Crusade against grounders continues early in 2017 campaign

Thanks to his blistering speed, Trea Turner, the 23-year-old potentially miscast as the Washington Nationals' leadoff hitter, has been advised over the years by various consultants - including his former coach at North Carolina State - to hit the ball on the ground more. You know, like Willie Mays Hayes in "Major League."

Not gonna happen, coach.

"People tell me that," Turner remarked to the Washington Post's Jorge Castillo last September, "and I'm like, 'Shut up.'"

Three games into the 2017 campaign, Turner has put the ball in the air in seven times, struck out four times, and hit just two grounders. But don't mistake this for defiance or misplaced hubris. This is, by and large, how forward-thinking hitters approach their craft now.

Ground balls are no longer cool. Despite the considerable efforts of slap-happy single-hoarders like Pete Rose and Ichiro Suzuki, they probably never were. Now, though, with players starting to educate themselves on concepts like launch angle and expected outcomes - ideas that have been expounded on at places like Baseball Prospectus and the The Hardball Times for several years now - commonly held (and commonly preached) truisms about hitting approach and hitting mechanics are starting to change.

"There have been so many things as hitters we've been taught, that I believe are incorrect," Toronto Blue Jays star Josh Donaldson said during an appearance on MLB Network. (About a month earlier, the 2015 American League MVP tweeted out a video of himself doing cage work with a caption that read: "Just say NO ... to ground balls.")

The objective of this paradigm shift is clear: hit bombs (and get paid). A ground ball can't go over the fence, after all, and though fly balls result in base hits less frequently than grounders, hitting the ball in the air is a better avenue to run creation. It's becoming increasingly clear that even if that message isn't necessarily coming from the front office, the players get this. Small-sample caveats apply, but the league-wide 1.25 ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio early in the 2017 campaign represents the lowest mark since 2011.

The early returns have been modest - despite the jump in fly-ball rate, the league's .153 isolated power (slugging percentage minus batting average) is down almost 10 points from 2016 - but that's no reason to freak out. Players know to trust the process. Some know a lot more, even.

"I want to hit the ball in the air (every time), optimally at about 25 degrees at 98 miles per hour," Daniel Murphy, Turner's teammate, told the Washington Post's Thomas Boswell in February. "Those are home runs. Ryan (Zimmerman)'s exit velocity last year was elite (14th in baseball, at 94.1 mph). He's just looking to take his already elite skill of putting bat to ball and (achieving high) exit velocity off the barrel and get it at the right angle. Now we're really starting to do some serious damage."

Murphy continued: "He hit the ball really hard last year. He's already doing the hardest thing at the high end. I don't think there needs to be big adjustments."

Not everyone is as studious, obviously, but they get the concept, and they're buying in. After slugging a pair of homers off Jered Weaver on Thursday, Los Angeles Dodgers right fielder Yasiel Puig outlined his approach at the plate, and he's very much on the same page as Murphy and Donaldson.

"What I think about is putting the ball in the air," Puig told the Los Angeles Times' Andy McCullough through an interpreter. "Or else I'm going to have no money in my pocket."