More than the glasses: How a lightbulb moment made Dodgers' Max Muncy a 'complete hitter' again

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Max Muncy, above celebrating a two-run home run against the Royals last Friday, is hitting .313 over his last 43 games with 12 homers and 47 RBIs. (Ed Zurga / Getty Images)
The glasses might've come first. But it was a lightbulb moment with the swing that made the most profound change.
Just over a month into the season this year, veteran Dodgers slugger Max Muncy was in a desperate search for answers.
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Through the team's first 30 games, his batting average started with a one and his home run total was stuck on zero. His role as the team's starting third baseman was being called into question, fueling early-season speculation that the team would need to replace him before the trade deadline. He was absorbing daily criticism from fans, while trying not to succumb to internal self-flagellation.
The 10-year veteran had gone through cold starts before. But nothing quite so frustrating as this.
'It's a privilege to play under this pressure, and it's something I've always thrived on, but it doesn't mean it's been easy,' Muncy said on the last day of April. 'It's been a rough month.'
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Starting that afternoon, however, Muncy made one big change. Upon learning he had astigmatism in his right eye, he began wearing glasses at the plate to balance out his vision. In his first game using them, he hit his first home run of the year.
Then, nine days later, came the real breakthrough.
After spending the entirety of the winter tinkering with his swing, and most of the opening month trying to calibrate his mechanics, everything suddenly synced up during a May 9 at-bat in Arizona.
Muncy took a quick hack at a high fastball from Diamondbacks reliever Kevin Ginkel. He lined a ninth-inning, game-tying single through the right side of the infield in the Dodgers' eventual win at Chase Field. And he realized that, finally, he'd found a feeling in the batter's box he'd been chasing the last several years.
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A demarcation point had just been established.
And Muncy's season has been transformed ever since.
'The funny thing about baseball is, sometimes, it just takes one swing, one play, one pitch to lock someone in,' he said. 'And ever since that day, I've had that feeling in the back of my head. Like, 'That's what it's supposed to feel like.''
In 36 games before then, Muncy was hitting .188 with only one home run, eight RBIs and 43 strikeouts; his early days with the glasses not even leading to an immediate turnaround.
But since May 9, he has been one of the best hitters in baseball, and on one of the most prolific stretches of his entire career. Over his last 43 games, Muncy's batting average is .313, a personal best over any span that long in the majors. He has 12 home runs and a whopping 47 RBIs, a major-league-leading total in that stretch. According to Fangraphs' all-encompassing wRC+ statistic, only Ronald Acuña Jr., Cal Raleigh, Aaron Judge and Ketel Marte have been more productive at the plate.
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And, most important, he has reestablished himself as a central cog in the Dodgers' lineup.
'He's one of our most trusted hitters,' manager Dave Roberts said this past weekend. 'I haven't always been able to say that.'
Being a better, more trusted hitter has been a work in progress for Muncy ever since the devastating elbow injury he suffered at the end of 2021.
In Muncy's prime years with the Dodgers from 2018-2021, he not only blossomed as one of the best sluggers in baseball by belting 118 home runs over a four-year stretch, but did so while posting a .246 batting average and .371 on-base-percentage; solid marks for a power threat occupying a key role in the middle of the Dodgers' order.
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At the core of that all-around approach was an ability to handle pitches to all parts of the plate — none more important than elevated fastballs at the top of the strike zone.
Dodgers first baseman Max Muncy writhes in pain after colliding with the Milwaukee Brewers' Jace Peterson during the final regular-season game in 2021.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
'When I'm going well, I'm a really good high-fastball hitter,' Muncy said earlier this year.
'When Max is covering that pitch,' added hitting coach Aaron Bates, 'it allows him to do so many other things as a hitter.'
Coming off his elbow injury, however, getting to high heat became a weakness in Muncy's game. For much of the next two years, when he still hit for power but batted only a combined .204, he felt 'it was really hard to replicate' his old swing. Last year, he made some incremental progress — when he batted .232 — but was stalled by an oblique strain that cost him the middle three months of the season.
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Thus, this winter, Muncy set his mind to rediscovering his old mechanics.
'It really wasn't that big of a change,' he said. 'It was just going back to what I did when I first got here from 2018 to 2021. The same philosophy I had all those years.'
The work started in January, when Bates and fellow Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc visited Muncy at his home in Texas and crafted a simple focus for the 34-year-old's offseason work: Purposely practice hitting grounders and line drives on a lower trajectory, in hopes it would train his swing to stay on top of the ball even on pitches up in the zone.
'You know he's naturally going to have loft in his swing to elevate the baseball easily,' Bates said. 'So that was a focus point for him, making sure he can hit a hard line drive on a pitch up in the zone, not necessarily trying to elevate it more than he needs to.'
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A sound theory, with some disastrous early results.
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At the start of the year, Muncy's new swing thought bred other unexpected bad habits. In his effort to stay on top of the ball, he was opening up his backside and letting his front shoulder drift too far forward at the start of his move. As a result, Muncy had trouble squaring the ball and keeping his bat level through the strike zone. It led to not only a lack of power, but a diminished ability to distinguish the kind of pitches being thrown — evidenced by a nearly 32% strikeout rate in April that was seventh-highest among MLB hitters.
'That's where it's tough playing the sport,' Muncy said. 'Because you can't chase results immediately, even though you kind of have to. You have to chase the process in the long run.'
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And even as external pressure over his dwindling production mounted, Muncy said the club's coaches and front office assured him he'd have time to keep working through it.
'It's easier to stick with something long-term when that's the case,' Muncy said. 'And for me, that's been my entire career. Trust the process, not the result.'
During late April, Muncy's process included a visit to the same eye doctor who had diagnosed Kiké Hernández with eye astigmatism last year; a discovery that prompted Hernández to start wearing glasses, and keyed a sudden offensive turnaround in the second half of the season.
Turned out, Muncy had a similar problem. Though his vision was 20/12, astigmatism in his right eye had made him left-eye dominant, a subtle but limiting dynamic for a left-handed hitter.
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Thus, on the last day of the month, Muncy also started wearing prescription-lensed glasses, and christened the new eyewear with a home run in his first game using them.
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'It's not necessarily something that I need,' Muncy said. 'But just any chance at all it evens out both eyes for me, I've been taking it.'
Yet, in his first week using them, he still went just six-for-28 with nine strikeouts and only five walks. He was still grinding through his adjustments to his mechanics. He was still waiting for one swing where everything would feel synced up.
When Muncy came to the plate in that May 9 game against the Diamondbacks to face Ginkel, he surveyed the situation, put his swing mechanics out of his head, and tried to focus on only one objective.
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'It was guy on second, no outs,' Muncy recalled, 'so I was trying to give up the at-bat, get the ball on the ground to the right side of second base, and move the runner from second to third.'
Throughout his career, this is when Muncy is at his best. When his mind isn't clouded by the pressure to produce, or the particulars of his swing. When he's 'going out there and just trying to play the situation,' he explained. 'Like, 'What is my at-bat calling for in this moment?''
And on that day in Arizona, with the Dodgers trailing by one run in the ninth, that simplified mindset gave Muncy his moment of long-awaited clarity.
Ginkel threw a 95 mph fastball up near Muncy's chest. The slugger hit it with the kind of quick, level swing he'd spent all winter attempting to craft.
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As the ball rocketed through the right side of the infield for a game-tying single, Muncy felt a lightbulb go off as he pulled into first base.
Fans cheer as the Dodgers' Max Muncy rounds the bases after hitting a grand slam on June 22 against the Washington Nationals.
(Luke Johnson/Los Angeles Times)
'I was so short and direct to it, it just triggered something in my head,' Muncy said. 'It kind of took all the stuff I'd been working on, even going back to the winter, and was like, 'OK, this is how I'm trying to get it to feel.''
Muncy hasn't looked back ever since.
By being able to cover the top of the strike zone, he hasn't had to cheat on fastballs or hunt on tougher pitches to hit around his knees. When coupled with the glasses that have helped him better differentiate velocity from spin, he's been able to be selective and wait out mistakes.
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'There's been spells in his career where it was the three [true] outcomes and that was it,' Roberts said, long a believer in Muncy's ability to be a more potent hit collector, rather than just a high-powered, high-strikeout slugging presence. "Now, I think he's a complete hitter. So you see the runs batted in, the homers, the quality of at-bats all tick up."
During this torrid two-month stretch, highlights have come in bunches for Muncy. He's had two seven-RBI games and another with six. He hit a game-tying home run in the ninth inning against the New York Mets early in June. He had two grand slams in the span of three games last week.
He has gone from the subject of trade deadline rumors to a fan-voting finalist to make the All-Star Game.
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He knows it's still only been two months; that, in a sport as fickle as baseball, the feeling he has discovered at the plate can just as quickly disappear again.
But for the first time in years, he's healthy, in sync and possessing total clarity — in both vision and mind — every time he steps to the dish.
'This is definitely more of what I was envisioning,' Muncy said this weekend, reflecting back on the early-season struggles and laborious swing work over the winter that preceded his two-month tear.
'Now, I have the confidence to know I can accomplish pretty much anything I want to do for that situation. Whereas, before, you don't always have that.'
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.