Twins third baseman Miguel Sano, you might have heard, is down in Fort Myers for the biggest swing makeover since "Mambo No. 5" hit the charts. A big part of the reconstruction will be helping Sano recognize and hit the slider, a pitch he has been helpless against this season.
Sano doesn't have to be good at hitting sliders to become a consistent threat in the Twins lineup. He just can't be as wretched as he has been this season.
The numbers are brutal: a .103 average when hitting the slider, slugging percentage of just .138 and a (gulp) 65.6 percent strikeout percentage against sliders, according to Baseballsavant.com.
Teams are actually throwing a smaller percentage of that pitch to Sano this season (21.7 percent to 25.3), but that might be because he is swinging and missing at so many of them instead of laying off ones out of the zone.
But it's not as if Sano made his name pounding sliders, the second most frequent pitch he faces at the plate behind fastballs.
From 2015 to '17, he hit just .213 against sliders with a slugging percentage of .367. It might come as no surprise that his best stretch against the pitch came in the first half of 2017, the half of a season that made him an All-Star. That's when he hit .274 with four home runs off the pitch.
However, the struggles soon re-emerged. In July, his average dipped back to .120 with no home runs.
What happened during that three-month burst when Sano was at least competent in recognizing and doing some damage against the pitch? He was laying off the sliders out of the zone.