Tim Anderson feels back to normal after visiting Driveline to restore his swing

PHOENIX — Lost in his early defensive issues, the team’s struggles and a flap with Josh Donaldson is that Tim Anderson had seemingly figured out this whole hitting thing a third of the way through the 2022 season.

Anderson was hitting .356/.393/.503 at the end of May, which would say plenty in last season’s diminished offensive environment (it was a 157 wRC+). He was riding a sky-high .384 batting average on balls in play, but that was comfortably in line with what he had maintained over the prior three seasons. His power production (.147 ISO) was moderate, which was again impressive considering the league average (.152) wasn’t much higher and Anderson was hitting newly deadened balls largely to right field. Despite being more aggressive than ever, he was swinging-and-missing less than ever and had shaved his strikeout rate to 11.6 percent in the first two months of the season, one of the 10 lowest rates in the majors. He spoke confidently about seeing the ball with remarkable clarity.

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Then, he got hurt.

“Once I got back from the groin (injury), I couldn’t get back to the feeling that I had,” Anderson told The Athletic.

Anderson had to be helped off the field after straining his right groin muscle fielding a ball on May 29. Given the appearance of a major injury, it was surprising that the initial projection was a return to play in three weeks — and even more surprising that he nailed it to the day, smacking two singles in a win over the Blue Jays on June 20. But being able to get through games for a struggling team desperate for his services and re-establishing the same leg load and separation that made his swing so consistent were different animals. A month in, White Sox coaches were publicly noting the differences.

“He went through a stretch when he came back of trying to pull because he couldn’t get into his legs,” former Sox third-base coach Joe McEwing told me last July. “He was getting hits, but he knew he wasn’t himself. But he was still grinding and battled through. That’s what the good ones do.”

Anderson made his second All-Star team and finished with a batting average over .300 for the fourth straight season. But battling for singles provided diminishing returns, as Anderson hit .249/.287/.290 after the injury. Then he sustained a season-ending finger injury in the middle of an early-August series in Texas, where he seemed as out of sorts offensively as anyone had seen him in years.

“I was just trying to be successful, put myself in the best position to be successful,” Anderson said. “But it was just one of those feelings that I couldn’t feel. I couldn’t get back to how I started, and I got away from it. I just could never find it. I was searching all over the place to try to find it, but I could never get that feeling back.”

If the Sox were still in the playoff hunt, there would have been more hope for Anderson returning from the sagittal band tear on his left middle finger for the final few games of the 2022 season. But he still would have been searching for feel mid-stream. Anderson indicated neither issue affected his offseason schedule.

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“Same thing I worked on other offseasons,” Anderson told reporters earlier this week. “Take groundballs and hit.”

Tim Anderson stopping by for some training at our AZ facility the other day 🔥 pic.twitter.com/aqHuUAj3i4

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) February 18, 2023

This is, of course, broadly true, and Anderson is not touting any sort of reinvention in his game. But to ensure he’s back to where he was offensively in the first two months of last season, Anderson worked privately with Driveline Baseball multiple times during the offseason, even visiting its Arizona facility days before camp began. He went through several assessments and used its visualizations to track his progress toward the pre-injury version of himself. Or rather, so it could track his progress.

“I wasn’t really data-searching, that’s more their job,” Anderson said. “I was just making sure I was in the best position to fire and make sure I was getting the most out of my body. If you do that, then obviously the data is going to do what it do anyway, if you’re in the right position. So I wasn’t really searching for anything. I was just really trying to make sure I was getting my correct swing off in the right position.”

That’s not to say Anderson is a passenger in this process. But if the Driveline side of things is cross-checking visual and measured checkpoints in Anderson’s stance, load, swing, etc., he’s the one who has to confirm it feels the way it should in the end.

“I feel like it got me back to, really, my foundations,” Anderson said, “as far as my base and my setup. I wasn’t really searching for nothing else. I was searching for the correct load and making sure I put my body in the best position to fire, strong and effortless.”

Anderson’s new manager, Pedro Grifol, and much of the Sox coaching staff haven’t necessarily worked with him closely enough to talk about his baselines. But Grifol has spent the past several years watching Anderson from the opposing dugout — admiring him even during multiple spats he’s had with the Royals — and says the current version looks like a player who is comfortable using his legs to drive off the ground in his swing.

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“I noticed it right away what he was trying to do, where he was trying to create some ground angles and stay horizontal without losing his legs, going vertical a little bit,” Grifol said. “I asked him about it, and he had told me he was doing a lot of work on that. He’s using his legs. He’s got capabilities of hitting some homers. And we all know what he can do with the bat; he’s a magician with the bat. He can win multiple batting titles. He’s a pretty damn good hitter. But there’s some power in there, too. So I think that’s the one thing he’s been working on, and it’s shown. Not so much hitting balls over the fence; it’s the way he’s attacking the baseball and the way he’s using the ground as a part of his mechanics.”

The White Sox offense is seemingly built on a mountain of conditionals. They could be among the best in baseball if Eloy Jiménez and Luis Robert Jr. stay healthy, if Andrew Vaughn breaks out, if Yasmani Grandal bounces back, if Oscar Colás’ offseason pitch selection work pays dividends, if Yoán Moncada is as locked in as he looks. They lost their most consistent and proven producer in José Abreu, making room for a cadre of young players who could replace his production but haven’t done it yet. The next most reliable hitter for them is Anderson, and after last season, he just needs to get back to being himself.

(Photo: Nick Cammett / Diamond Images via Getty Images)

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