PHILADELPHIA — Kevin Long is trying to get the Phillies out of their hitting funk that led them to four straight losses heading into Sunday night’s game against the Yankees.
But for a few minutes before the game at Citizens Bank Park, the hitting coach was transported back to the beginning of his coaching career, just after he retired as a minor league player and took over as the hitting coach with Kansas City’s Class-A affiliate in Wilmington, Del., in the spring of 1997.
His first task was to take the organization’s young star, Carlos Beltrán, and help make him a switch-hitter.
Nearly two decades later, Beltrán ended up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, inducted Sunday in Cooperstown.
During his speech, Beltrán said becoming a switch-hitter was the “biggest decision of my career.”
Just shy of 20 years old, Beltrán, a natural right-handed hitter, worked with Long in extended spring training and went on to become one of the best switch-hitters in the history of the game.
“That was my first assignment as a coach,’’ Long said Sunday. “Somebody there thought he should be a switch-hitter and they put that in my hands, which I’m very grateful for. It taught me a lot at a very young age.”
Long, 31 at the time and having topped out at Triple-A as a player, was paired with Beltrán, in his third season in professional baseball.
“It really wasn’t to get him down the [first base] line faster or anything like that,” Long said of the decision to teach Beltrán to hit left-handed. “Maybe he was struggling righty-on-righty. I don’t know. Still, to this day, I don’t know.”
The pair just went to work.
“We hit every day at 10 or 11 in the morning, went to lunch together and came back and hit again,’’ Long said.
Beltrán, who grew up in Puerto Rico, was also still learning English, and Long said the two learned how to communicate together.
“There was a lot of Spanglish going on from both of us,’’ Long said.
Sunday, Beltrán pointed to their time together for helping shape his career on and off the field.
“There’s no doubt that you really helped me change my career,’’ Beltrán said. “People today might see the numbers, the home runs, everything that I did, but you and I remember the words that we put together to try to make that work.”
Beltrán’s talent was never in question.
“His tools were off the charts,’’ Long said. “The arm, the speed, the power, his bat speed. He was an elite player with an extreme skill set in every area.”
Beltrán mostly struggled at the plate in that 1997 season, but exploded the following year, as he opened the season at Wilmington before jumping to the majors from Double-A in September.
And Beltrán went on to be the American League Rookie of the Year in 1999.
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“It was not hard to see how good he could become,’’ Long said. “He could do things on a baseball field no one else could do.”
The pair reunited when Beltrán signed with the Yankees prior to the 2014 season, with Long the hitting coach.
“It was nice to be together again so many years later,’’ Long said. “For us to both have all that success was pretty special.”
And while he wasn’t in Cooperstown with Beltrán on Sunday, he was aware his former player made a point of crediting him.
“It’s a pretty cool story,’’ Long said.
— Additional reporting by Mark W. Sanchez in Cooperstown
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: nypost.com
