TEMPE, Ariz. — The Angels have reunited Gio Urshela with the hitting coach who was there when he turned his career around.
Within a couple weeks in November, the Angels hired Phil Plantier as their assistant hitting coach and acquired Urshela from the Minnesota Twins.
“I am really excited to be with him,” Urshela said of Plantier. “I learned a lot with him in 2018.”
At that time, Urshela was joining his third organization of the season, starting in Cleveland and passing through Toronto on his way to the New York Yankees.
Plantier was the Yankees’ Triple-A hitting coach when Urshela arrived that August, having hit .244 with a .544 OPS with the Blue Jays’ Triple-A affiliate. That was on the heels of hitting .225 with a .589 OPS in 167 big-league games with Cleveland and the Blue Jays.
In short, Urshela had done little to show that he was anything but a good-field, no-hit player.
Although Urshela has said that what’s happened since began with the help of Plantier, you won’t get Plantier to take any credit.
Or even to describe specifics on what they did.
“Gio tapped into his athleticism as a hitter,” Plantier said. “It’s always the player that makes decisions and Gio made really good decisions. He worked on things that were good for him. He was able to own what he was doing. He’s a good athlete and he figured it out.”
Urshela said Plantier mostly helped change his approach, getting him to pull the ball with a little more power into the gaps instead of simply spraying it to the opposite field.
Urshela hit .307 with an .815 OPS over the final 27 games of the season with Plantier at Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes Barre.
In 2019, Urshela hit .315 with 21 homers and an .889 OPS in the majors with the Yankees.
Marcus Thames, now the Angels’ hitting coach, had that role with the Yankees in 2019, so the Angels now have both of the hitting coaches who oversaw Urshela’s career breakthrough.
What’s more, Angels manager Phil Nevin was the…
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