ST. PETERSBURG — The new approach to hitting came about after meetings between hitting coach Derek Shelton and Kevin Cash, Cash and the baseball ops guys and Shelton and assistant hitting coach Jamie Nelson. The new approach was basically this: If you see a fastball and you think you can hit it, have at it.
It was as if the restrictor plate attached to the offense was removed.
No longer were the hitters encouraged to work counts, to add pitches to the opposing pitcher’s pitch count.
Patient? If you must.
Aggressive? Why not?
“We had had kind of an organizational philosophy of how we were going to control at-bats, and we went away from it a little bit and did something different,” Shelton said.