Christian Vazquez was tired of being a No. 9 hitter. Here’s how he became much more

Four years after his major league debut, eight months after his long-term contract extension, and just days after his ride down Boylston Street in the World Series parade, Christian Vazquez decided to do something about his disappointing career. He was 28 years old, well established as a glove-first big league catcher, and the Red Sox had just proven a team could win with him behind the plate.

But Vazquez couldn’t get over the offensive numbers forever attached to his name.

Hitting .207 sucked. Finishing with three home runs sucked. Ranking third-to-last in OPS sucked.

“I was tired of suck,” Vazquez said. “I was tired of being the No. 9 hitter in the bottom of the lineup. I don’t like that, you know? I need to play better to feel better.”

So, in November, Vazquez got on the phone with the people who could make him feel better. He called his mother, he called his best friend, and he finally called a 54-year-old former construction worker who’d never played a game of organized baseball in his life. Lorenzo Garmendia had the solution, and it started with a harsh truth.

“I’ve got to tell a major leaguer,” Garmendia said, “‘Hey bro, you’re not very good.’”

Vazquez already knew that. Or, at least, he knew his numbers weren’t very good. He had a tremendous baseline of talent, and that talent had gotten him this far, but he needed to unlock the mysteries of the modern baseball swing. He needed to learn not to suck.

What happened next was a remarkable rebirth that has Vazquez’s career on a whole new trajectory. On Sunday, he hit two home runs, Nos. 20 and 21 this season. He’d never before hit more than five. A year ago, only two players in all of Major League Baseball had at least 250 plate appearance with an OPS lower than Vazquez’s .540. This year, only seven catchers with at least 350 plate appearances have an OPS higher than his .781 and only five have hit more home runs. Add his highly ranked defense, and Vazquez has the highest fWAR of any catcher in the American League. He’s hit so much, the Red Sox have kept his bat in the lineup by starting him at second base, first base and 10 times at designated hitter — more than quadrupling his career DH appearances. He hit ninth on Opening Day, but he’s become a regular in the No. 6 hole.

All because he decided simply being a viable big-league player wasn’t enough.

“Top five catcher in the league,” he said. “That’s my goal. Why not?”

Before this season, there were plenty of reasons why not, but he’s spent the past nine months eliminating them.

Imagine a boxing match. One fighter has a tremendous left hook. The other has a crippling inability to block the left hook. That second fighter might land enough blows to win a couple of rounds, but eight times out of 10, his vulnerability is going to leave him laid out on the canvas.

“That’s your .200 hitter,” Garmendia said.

Garmendia’s conversational style is peppered with analogies like that. Bad swings are like iPhone prototypes. It takes a bunch of bad ones to find one that really works. Moving to a robotic strike zone would be like defensive backs not being allowed to touch wide receivers within 5 yards of scrimmage. The offense would have the advantage. Baseball itself is like a James Bond film, and guys like Garmendia are playing the role of Q, the research-and-development expert.

“People don’t come to see me,” he said. “I’ve got to keep James Bond alive.”

Bond, in this case, is Vazquez. Or it’s Mariners catcher Omar Narvaez, another of Garmendia’s clients having a breakout season at the plate. On a very basic level, Garmendia teaches all of the things that have become familiar in the past half-decade or so. Get the bat on plane. Barrel the ball for hard contact. Lift the ball in the air. Garmendia’s invested heavily in technology so that he can break down video frame-by-frame. He studies extensive data with spray charts, exit velocity and launch angle (even if he doesn’t use that term with his clients).

Garmendia said he literally shows his clients video of Mike Trout’s swing. As he sees it, he’s not teaching theory, he’s teaching fact. These things are not hypothetical. They’re right there for everyone to see, as long as they know what they’re looking at.

“At the end of the day, this is math,” Garmendia said. “All we do is, we look at the best hitters in the world right now. What are they doing? When you look at them, and you know what we know, they’re all doing the same thing.”

Vazquez didn’t know what those hitters were doing. He only knew he wasn’t doing it. Frustrated by the worst offensive season of his career, he called his parents in November, and his mother did not sugarcoat her advice.

“My mom said, you need somebody to teach you to swing,” Vazquez said. “Somebody that knows more than you.”

In search of such a person, Vazquez called his best friend, Marcos Derkes, who’d once played in the Rockies minor league system with a guy named Alex San Juan, who’d begun working at Garmendia’s hitting facility in Miami. That’s how the connection was made. Garmendia watched video of Vazquez’s swing and felt confident he could help, all he had to do was convince Vazquez that he knew what he was talking about, which wasn’t a given because Garmendia can’t hit at all. He was always more of a basketball guy, but Garmendia’s three sons took to baseball. He tried to get them good coaching but couldn’t wrap his head around the things his sons were being taught.

“I noticed, whatever they were telling my kids didn’t make mathematical sense,” he said.

So, 15 years ago, Garmendia’s kids became his first pupils. He studied the game and came to consider himself a particularly good fielding coach, but hitting intrigued him the most and became his specialty. One son wound up drafted by the Brewers. Another signed as an undrafted free agent with the Royals. In 2008, Garmendia’s daughter was in school at Wake Forest when she suggested he start training more people. He opened a tiny place in Miami — he swears it was no more than 12 feet wide — and that’s blossomed into Gradum Baseball, which has four facilities in South Florida.

Garmendia’s business is named after the Latin term for “next level.” In every way, that’s exactly where Vazquez was heading.

Four days a week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday — Vazquez went to Garmendia’s facility to rework his swing into something built for the modern game. Garmendia remembers it being more like five days a week, but maybe it just felt that way because he was floored by Vazquez’s work ethic and commitment.

Among Garmendia’s guiding principles is the idea that the pitcher is the enemy, and a hitter has to take away a pitcher’s weapons. He has to block the left hook.

Vazquez’s greatest weakness, Garmendia said, was the outside pitch, particularly sliders and fastballs. He taught Vazquez a swing that could handle every zone with authority. He started by teaching the inner half, then worked his way to the outside. He taught scouting reports as well, and emphasized driving the ball to all fields.

A swing is an athletic movement, and better athletes seem to make adjustments more easily. Vazquez might not look the part, but there’s a reason Alex Cora has trusted him at three different infield positions. He’s a better athlete than it seems.

“Have you seen him shoot a basketball?” Garmendia asked. “He could hustle some people for money.”

After three months spent overhauling his swing in Miami, Vazquez arrived in Red Sox spring training a changed hitter. He began taking batting practice on back fields he’d been using since he was a 21-year-old prospect, and Vazquez found he was hitting home runs to right field and right-center.

“I’d never do that before,” he said.

When the exhibition games started, the results were an epic failure. Vazquez hit just .132 in spring training and only one ball left the ballpark. But other hitters who’ve gone through the same swing modernization process — J.D. Martinez and Jackie Bradley Jr. notable among them in the Red Sox clubhouse, having also used hitting gurus who never played pro ball — say there’s just no turning back.

“You can’t fall back to where you were,” Martinez said. “Because you know where you were didn’t work.”

Said Bradley: “I think you just focus on the end-game. You know what looks right, and you know what feels right. Once it all connects, then you start to go right.”

Vazquez believed his spring struggles were a product of bad timing. He was executing a new move for the first time against live pitching. Baseball’s a game of repetition, and he needed more reps. When he had his timing, the results would follow. He believed that. What he’d learned made too much sense.

First game of the regular season, he doubled. Second game, he homered. His confidence spiked. April was a good month, but every month since has been even better.

“The root was, I think, he’s invested in his career,” Red Sox hitting coach Tim Hyers said. “(He decided) I want to make a change. I’m better than this. … I do believe hitters learn (when they) really invest in their career and really learn what’s happening with the swing. Some guys just get to the big leagues and they play this game on feel. Perfect. I have no problem with it. But when it goes south with feel, where do you go from there?”

According to Baseball Savant, these are Vazquez’s spray charts for the past two years. There will be no difficulty telling which is 2018 and which is 2019.

Notice that Vazquez was all along hitting singles to all fields — coaches have long praised his hand-eye coordination in the box — but this season he’s added a brand-new ability to drive extra-base hits to the opposite field, and his natural strength has helped him lift a lot of those fly balls out of the park. Before this season, he’d hit 10 home runs in 999 career plate appearances. This year he has 21 home runs in 482 plate appearances.

“I honestly feel like in years past, he’d only hit whatever — three, four, five — but they were all bombs when he hit them,” said longtime teammate Brandon Workman. “He’d hit them 500 feet when he hit them, but he’d only hit four a year.”

Vazquez’s average launch angle isn’t all that different from last season, but his average exit velocity has jumped 1.5 mph and his hard-hit percentage has soared from 28.6 percent in 2018 to 38.7 percent this year. Hyers has noticed improved pitch selection as well. Garmendia has noticed something else.

“Have you seen the pep in his step?” Garmendia said. “Have you seen how he is on deck?”

To Cora, that swagger is familiar. It’s the way Vazquez carried himself in the Puerto Rican Winter League back when he was a young big leaguer returning to his small island. Confidence high. Possibilities ahead.

It feels good to not suck.

(Photo: Laurence Kesterson / Associated Press)