For the first week of his big league career, Michael Chavis has made it look easy.
In his first at-bat, he drilled a rocket to center for a double off Tampa Bay's Jose Alvarado, a ball hit so hard that Kevin Kiermaier, who leads all major leaguers in defensive runs saved for the past three seasons, got turned around the wrong way while in pursuit.
Soon after came two home runs at Fenway, one of which cleared everything in left and was measured as the longest home run hit by a member of the Red Sox this season.
Hitting in the big leagues is simple, right?
Not quite.
To get here, Chavis had to overcome a couple of hurdles in the minor leagues - one that's common for most prospects and another that, frankly, isn't.
First came a couple of seasons of struggle at Low-A ball. In 2015, the year after he was selected in the first round of high school in Georgia, Chavis slashed just .223/.277/.405 and struck out 144 times in 435 at-bats. Then, the next year, he battled a couple of hand injuries and additional inconsistency.
It was Chavis's first experience with failure and it was a challenge.
"He didn't have that same body control,'' said Red Sox hitting coach Tim Hyers, who watched Chavis as a high schooler in Georgia and served as the Red Sox' minor league hitting coordinator for the first two years of Chavis's pro career. "Like every high school player, when he first got here, the breaking ball away gave him a lot of trouble. And I think, at times, his swing got long.''
Chavis made some adjustments. He stopped chasing balls out of the strike zone and waited for more hittable pitches. The results? He had a breakout year in 2017, split between High-A and Double-A, smashing 35 homers.
"Talking to him and some of our (minor league) coaches,'' said Hyers, who by then had moved on as assistant hitting coach with the Los Angeles Dodgers before returning to the Sox last year, "I think he learned to lay off some pitchers' pitches and be more consistent with his pitch and not miss it as often. I think he realized he had to tighten up some things with his swing. When you're at that level and you start getting to Double-A and Triple-A, you start to realize you have to make some adjustments. You can get by with some things in A ball and you can beat up the league on talent alone. But by Double-A, you're facing pitchers who command a lot better and can hit you with a plan.
"You have to dig deep and make the adjustments. It's a mental game. A lot of these guys come in physically strong and mentally weak. You have to be strong in both to make it up here. And your mental strength has to go, just like your physical strength. It's a day-to-day grind and it can beat you up. In this day and age, they identify your weaknesses pretty quickly and they see them clearly.''
But in the spring after his breakout season, Chavis failed a drug test and was suspended for half the year for violating baseball's PED protocol. To this day, Chavis maintains that he didn't knowingly take anything illegal, and to his credit, returned at midseason in 2018 and picked up right where he left off the year previous, slashing .298/.381/.538 with nine homers in 46 games.
That, to Hyers, showed something about the player's resiliency.
"Absolutely,'' Hyers said. "You know it weighed on him and for him to come back the way he did and not miss a beat, it shows he's growing up and that he learned from a difficult time and he'll better off for it. I didn't doubt that he would come back.''
Chavis politely declined to talk about his frame of mind during the suspension ("Honestly, at this point, I'm kind of done talking about that - it's in the past''), but did say the experience made him stronger.
"I definitely think it did,'' said Chavis. "In this area, given how intense it is with sports in Boston, everyone's very into it and cares so much, so I think (that experience) kind of prepared me for it. There's going to be a time down the road when things aren't going to be going my way, things are going to get tough, but I think that taught me the value of perseverance and how to grind through tough times and press on.''
And should those challenges surface, Hyers believe Chavis is uniquely situated to handle them.
"He's a baseball rat when it comes to hitting,'' he said. "He loves to talk about it. Hitting's his thing. He knows his swing and he knows how it feels. He understands his swing and he knows what to do when it gets out of whack. He also does a much better job of having a plan during batting practice. He hits the ball the other way, mimicking some things that he'll have to adapt to in the game. It's really impressive seeing his growth.''
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