St. Petersburg, Fla. — Jonathan Schoop’s island lessons continue to serve him well, even at age 30 and 10 years into his big-league career.
“They used to tell us, ‘You have to swing your way off the island,’” Schoop, a Curacao native, said earlier this year when he was scuffling mightily at the plate. “You can’t walk your way off the island.”
He kept swinging. And since May 8, he’s gone 10-for-40 with a pair of doubles and a pair of homers — that .250 average, modest as it is, is 100 points higher than the average he brought into the month.