Cubs’ Trey Mancini carrying lessons from last year into spring training adjustments

MESA, Ariz. – Trey Mancini could tell he was in a good spot with his swing to start spring training because even when he was getting jammed, he was eking out soft line drives and bloopers that would fall in.

“I was staying through the ball really well and getting hits on those,” Mancini told the Sun-Times. “And that can be the difference between you getting close to .300, or hitting .230 or .240 in a year.”

Lately, his timing has been a little off, which he sees as the root of his strikeouts. They haven’t been egregious; Mancini only had one multi-strikeout game in a little over a week, when he punched out three times against Milwaukee last Sunday. But he’s also rolled over on some of those pitches that he had been poking into the shallow outfield.

“We all always want to analyze our swing and see what’s going wrong,” he said. “Normally, it’s going to be something with your timing.”

Spring training comes with less pressure than September baseball, but the difference in Mancini’s mindset now is far different from his approach to a slump late last year. He’s among the Cubs’ offensive bounce-back candidates who could help them exceed projections.

Mancini signed with the Cubs this offseason after a unique 2022 season. He was hitting .268 with 10 home runs for the Orioles, the only organization he’d ever played for, when the Astros traded for him as a difference-making power hitter in the second half.

At first, all went according to plan. Mancini hit three home runs in his first eight at-bats with the Astros, and he was batting .296 in the first couple weeks of August. But as the month wound down, he sunk into a rut, and he remained there through the postseason. He made one mechanical tweak after another.

“I was looking for an epiphany, almost,” he said. 

After the World Series, which featured a Game 5-saving defensive play by Mancini at first base, Mancini took two months off from hitting.

“I just wanted my body to forget what I was doing at that point,” he said. 

The rest of his offseason centered on simplifying his mindset and cues. Mancini’s best swing generates a lot of opposite-field power. When he hit a career-high 35 home runs in 2019, over half of those were up the middle or to right field. He wants to get back to “hitting the ball with authority that way.” 

He went through old video of his best offensive seasons, 2017 and 2019, and tried to remember what his mindset was at the plate. 

“I was very, very just focused on one thing, and that was the baseball,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking about anything I was doing.”

Physically, Mancini’s swing starts with his legs, and everything else follows. But when he thinks about replicating his mechanics that way, his hands lag too far behind. 

Instead, he’s found that if he thinks about starting with his hands, “everything else [falls] into place.”    

“It’s a little unorthodox,” he said, “but for me, that’s what works.”

Mancini sums up his mentality in two words: “Try easier.”

He’s putting it into practice now that he’s hit his first rough patch of the year. 

“Trey’s really smart, and he understands his swing,” hitting coach Dustin Kelley said. “So he knows when something is just a tick off. And he’s the type of guy, when it’s a tick off, he wants to address it right away and not let it snowball.”

This time, Mancini’s not trying a series of mechanical fixes. He knows the issue is the timing of his load. Mancini wants to be recognizing the pitch while his weight is in his back leg, almost “hanging” in that split second before shifting forward. 

He’s been just slightly ahead of that mark, but that can be the difference between laying off the inside pitch off the plate and chasing it, or between hitting a soft line drive and rolling over into a groundout. 

“You don’t want to go through all spring and have it be a breeze, and then you go into the season and face your first set of adversity there,” Mancini said. “It’s good in spring to feel a little uncomfortable. You want it to simulate the season because the season is going to have its ebbs and flows.” 

On Sunday, in the Cubs’ 5-2 walk-off win against the Padres, Mancini struck out in his first at-bat and grounded out in his second. 

Mancini next stepped up to the plate in the fifth inning with the bases empty and one out. He almost was charged with an automatic strike when he lost track of the count but called time out before the clock hit eight seconds.

“Was able to gather myself and reset,” he said. “And it felt really good to hit that backside line drive there.”

Deflected by Padres right fielder David Dahl, it fell in for a double.

“The thought process is, you want to be feeling like that from the first at-bat,” Mancini said. “So, always trying to get better, but at the same time, not worrying too much if it’s not a great game.”