Scoreboard! Former Angel Brandon Marsh has been a big hit with Phillies
Brandon Marsh didn’t make a habit of perusing the scoreboard before every plate appearance with the Angels in 2022 — he’s not that much of a masochist — but toward the end of his tenure in Anaheim, the statistics were impossible to ignore.
A top prospect and elite defender who was expected to take over in center field when Angels star Mike Trout moves to a corner spot, Marsh was one of baseball’s least dangerous hitters for the first four months of the season.
When he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies for catching prospect Logan O’Hoppe on Aug. 2, Marsh was batting .226 with a .637 on-base-plus-slugging percentage, eight homers, 37 RBIs and 117 strikeouts in 93 games, his 36.2% whiff rate the worst in the major leagues.
“I mean, you look back at the numbers, and what I was doing wasn’t going to play,” Marsh said before the Phillies opened a series in Dodger Stadium on Monday night. “So you’ve got to try to be as coachable as you can and have some adjustability in order to stay in this locker room. That’s very, very hard to do, but sometimes you’ve got to push your pride to the side and put your trust in the guys in the cage, trust the staff here.”
Top prospect Brandon Marsh finally made it to the majors this season. It has come at time when he has had to deal with the death of his father and a close friend.
For Marsh, that meant playing the Long game. The 25-year-old outfielder put his faith and future in the hands of highly regarded Phillies hitting coach Kevin Long, who helped the left-handed-hitting Marsh overhaul a stance and swing that has transformed a weak bat into a lethal weapon.
Marsh’s offense improved immediately in Philadelphia, where he hit .288 with a .773 OPS, three homers and 15 RBIs in 41 games to help fuel the 87-win Phillies’ unexpected run to the World Series, where they lost in six games to the Houston Astros.
Phillies fans took a shine to Marsh because of his long, stringy hair and ZZ Top-inspired beard, the energy he oozed on the basepaths and in the field and the way he, in his own words, “acts like a 12-year-old kid at times.” Now, they’re digging him for his elite production at the plate.
After a winter of intensive work with Long in Arizona, Marsh has emerged as one of baseball’s best hitters in 2023, with a .326 average, 1.029 OPS, four homers, seven doubles, four triples and 14 RBIs in 29 games. He ranks among baseball’s top 10 hitters in OPS (sixth), average (eighth) and triples (first).
“It was a grind for sure, we definitely pushed each other’s limits to see where we can get,” Marsh said of his winter work with Long. “We fine-tuned a lot of things and eliminated some holes in the swing.
“We talked about what pitches to go for, what part of the zone to attack and when. It’s still a small sample size, but it’s been good. We just gotta find a way to keep it there.”
Long wasted no time taking a sledgehammer to Marsh’s approach. On Marsh’s first day with the Phillies last August, Long suggested he widen his stance, quiet his hands and eliminate the double toe-tap he used in Anaheim. That improved Marsh’s timing and helped him get around on the fastballs he was often late on.
There were so many more adjustments over a winter in which Marsh and Long spent three or four days a week in a Phoenix-area batting cage together that Angels fans might not recognize the player who reached the big leagues with them in 2021.
Marsh stood taller back then, with his legs closer together and his bat more upright. He had a pronounced bat tip, or hitch, in his backswing that made it tougher to get the barrel through the zone quick enough to pull balls with authority.
Marsh is now crouched in the box with his legs spread apart and bent, his hands positioned higher and the bat almost flat on his shoulder. His stance is neither open nor closed. He aligns his feet with the pitcher’s release point — slightly toward left-center field against a right-hander and toward right-center field against a left-hander.
With fewer moving parts and barely a hint of a hitch, Marsh is seeing the ball better and allowing it to travel deeper. He has a shorter path to the ball and is using his hands more effectively.
“It’s staying behind the ball, not on the side of it or around it,” Marsh said. “I’m trying to drive the ball to left field and left-center, staying on the heater and reacting to the offspeed as best as I can.”
The numbers tell the story. Marsh’s hard-hit rate has jumped from 39.8% in 2022 to 48.3% in 2023, and his walk rate has jumped from 4.4% to 12.8%. His strikeout rate is down slightly, from 29.7% to 28.4%, but the percentage of pitches he’s swinging at outside the strike zone has dropped from 33.7% to 27%, according to Fangraphs.
Marsh hit .228 with a .722 OPS against four-seam fastballs last season according to Baseball Savant. He’s hitting .382 with a 1.229 OPS against the heater this season.
After hitting .188 with a .486 OPS against left-handers last season, Marsh is batting .375 with a 1.215 OPS against them this season. He has the same number of homers (two) and RBIs (seven) in 24 at-bats against lefties as he does in 65 at-bats against right-handers.
“It was just a matter of time, whether it was in Anaheim or Philadelphia,” said Joe Maddon, who managed the Angels from 2020 to last June 7, when he was fired amid a 12-game losing streak. “Maybe it’s language. Sometimes it’s about saying the same thing with different words, where it really resonates with a player, and I would bet that’s what happened here.
“As a hitting coach and as a hitter, redundancy is a really big part of becoming better. It’s been my experience personally and as a teacher that there has to be that light-bulb moment, that epiphany, where everything the coach had been saying to me all of a sudden makes sense.”
Marsh’s success in Philadelphia begs the question: Did the Angels suggest some of the same adjustments that Long has?
“Ummm … with hitting, you can go from many different guys who preach different things,” Marsh said. “So they teach differently, but a lot of the same stuff, yeah.”
So why did he struggle so much in Anaheim?
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Marsh said. “I’m just here playing ball day by day. I forgot all about 2021 and early 2022.”
The Angels’ collective failures at the plate in 2022, which included the inability of Marsh and Jo Adell to reach their offensive potential, led to the dismissals of hitting coach Jeremy Reed and assistant John Mallee, and the reassigning of assistant Paul Sorrento to a player development position.
Shohei Ohtani was brilliant on the mound for the first three innings and a home run short of a cycle as the Angels edged the Oakland Athletics 8-7.
Angels general manager Perry Minasian, reached by phone in St. Louis, said he “wouldn’t feel comfortable” talking about another team’s player but reiterated what he said at last summer’s trade deadline, that he wasn’t looking to deal Marsh when the Phillies inquired about him.
“You have to give to get, and the catching position for me is the most important position on the club,” Minasian said last August. “We really liked what we got back.”
Indeed, O’Hoppe was off to a superb start with the Angels before tearing the labrum in his left shoulder April 20 and undergoing surgery. When O’Hoppe returns next season, the trade should be win-win for both clubs. But the Phillies, thanks to Marsh’s hot start, are getting the best of the deal this year.
“It’s nobody’s fault — it’s just that the hitter got better,” Maddon said by phone from his home in Sugarloaf, Pa. “Everybody is looking for the obvious. ‘Well, he’s not doing this or that.’ No. He figured stuff out. He started to feel things he had not felt before. His confidence came up. He played in a World Series, and he wants to do it again. He’s motivated. And he’s a great athlete. That’s why he’s good right now.”
Go beyond the scoreboard
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