Angels’ Brandon Drury is ‘hungry’ to correct the mistakes that led to a ‘brutal’ season

Drury says he changed his swing last winter in an effort to produce more exit velocity and the results were too much extra movement. A free agent this winter, Drury says he will go back to his old swing as he tried to return to form next season.

Sep 29, 2024 - 05:00

Angels’ Brandon Drury is ‘hungry’ to correct the mistakes that led to a ‘brutal’ season

ANAHEIM — After Brandon Drury produced his second straight strong offensive season in 2023, he went into last winter looking for even more.

The result was a season that Drury described flatly as “brutal.”

Drury came into the final two games of the season hitting .171 with a .476 OPS. Both numbers are the worst in the majors for anyone with 300 at-bats.

Part of what went wrong is that Drury changed his swing over the winter in an effort to add more exit velocity.

“I’m in the cage all offseason and I’m hitting the ball four or five miles an hour harder,” Drury said. “That’s intriguing. Who wouldn’t like that? But I think to create that, I had to do more movement and a bigger move and all this extra stuff, and I don’t think that helped.”

Drury said the movement he added to his swing in the cage didn’t translate well once he started trying to hit live big league pitching.

“I’ve been trying to constantly tinker with mechanics,” Drury said. “It’s been back and forth on everything. It’s been tough for me, but I’m looking forward to getting some of this stuff cleaned up this offseason and getting back to who I am, and doing everything I can to be the best player I can be for next season.”

Drury, 32, is a free agent this winter, so he’ll have to convince some team that he still has something left in the tank.

“I’m hungry to get back to feeling good again and get it all figured out again,” Drury said. “This offseason, I still feel like I should be getting better. Sometimes baseball can be a brutal game, and I’m going to use this season to make me a better player overall.”

In 2022 and 2023, Drury produced almost identical numbers, totaling 54 homers with a .262 average and an OPS of .808. He won a Silver Slugger in 2022.

He believes he can be at least that good next season, once he scraps the swing changes he made last winter.

“I don’t need more exit velocity,” Drury said. “If I take my swing and barrel it, it’s hit plenty hard enough. The (previous) two seasons, I was focused on just squaring the ball up, and I was producing a lot of extra base hits. And this off season, I went into it wanting more, so I was trying to do some moves and some mechanic stuff to get more exit velocity. And I think that really kind of backed me up a little bit.”

A BIG MOVE

Left-hander Brock Burke came to the Angels last month in the midst of a horrible season. He was designated for assignment by the Texas Rangers after posting a 9.22 ERA with the Rangers and a 5.31 ERA in Triple-A.

Since coming to the Angels, though, Burke has a 2.79 ERA with 23 strikeouts in 19 ⅓ innings. He said he feels even better than he did when he had a 1.97 ERA with Texas in 2022.

The key to his improvement, it turns out, was pretty simple.

The Angels realized that he’d moved his position on the rubber, to the far third base side. They had him move about 6-8 inches more toward the middle.

“It just cleared up my mechanics,” Burke said. “In Texas I was looking all these end result things, hand position, this and that. Literally it was so simple. The start of my mechanics is what was screwing everything up.”

Burke, 28, is arbitration eligible this winter, under control to the Angels for two more seasons.

NOTES

Shortstop Zach Neto was out of the lineup for the second straight game because of a right shoulder injury. Although Neto said he’s not concerned, he said they still haven’t gotten back all the test results. He has not swung a bat since he was hurt on Thursday. …

First baseman Nolan Schanuel is not expected to play in the season’s final weekend, even though he had said he hoped he could. Schanuel bruised his leg on a foul ball on Wednesday. Manager Ron Washington said on Saturday that he was “better, but not good enough to go out there.” …

The Angels are locked in to their final spot for the 2025 draft lottery, which will be held at the Winter Meetings. The Angels will have an 18% chance at getting the No. 1 pick. The worst they can pick is ninth. The Angels haven’t picked higher than ninth since 1997. …

The Angels season finale begins at 12:07 p.m., an hour earlier than a normal home day game. Major League Baseball schedules all the games on the final day of the regular season to start at the same time, so it’s more equitable for teams fighting for playoff spots.