As he stepped into the batter’s box, Matt Duffy could feel his body tighten. His mind raced. He had trouble controlling his usually rhythmic breathing. When the pitcher delivered the pitch, Duffy tensed up. He was leaping into the pitch, something he does when he feels uncomfortable at the plate. A once smooth and relaxed swing became rigid and long. But this was not unfamiliar. It was something he had dealt with throughout 2016.
Advertisement
“I would be fine in batting practice, I would be fine when the ball was on a tee, when it wasn’t moving and when there were no people,” Duffy said. “But the second I got in the box, I kept telling myself ‘I gotta get a hit, I gotta get a hit.’”
Duffy’s approach at the plate has always been simple. He takes a deep breath. Takes a quick glance at his bat. Controls his breathing throughout the at-bat. He sees the ball, reacts accordingly, and lives with the results.
It’s a simple approach. Until it isn’t.
“I felt a lot of anxiety creep in,” Duffy said. “I wasn’t anxious as a person. But once I stepped in the batter’s box, I was tense. I was so tense. I wasn’t relaxed, I didn’t look comfortable, I didn’t feel comfortable, and it just really carried over into my hitting.”
As the first half of the season comes to a close, Duffy is enjoying a resurgent 2018 campaign. He has been a fixture at the top of the Rays’ lineup and leads the team with a .314 batting average. That success is the product of a two-year-long process for the Rays third baseman.
After breaking into the big leagues in 2014 with the Giants as the youngest player on that World Series-winning roster, Duffy followed that the next season by slashing .295/.334/.428 and securing a second-place finish for the National League Rookie of the Year. In just a year and a half in the big leagues, he experienced success at the highest level. As the 2016 season got underway, he wanted to prove that he wasn’t just a one-year wonder — and created an enormous amount of self-induced pressure.
“It wasn’t like I was hitting below the Mendoza Line, but .250 is not where I think I should be. And that was part of the problem,” Duffy told The Athletic.
“I was seeing those numbers and I was thinking, ‘I gotta get a hit, I gotta get a hit, I gotta get a hit’ when it’s like, ‘no, get rid of the numbers, just relax, see the ball, and put your best swing on it.’”
Advertisement
As Duffy battled his mind, his batting average began to plummet. Following every out, Duffy would run to the video room to try to see what was wrong with his swing. He would see a mistake in the mechanics and sort it out in the cage, but once he got into the batter’s box, he would lose control of his thoughts all over again.
“He was one guy that always worked on his craft, so we tried to back off and do less,” said Hensley Meulens, who served as the Giants’ hitting coach in 2016. “At some point, he had to do less.”
Throughout his first couple of seasons in the big leagues and in his time in the minors, Duffy kept a copy of Mental Keys to Hitting by Harvey Dorfman, a handbook that focuses on the internal aspects of the game. In 2016, he stopped carrying it around. Not having the book wasn’t truly a problem, but for Duffy, it was a sign that he had forgotten to check in with himself mentally and address any negative thinking that may have popped up.
“For some reason, I didn’t carry [the book] around — I don’t know if I thought I figured it out,” Duffy said. “I think everyone can relate that there are always negative thoughts rolling through your mind, no matter how figured out you think you have it, there’s always a little devil in your head, that’s like ‘you’re not that good, you need to change something.’”
That inner voice grew louder as his batting average dipped to .234 after an 0-for-4 game against the Cardinals on June 4. Duffy would arrive early to work on his mechanics, but nothing seemed to be working. Fifteen days later, Duffy suffered an Achilles strain at Tropicana Field while playing with the Giants. A month later, he was dealt to the Rays.
Duffy eventually returned from the disabled list and played in 21 games for the Rays in 2016 before shutting it down on Sept. 5. The daily grind of baseball was too much for an injury that required rest.
Advertisement
“I couldn’t even put my foot past 90 degrees,” Duffy recalled.
Because of the ongoing discomfort in the Achilles, the Rays and Duffy agreed surgery would be the best option moving forward. Doctors told Duffy that the expected recovery time was somewhere between three and six months. Like any athlete, Duffy was frustrated he was going to miss time, but he was ready to attack the process.
As time went on, Duffy’s pain was not subsiding. Duffy reached the six-month mark but was still not ready to endure the everyday grind of baseball. Duffy couldn’t understand why he wasn’t feeling better. Months went by and the 2017 season was well underway, but Duffy’s pain remained. His frustration grew to the point where he started wondering about what came next.
“The frustration comes when you hear 3-6 months, but it takes longer than that,” Duffy said. “That’s when you start asking, ‘What’s wrong with me? Am I ever going to be back? Where am I going to go to school after baseball? How am I going to make money for the rest of my life?’
“I thought my career was essentially over.”
Finally Duffy’s dad, Tom, started doing his own research. He stumbled upon some blog posts, which he sent over to Duffy, in which other patients were reporting that it took them about a year to feel better after the same surgery. Like Duffy, many of them had also been told they would have a three-to-six-month recovery time.
For the first time in a long time, Duffy was relieved. Maybe his body wasn’t betraying him.
“In the post, they said, ‘I don’t care what your doctor tells you, this is a one-year thing’,” said Duffy. “I was like ‘okay, let’s calm down and see how this plays out. Maybe I’m not weird. I’m not injury-prone. I’m not broken.’ It’s not a heel that doesn’t want to get healed.
“It wasn’t until a year to the day that I was like, ‘Oh shit, this feels close to good. I still feel it a lot, and I’m still not where I need to be, but I can almost say that it feels decent.’”
Advertisement
Duffy’s Achilles finally started to heal. Now he needed to work on his mental approach, something that had now been an issue for him for nearly two years. As frustrating as the injury was, it helped Duffy hit the reset button. After the Rays and Duffy decided he would miss the entire 2017 season, he used that time to observe how his teammates handled success and how they dealt with the inevitable defeats. He would check to see if they ran to watch video after making an out, or if they just accepted that failing is a part of the game. You’re going to ground out with the bases loaded. You’re going to go through slumps. But you’re also going to find success.
As the 2017 season came to a close, Duffy finally identified his problem. It wasn’t in the mechanics — the issue was in the way he was approaching the game. He knew he needed to stop forcing it.
“If you’re trying to chase hits, it’s so stressful because you don’t really have much control over it,” Duffy said. “For me, the best mindset is the one that consistently puts me in a position to get hits, and I lost that.”
Off the field, Duffy picked up hobbies to keep his mind sharp. He started painting. He built with Legos. He played the MLB The Show video game to keep his competitive juices flowing. He even went as far as creating a team in the game and made his home ballpark Fenway Park — a park Duffy never felt comfortable playing in — “in hopes that I rake in the game, and then I’d come back to the park and I could rake,” he said, laughing.
“When I got to Fenway Park, I promise you that I didn’t feel as uncomfortable as I did before.”
Thus far, the experiment has worked. Duffy has collected a hit in four of five games this season at Fenway Park, including a four-hit game on April 28.
It may sound quirky, but it was all part of Duffy’s rehabilitation process — not for his Achilles, but for his mental approach. Duffy continued to battle his anxiety as he got back on the field during this year’s spring training, but thanks to his earlier revelations, he was able to address it more effectively.
Advertisement
Duffy also wanted to prove something to his teammates. Tasked with being Evan Longoria’s successor at third base, he was eager to show why he was chosen as the main piece in the package that shipped Matt Moore to San Francisco. He hit .327 during spring training and was finally past the Achilles injury that he once believed would end his career.
Duffy’s batting average hovered around .250 when the Phillies came into town for a three-game series in April. On April 14, Jake Arrieta was on the mound, with the Rays down 7-1 in the fourth inning, when Duffy came up to the plate with runners on first and second.
He took a deep breath. He took a quick glance at his bat. He controlled his breathing. He saw the pitch, but he didn’t react as Arrieta threw a 92-mph two-seam fastball out over the plate for a strike.
Even though he didn’t swing at the pitch, Duffy knew he had experienced a breakthrough.
“When I landed, I was like, ‘That was it. Mechanically, I was good, mentally, I was good,’” Duffy said. “Now just do the same thing and let the hands fly.”
He took another deep breath. He took a quick glance at his bat. He controlled his breathing. He saw the pitch, and this time he reacted as Arrieta tried to sneak another 92-mph two-seam fastball out over the plate. Duffy lined it into the left-field corner for an RBI double.
“I literally felt like I blacked out,” Duffy recalled. “Before I knew it, the ball was going down the line. I came back to the dugout and I told [hitting coach Chad Mottola], ‘that was it, right there.’”
To everyone else, it was just a double. But to Duffy, it was the culmination of a long, exhausting process. It served as validation that his body would follow his mental approach at the plate. Since that double against Arrieta, Duffy is hitting .343 and has been a consistent force at the top of the Rays’ lineup. And he is constantly checking with himself mentally.
“It was something that happened so easily and so quickly, that it was a lesson and it is something that I’ll never lose again,” Duffy said. “I’m always going to be on myself about it.”
(Top photo of Duffy: Adam Hunger/Getty Images)