Kyle Tucker said he wasn’t looking for anything specific Saturday afternoon.
Just better feel for a swing that has plagued him all season.
In what manager Dave Roberts described as a “very telling” move from the team’s $240 million offseason signing, Tucker went out on the field twice ahead of Saturday’s game for some rare open-air batting practice.
There was one session off a velocity machine hours before the game. Then, another during traditional pregame batting practice — his first time participating in that all season.
Typically, Tucker does all his swing work out of sight in the team’s clubhouse batting cages.
Then again, typically, the four-time All-Star isn’t struggling the way he has lately.
“He’s working hard,” Roberts said, “to try to work through it.”
The good news for Tucker: A day after his batting practice sessions, he seemed to finally find something in the Dodgers’ rubber-match win Sunday over the Phillies, going 2-for-4 with an RBI and a couple well-struck balls.
He laced a 100 mph line drive in the first inning that was unlucky to find the glove of Justin Crawford in center.
He chopped a 92 mph one-hopper in the third that was very lucky to kick off the bag at first for an RBI single.
Then, on his fourth-hardest-hit ball of the season in the fifth inning, he smoked a rocket of a double off the wall in deep right.
“Today,” Roberts said, “looked [like] more of who he is.”
The problem for Tucker, at least to this point of his debut Dodgers campaign, is that he has not been able to translate breakout days such as Sunday’s into more prolonged hot streaks.
The nine-year veteran is still hitting just .242 on the season, on pace for a career-low mark. He has just four home runs and a .729 OPS, struggling to find much power in his left-handed mechanics.
The biggest “red flag,” Roberts said before Sunday’s game, remained Tucker’s elevated rate of chasing pitches (24% this year, compared to 17.5% the last two years) and whiffing on swings (22.7% this year, compared to 20.2% and 19% the past two seasons).
“I think that speaks to not being selective enough,” Roberts said. “Because he is a guy that, by nature, can run deep counts and still be fine getting to two strikes. But it just seems like he’s much more hyper-aggressive than I recall.”
A few weeks ago, Tucker seemed to turn a corner. After batting .233 with a sub-.700 OPS in the opening month of the season, he was bumped down the batting order, made some subtle refinements to his approach, then hit .268 with an .849 OPS over his next 28 games.
But even then, Roberts said, Tucker still “didn’t look right, and I don’t think he felt right.”
Indeed, on this homestand, he fell back into a 1-for-16 slump before Sunday’s two-hit performance, triggering a couple outbursts of frustration leading up to Saturday’s on-field BP work.
“I think that it speaks to his toughness and fight to still try to perform,” Roberts said. “But it still wasn’t right, as far as not even close to being locked in.”
The Dodgers have been just fine despite Tucker’s inconsistent production, of course. They have won 14 of their last 17 games and five consecutive series to build a 5 ½-game lead in the National League West.
Still, they are paying the 29-year-old a whopping $60 million this season for a reason.
And while he finally lived up to that billing Sunday, the search for consistency continues to drag on.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
