What Thames and Fielder Learned in Exile

Those who witnessed Eric Thames play in South Korea aren’t so surprised about his exploits in the States this April. After all, he was dubbed “God” there while playing for the NC Dinos in the southeastern port of Changwon.

Over the last couple of weeks my colleagues at FanGraphs have written about the scary, scarier, and scariest feats and underlying performance metrics of Thames.

On Tuesday, FanGraphs editor Dave Cameron asked the people what they would now pay for Thames. (FWIW, I chose to pay Thames $11-15 million of my make-believe dollars per annum. You can still vote!)

Thames continued to mash Tuesday evening…

And Thames continues to be drug tested…

Even if the Reds’ staff remains mostly equivalent to KBO pitching — kidding (kind of)! — Thames has been Bonds-ian over the first few weeks of the season.

Thames has always possessed power and bat speed. That was apparent in his first go-around in the majors. But he has returned as a much more selective hitter. Only Robbie Grossman is swinging at fewer out-of-zone pitches.

This is what a locked-in hitter’s heat map looks like. This is a data-density chart of all 92 of Thames’ swings this season via Baseball Savant:

So we know why Thames has been so good. We know what underlying processes are at work here thus far. But what happened while he was out of sight and out of mind?

There aren’t many of historical comps for a Thames’ road map and comeback. Perhaps there’s only one, actually — that of Cecil Fielder, who spent a year in Japan before return to the majors in 1990 as a bonafide slugger with a 51-homer campaign.

One shared feature of their respective experiences playing on the far side of the world? Fielder and Thames enjoyed everyday playing time, something which neither was afforded during their first experiences in the majors.

Fielder, a fourth-round pick in 1982 out of UNLV, debuted with the Blue Jays late in the 1985 season. He shuttled between Triple-A and the majors in 1986 and spent all of the 1987 and 1988 seasons with Toronto. But Fielder never reached more than 175 at-bats in a single season with the Blue Jays as a part-time DH and first baseman. Thames, meanwhile, received 290 plate appearances in the majors in 2011 with the Blue Jays and 290 in 2012 split between two teams. Again, not a regular job.

While attempting to understand how Fielder changed as a player before returning to the United States, I found a 1990 piece written by Thomas Boswell for the Washington Post.

Writes Boswell in it:

[Fielder] is first player to go to Japan so he could come back to America to be a star. He’s the only Japanese import welcome in Detroit…. After most of five seasons in the minors, and parts of four seasons with Toronto, Fielder was fed up. Tagged a platoon player in a talent-rich organization, he showed a self-confidence almost unique in baseball history. He expatriated himself, became a Hanshin Tiger and hit 38 home runs in 106 games.

“Usually, old guys go to Japan because they can’t bear to hang ’em up,” said Tigers teammate Alan Trammell. “Cecil went there [at 25] to get a chance to prove how good he really was. He may have opened some eyes among young players” …

“It’s tough for a platoon player to be patient when you know you have to do it now,” [Fielder] said. “If you get only eight or ten at-bats a week, that’s really pressure because if you don’t do well, it could be less the next week. When you play regularly, you let things happen.”

Like Thames, Fielder returned to the majors as a more selective hitter.

In his first run in the majors, from 1985 to -88, Fielder posted a 8.2% walk rate and 25.8% strikeout rate in 558 plate appearances. During his 1990-93 peak, in the first four years after his return, Fielder boosted his walk rate to 12.1% and cut his strikeout rate to 22.2%. From the WaPo piece:

“He’s totally different,” said Orioles Manager Frank Robinson. “He used to chase bad off-speed breaking balls in the dirt and fastballs up and in. Now he handles more types of pitches and he not only hits the ball out off the plate hard, but he hits it out of the park.”

“In Japan,” explained Trammell, “they don’t want the Americans to beat them. It’s a matter of pride. So they pitch around the good ones. Cecil had to learn to use the whole field and be patient, because he wasn’t going to get many good pitches to drive {to left field}.”

While Fielder’s experience occurred 30 years ago — and in a different pro league at that — perhaps there is still something significant instructive worth considering as it relates to Thames. Writing for USA Today, Bob Nightengale asked Thames what he learned while he was in the KBO.

Interestingly, Thames noted that the size of the KBO strike zone played a role in honing his discipline.

He was a free swinger when he left the USA, hacking at 33% of breaking pitches outside the strike zone … If it was within 3 feet of the batter’s box, Thames joked, he was swinging.

In Korea, he learned discipline. Korean pitchers routinely throw no harder than 88 to 91 mph but will make your head spin with an array of split-fingered pitches and breaking balls. If you don’t adjust, your next job might be selling cheeseburgers.

“I had to really bear down in the strike zone and learn how to have plate discipline,” Thames says. “I would have to carry that here because they throw harder and the strike zone is bigger.”

But there’s also something to be said about leaving a comfort zone of a native land, about being immersed in a foreign culture, and also being removed from the spotlight of the majors. Thames not only refined his zone, he found more time to reflect and gain perspective, according to Nightengale:

Could he have learned that discipline by maturing and staying in the USA?

“You know how life is under certain circumstances kind of like the butterfly effect,” Thames says. “I feel like if I stayed here, I probably would have gone on the same path that I was on. I was the kind of player that I put too much pressure on myself, tried to do too much. I was too much into my own head. …

“When I went over there, I started to read a lot more, study inner peace, meditate, really embrace the mental toughness training. I could focus on the process, and don’t worry about the results.”

And that process, that self-imposed exile, has led to unthinkable results. Thames took an unusual path, but perhaps — for the right, scuffling, opportunity-shuttered Stateside player — it can be a road map to follow.