TEMPE, Ariz. — Logan O’Hoppe needed to get away from baseball to see things more clearly.
The Angels catcher gave plenty of reason to be optimistic about his career when he hit 20 homers with a .712 OPS in his first full season behind the plate in 2024. A six-week stretch of miserable hitting in August and September, though, showed O’Hoppe what he needs to do to take the next step.
“Once I got away from that, that’s when I really did a lot of learning,” O’Hoppe said Thursday.
The first part was physical.
Last season, O’Hoppe started 121 games behind the plate, third most in the majors. He caught 1,064⅓ innings, which also ranked third.
It’s natural to assume that fatigue played a role in his slump at the plate in August. O’Hoppe, 25, made it clear – then and now – that he wasn’t fatigued.
“No, not at all,” he said. “I wanted to play that many games. I was vocal about it. I don’t regret a thing from last year.”
However, as O’Hoppe talked through it a little more, there was a caveat.
“At the end of the year, I wasn’t worn out because of my playing time,” he said. “It was all the stuff I was doing off the field. I got home (in the winter) and I really needed some time to reflect on managing things.”
For example: “Not taking 250 swings a day in the winter. It’s a challenge, whether it’s taking 50 to 75 swings a day, it’s hard. You get home and you feel like you’re being lazy, but your body feels good over a certain period of time, you know you’re doing the right thing.”
O’Hoppe also said he wasn’t “throwing as much weight around as frequently” in the gym this winter, which was also part of rehabbing a knee that bothered him late in the year.
Manager Ron Washington appreciated O’Hoppe’s attitude about his workload last year, even though he saw something a little different.
“He’s Superman if he wasn’t tired,” Washington said. “But what I loved about him being tired is he didn’t believe he was tired, and he showed up every day at the ballpark and went at it like he wasn’t tired. That’s the mental side of it. He accomplished that because he told you he wasn’t tired.”
Heading into this season, O’Hoppe not only has the benefit of experience in how to manage his work, but the Angels also have a much better backup. The Angels signed Travis d’Arnaud, a 36-year-old who has caught for 12 years in the majors.
“D’Arnaud is going to step in and take some of the pressure off him,” Washington said. “It’s going to be a fight every day to get (O’Hoppe) out of the lineup, but that’s what we’re going to do to protect him. He may end up catching more games than any catcher in the game. He probably will do it because he’s that durable. But we have to take care of him, and that’s what we’re gonna do this year. You don’t want to be back there, hurting, having soreness, trying to play when a day (off) will help that soreness, when we’ve got a quality guy to go out there and we won’t miss a beat.”
Aside from the fatigue issue, Washington said he’s expecting to see more out of O’Hoppe at the plate, as he learns how to be a big-league hitter.
Washington said at times he felt O’Hoppe was looking for homers, instead of simply taking what the pitcher was giving him.
“If you play your amount of games that you’re supposed to play, whatever amount of homers you’re supposed to hit, they’re gonna be there,” Washington said. “You don’t need to try to do it. He’s strong enough to do that.”
O’Hoppe – as you’d expect – denied that he was ever thinking about hitting a homer when he went up to the plate, but Washington wasn’t buying that.
“Sometimes when you’re young, you don’t know what honesty is with yourself,” Washington said. “(Homers are) in the back of all these young kids’ heads, because in this industry, if you go deep, you get paid.”
O’Hoppe did acknowledge, however, that he did learn a lot about his swing when he reflected on that six-week stretch when he hit .103 with a .355 OPS. Although he wasn’t trying to hit homers, he was trying to do things that weren’t specifically in his strengths, he said.
“I know the kind of hitter I want to be now,” O’Hoppe said, “and that really took a lot off my plate, just maximizing my strengths and trying to do things that come naturally, and trying to really sharpen and polish those skills off.”
NOTES
The Angels signed right-hander Shaun Anderson to a minor-league deal with an invitation to camp. Anderson, 30, has appeared in 69 big-league games over parts of five seasons. Last season he pitched six games, with an 8.27 ERA. He struck out 10 and walked one in 16⅓ innings. He allowed 34 hits. …
Right-hander José Soriano said he feels good, after missing the end of last season because of arm fatigue. Washington said the goal for this season is to get Soriano from 113 innings to about 160. …
First baseman Evan White is healthy and in minor-league camp. White has been plagued by hip problems for most of his career. He has played just 84 big-league games since signing a six-year, $24-million deal with the Seattle Mariners in late 2019. The Angels acquired him for infielder David Fletcher and catcher Max Stassi in what was essentially a swap of bad contracts with the Atlanta Braves in late 2023. …
The Angels announced that this season they will have Bobblehead nights recognizing five players: O’Hoppe (Aug. 22), Mike Trout (Sept. 8), Zach Neto (July 25), Nolan Schanuel (June 21) and Ben Joyce (May 2).