s been me my whole life,” Lopez said. “I’ve always been the smallest on the team. I’ve always been the smallest guy, you can’t do this, you can’t do that. I love it. It just adds another chip on my shoulder. There’s a lot of negative people in this world, so you’ve got to use it for a positive. You’ve got to use it for motivation.”
So adding muscle, hitting for power, pulling the ball were challenges he wanted to meet head on because that’s what he’d always done, no matter what anyone else said.
Taking a step back
That headstrong approach changed when the Royals informed Lopez that he wasn’t going to be their starting second baseman on opening day.
He wasn’t going to even be on the major-league roster.
Instead, they were sending him back to the minors with the goal of finding that hitter they’d watched climb through their system garnering All-Star honors in the Appalachian League (Rookie), Arizona Fall League, Carolina League (High-A) and Texas League (Double-A) as well as the organization’s highest honor as the 2018 George Brett Minor League Hitter of the Year award.
When he went to the minor-league side of camp this spring, he sat in a conference room with director of hitting performance/player development Alec Zumwalt laid out the data detailing the issues they needed to address.
Lopez had been consistently missing pitches in the strike zone at a rate he’d never missed before, and he was missing fastballs at a rate of about 30% — again alarming compared to what had been his normal.
They dove into the club’s internal system called “Monarch,” and started analyzing his at-bats from his 2018 season in the minors and simply decided he needed to emulate that mindset and approach.
No big swing changes or retooling mechanics. His adjustments needed to take place between his ears.
That chip on his shoulder he’d wielded as a weapon for years now had to take a backseat to the cold, hard evidence that he’d become a worse hitter by trying to prove others wrong.
“It is hard,” Lopez said. “It’s tough when you have that personal belief, knowing that you can do something, and your personal belief is not matching up with what you’re showing on the field. Spring training was tough for me.
“Obviously I was missing the fastball, swinging and missing a lot, so I had to take that step back and kind of flush everything out, go back to the drawing board, watch a lot of film.”
Lopez’s journey to self actualization as a hitter took an abrupt turn when Adalberto Mondesi suffered an oblique strain on the final day of spring training. Mondesi started the regular season on the injured list, which meant the Royals needed Lopez to fill in as their everyday shortstop.
A trusted veteran voice
Matheny made it clear to Lopez and anyone else who asked that his job wasn’t to hit for power or become a big run producer. Lopez would play his part by having quality at-bats, getting on base regularly, moving runners over, laying down bunts and being a tough out in the batter’s box.
Still, early this season Lopez battled inconsistency. He batted .209 for the month of May with a .308 OBP.
He seemed passive at the plate at times, looking for “perfect” pitches or focusing so much on trying to draw walks that he watched good pitches go by for strikes.
Royals All-Star infielder/outfielder and two-time MLB hits leader Whit Merrifield recognized in Lopez a young hitter putting himself in holes needlessly.
So Merrifield, knowing the type of hitter the organization believed Lopez could be, decided to pull Lopez aside.
Merrifield’s message to Lopez was: “You’re in the big leagues for a reason. You can handle the bat. You can swing the bat. You get a good pitch to hit, you can’t give away strikes up here on a consistent basis.”
Armed with a more aggressive mindset, Lopez has been one of the hottest and most consistent hitters in the majors since the start of June. In 36 games (34 starts) entering the Royals’ short series in Milwaukee, he had batted .330 with a .407 OBP, 14 walks, 15 strikeouts, 10 RBIs and 18 runs scored.
“It’s like he’s got a little more swagger with the bat now,” Merrifield said. “He’s not up there just looking for a walk, even though he’s got such a good eye walks are going to come. He knows he can go up there and do some damage and hit the ball hard.”
Entering the week, Lopez had reached safely in 23 of his last 26 games.
His .270 season batting average is similar to Merrifield’s (.272), and Lopez’s OBP (.355) would rank behind only Carlos Santana on the Royals. Lopez does not currently have enough plate appearances to qualify among league leaders.
“What is the saying? Your biggest successes come after failure,” Lopez said. “Baseball is a game of failure. I know I’m going to fail more times than not as my career goes on, but you’ve got to turn those failures and those negatives into a positive.”
He’s no longer failing at being Nicky Lopez.
This story was originally published July 19, 2021 at 10:14 AM with the headline "How the Kansas City Royals’ Nicky Lopez got his swagger back at the plate."
