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Watching Jason Heyward, the Virtuoso Who Is Still Figuring It Out

The Chicago Cubs' Jason Heyward is both a star and a riddle, and one of baseball's least-appreciated most valuable players. It's all inherent in what he does, and it may always be.
Photo by Jeff Curry-USA TODAY Sports

In a game against the Chicago Cubs in St. Louis last week, with one out and a runner on third, Cardinals catcher Yadier Molina lifted a fly ball to right field, deep enough to score the run under standard circumstances. These were not standard circumstances, though, because Jason Heyward plays right for the Cubs. Having moved from St. Louis to Chicago on a substantial contract in December and got off to a slow start, Heyward was surely eager for any opportunity to chip in. He was also just doing what he does: playing the best defense at his position in baseball.

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The runner on third, Matt Holliday, tagged up. Heyward circled under the ball, caught it while jogging forward, and threw. The trajectory and aim were perfect. The throw one-hopped and met catcher David Ross at his chest protector. Ross turned and did the simple work of applying the tag, making official what had been clear from the moment the ball left Heyward's hand, which was that Holliday didn't have a chance.

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Heyward excels at these sorts of plays, and at making exceedingly difficult tasks appear, when he pulls them off, inevitable. He goes after gappers that other outfielders would have to dive for and ends up throttling back by the time he catches them. He climbs the wall not with the usual jigsaw of limbs but with an orienting hand and a timed hop. When he shoots a double down the third-base line or pulls a homer over the right-field fence, his swing—a flicking down-then-up job that almost traces the first letter of his name—seems like the sort of quiet but handy tool that would bring good outcomes as a matter of course.

All of this is to say that Jason Heyward can make baseball look easy. And then, in the same week or the same game or sometimes even in the same moment, he can make it look very hard. His first stretch as a Cub has passed in a barrage of groundouts and a sub-.300 slugging percentage, and though there's every reason to view the cold start as an aberration, it is an instructive one. Heyward makes his home at an uncanny intersection, a place where the ways we think about the game, through pattern and expectation and style and hope and history, don't meet quite flush. He is always just to the side of where it seems like he's supposed to be.

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When you see an interesting critique of your whole thing on Vice Sports Dot Com. Photo by Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Heyward is six-foot-five, with a mannequin's build and all the watchful patience anyone could want in an outfielder. Leaning on the dugout railing or standing still out in right between pitches, he looks calm and sure of his ability. Get him moving, though, and Heyward is one of baseball's foremost fidgeters. When he plays catch between innings, he drops his arm below his belt and gives it a wiggle before each throw. When he waits on a pitch at the plate, he grips and re-grips his bat handle like some bleary-eyed high school student fiddling with his pen. When he steps out of the box to spit after fouling off a pitch, he has to go through the extra step of pulling a faceguard away from his mouth; he's worn it since taking a fastball to the jaw in 2013.

This distinction—cool at rest, antsy in action—is a pretty apt summary of what it's like watching Heyward play. He puts up the kinds of statistics that suggest steady, high-level contribution; he's bettered five and a half wins above replacement in four of his six Major League seasons. He gets to those numbers, though, in fits and starts. Heyward's defense is one of the most dependable assets in baseball, but his bat is a riddle. He can go a third of a year unable to do anything with an inside fastball but tap it to the first baseman, and then without warning he'll start searing everything in the strike zone.

The same evening Heyward gunned down Holliday, MLB Network, broadcasting the game, showed a display of Heyward's various batting stances over the years. There was the one he used in Atlanta as a rookie, when he homered in his first at-bat and put together what remains his best offensive season, and the one he used in St. Louis in 2015, when he shook off a slow start to help the team to 100 wins. There were images from up years and down, and it was hard to tell, just by looking at them, which were which. Though the stances shared most essential characteristics—pinched shoulders, locked spine—they were all was distinct in some minor way, like face cards from different decks. In one, Heyward closed his usually open stance. In another, he dropped his normally upright bat head. His hands shifted by inches from frame to frame, and his feet rotated by degrees.

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Is that confidence or a lack thereof? Like most everyone who watches him, Heyward thinks he can be better, and he privileges long-term gain over interim discomfort. The motivation is healthy. The sight of it, though, can be unnerving. Standing at the plate with his hands here and his feet there and holding his bat like this, Heyward looks like he's trying to learn how to use himself. Which I guess he is.

A normal inning in a normal game. Photo by Matt Marton-USA TODAY Sports

Sports has developed a vocabulary for players like Heyward. The logic of this language is that athletes are comprised of two principal elements: physical talent, which prescribes a best-case career, and makeup, which decides how much of that career is realized. Because he is tall and strong and tends to experiment and adjust, and because he has been a good baseball player but not yet a great one, announcers, columnists, and fans use the words we've always used in these scenarios. Simplify, relax. Don't think so much. At least some of Heyward's coaches have undoubtedly given him the same thumbnail prescriptions.

There's comfort in that sort of advice, for the giver if not for the recipient. It provides a mystery with a cause, sets aside a clean explanation. It suggests that inconsistency is merely something waiting to be resolved, not a basic fact of the world, and that epiphany and self-knowledge are just around the corner. It assumes, too, that we have some idea what the hell we're talking about.

Consider, though, that Heyward may not be on his way anywhere. What we've called development for the past half-decade may just be the final product: a player who is good sometimes and bad others, who is curious and hard-working and does what he can to move things in the direction of the former.

Consider, too, why we'd rather diagnose stalled progress than essential imperfection. Maybe frustration with Heyward is really frustration with the inability to tell the difference, to do anything but shake our heads and say the issue is between the ears—his, not ours. Maybe it's worry, because it all looks just a little too recognizable for comfort. Maybe it will always be too soon to tell.