Your New Favorite Player: Corey Dickerson

Every now and again we’d like to offer up a suggestion in case you are looking for a new favorite player. Today: Tampa Bay’s Corey Dickerson.

Corey Dickerson never could get people to notice him. He grew up in Brookhaven, Mississippi, which is a tiny place about an hour South of Jackson. It is an oddly magical place for a town of only 12,000 or so people. Hall of Fame wide receiver Lance Alworth grew up in Brookhaven. Robert Pittman, the guy who created MTV, grew up in Brookhaven. Civil rights and labor pioneer Addie L. Wyatt — the first African-American woman to be named Time Person of the year — was born in Brookhaven.

And Corey Dickerson — he was a huge Brookhaven sports star in high school, football, baseball, basketball, you name it. He mashed 45 home runs in high school. You couldn’t get him out.

Nobody recruited him. Nobody drafted him.

He somehow believed that baseball was his future, though. He went to Meridian Community College and crushed the ball there too. As a freshman he did a fun interview where he said that his dream was to play professional baseball someday. He had his coach there convinced.

“I truly believe Corey will be a big league player,” Meridian baseball coach Chris Rose said. “I have never been more confident about saying that with any player. Actually, I have never said it.”

I love that quote, especially the “actually” part. Dickerson was drafted in the 29th round after his first season. He came back to Meridian and was drafted in the eighth round the next year by Colorado. He was a non-prospect, really. He was a non-prospect even after hitting 32 home runs in Class A Asheville in 2011. Few thought the bat would quite adapt to big league pitching. And he didn’t really have anything else going for him as a prospect; he was viewed as a defensive liability with a below average arm.

But — and this is the story of Corey — he improved dramatically. His bat just kept getting better and better. He impressed everyone with his work ethic and his toughness. He broke his nose in a game, and came back almost immediately. He does not have much (or any) natural speed, so he worked so many agility drills that he became a more-or-less average base runner. And he just kept hitting until the Rockies just gave him a shot.

In his firs full year in the big leagues, he hit .312/.364/.567 with 57 extra base hits. It was a good story.

And the Rockies enjoyed watching him grow up in the system … but they traded him anyway for some bullpen help. Dickerson went to Tampa Bay last year and was pretty blah. He did hit 36 doubles and 24 home runs, but he struck out four times as often as he walked, he struggled in the outfield, he just wasn’t all that great or noticeable.

But here’s the thing about Corey Dickerson, the reason he should be your favorite player. The guy never stops getting better. It’s one thing to watch the gifted — the Mike Trouts, the Bryce Harpers, the Manny Machados — fulfill their destinies as great players.

But a guy like Dickerson does it and you begin to think about the potential all of us have. Dickerson just keeps grinding away on his weaknesses, keeps improving in subtle ways, and suddenly you look up and — wow, Corey Dickerson is having one of the best years in baseball. Sure, it’s early, but at the moment he’s hitting .347/.397/.635. He leads the league in hits and total bases.

How? Well, he has just figured out some things. Look at these two charts. This is 2016 exit velocity against right-handed pitchers based on where the pitch was hit in the strike zone (this is from the catcher’s perspective).

Now look at it in 2017:

It’s not too different, really, except in the margins. You can see that last year, pitchers had success throwing the ball inside on Dickerson as a left-handed hitter. If you jammed him, well, look at that box. Up and in his exit velocity was 85.5 mph — that’s an out. Middle in it was 88.9 mph — that’s an out. Down, it was 94.7 mph, which is good, but not especially scary. Throwing inside wasn’t too daunting a task.

Now, you throw it inside and just miss your spot, he’s crushing the ball. Middle in, he’s up to about 92 mph, which can cause some damage. But down and in, look out, he’s absolutely crushing the baseball. That 104.5 mph exit velocity in the down and in corner and the 97.9 mph exit velocity on the down and middle box, those are doubles and home runs more often than not.

One of the tough parts of hitting, I think, is covering the gaps in your swing. Everyone has them. Ted Williams had them. What made Ted Williams so ridiculous was that he knew that pitchers could find the gaps in his swing with every pitch. Sooner or later, they would make a mistake. Sooner or later, they would give him a pitch to hit.

Dickerson has started to figure it out too. It’s fun to watch a star emerge when you least expect it.

Our Daily Trout

On Saturday, Mets manager Terry Collins seriously considered walking Mike Trout with the bases loaded. Well, anyway, he said that he seriously considered it. There’s no point in describing just how ridiculous a strategy it is to purposely walk a hitter with the bases loaded.

This intentional walk with the bases loaded thing supposedly has happened three times in baseball history. Everyone remembers the Barry Bonds one, but it happened more recently, in 2008, then Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon intentionally walked Josh Hamilton with the bases loaded. The score was 7–3, the bases were loaded, and and Maddon ordered Grant Balfour to intentionally walk Hamilton to put the tying run on first base and the winning run at the plate. It “worked” in that Marlon Byrd followed with a strikeout to end the game. But … come on.*

*I really like Joe Maddon. Everyone really likes Joe Maddon. I think he’s a wonderful manager. Everyone thinks he’s a wonderful manager. But I’m actually amazed how often I think his baseball strategies are kind of whack.

The second one was Barry Bonds, 1998, Buck Showalter ordered it with two outs in the ninth and Arizona clinging to an 8–4 lead. That one also “worked” in that Brent Mayne made the last out, though he put together a terrific at bat and crunched a long line drive to right that was caught. One thing that people tend to forget about the Bonds intentional walk with the bases loaded is that it happened BEFORE he became cartoon Barry Bonds, the guy who hit 73 home runs and slugged 800 and was intentionally walked 120 times in a season. This was regular old awesome Barry Bonds.

The third one is one of the weirder quirks in baseball history … you will see it written in various places, talked about at various times, and Baseball Reference has it logged in: On June 15, 1941, in the second game of a doubleheader between the Giants and Reds, the old story goes, Cincinnnati’s Lonny Frey was intentionally walked with the bases loaded.

You look back: The walk makes absolutely no sense at all. For one thing, Frey was the Reds’ №7 hitter, he was hitting .211 at the time and all that. But more to the point: Frey’s Reds led the game 4–3 in the eighth inning. Intentionally walking Frey at that moment was entirely pointless and ridiculous even if TRY to think of a reason.

So why did they do it?

Answer: They didn’t. It’s just a mistake someone made along the way, and it has mushroomed through the years. I went back to the game stories; there was no reference to Frey being intentionally walked. He definitely walked. He might even have walked on four pitches. He was unquestionably NOT intentionally walked.

A Modest Replay Request

As most brilliant readers probably know by now, I have my issues with instant replay in sports. I’ve written it once or twice or a thousand times, lost count. I’m not some Luddite who repudiates technology, and I’m not an overbearing traditionalist resistant to all change. At least I don’t think so. I am absolutely a fan of fixing obviously wrong calls with instant replay reviews.

My problems with replay have to do with everything BUT the obviously wrong calls. I don’t like how replay makes us break down the molecular structure of our games so that things we always simply understood — a catch in football, a slide in baseball, offsides in hockey — are studied under powerful microscopes until they morph into something different and fuzzier. I don’t like how we re-litigate our games by turning everything over to an appellate court. I don’t like how replay has taken the “live” out of our sports — we can’t ever really cheer until the whole thing goes through appeal.

But I do realize that I’m in a minority, a tiny minority, and that most American sports fans would go through a district court of appeals, the United States court of appeals and the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes to GET THE CALL EXACTLY RIGHT.

Still, I’d like to make a modest proposal: I think replay in baseball would be infinitely better if we would just agree to simply stop reviewing what you might call “continuation plays.”

Most plays in baseball are not continuation plays. They are instantaneous. A hitter running to first on a ground ball is either safe or out. A fly ball is either caught or not caught. A runner trying to score either touches home plate first or is tagged first. A shot down the line is either a home run or it is a foul ball.

I absolutely like replay on these plays. True it sometimes takes too long and true I think some plays are so close that it’s silly the way we try to split the atom by looking at it from 25 different angles in super slow motion. But, in general, instantaneous plays have a right and wrong answer, and it is an answer that matches the eye and fits in with the long history of baseball. Replay these all you want.

So what are continuation plays? A stolen base is a continuation play. When someone is trying to steal a base, let’s say second, the play does not end when he touches the base the way it does at home plate. Instead, the play continues on. Does he stay on the base? Does his foot bounce off the base for a millisecond? Does the player’s right fingertip lose contact with the base or is it just touching? Does the fielder manage to kick the hand off the base while maintaining a tag?

This stuff, in my mind, should not be reviewed. The other day, Michael Schur and I drafted sports rules on the PosCast, and the fun part of it was that we both agree on a basic ideal — rules are living, breathing things. The infield fly rule, for instance, as Michael says, is not important in the details. What’s important is that baseball arbiters are saying: “OK, come on, no funny business, all right? No dropping fly balls to try to get cheap triple plays. Come on, let’s keep it clean out there.”

Well there’s another theme in the baseball rules — the “tie goes to the runner” principle. It’s not actually a rule (and let’s be honest, there are no ties) but I always thought the basic philosophy was this: All things being equal, let’s cut the runner a break. Baseball relies on action. If a player is out, the player is out. But we don’t want to make it any harder than it already is to get a hit, to steal a base, to go first to third on a single, to try for a triple and so on.

That’s why these overrules on continuation plays — on stolen bases, on runners advancing the extra base and so on — annoy me to no end. Did he beat the throw? Yes? Then he’s safe. Sure, if he obviously comes off the base so that an umpire can see it live, fine, then he’s out. But to search and search for tiny cracks of light between the runner and the bag as the play goes on and on, well, that is entirely against the spirit of baseball in my book.

I don’t expect anyone to agree with me on this. But I will say that if they would just stop reviewing continuation plays, I would stop writing about my distaste for instant replay.