In the wee hours of the morning in Memphis, Tennessee, Hunter Goodman flipped the switch to become the elite power hitter he was destined to be.
At the start of the Rockies All-Star’s freshman season at Goodman struggled, including a five-strikeout game in which he tried to bunt in his last at-bat because his confidence was so low. But Goodman never stopped working, and that sweat equity included routine hitting sessions well past midnight in the Tigers’ cages.
“I would wake up in the morning and have all these TrackMan numbers sent to me from late, late in the night,” recalled Clay Greene, the Memphis hitting coach who recruited Goodman. “Come to find out, Goodman (and one of his teammates) would eat dinner, play some video games, then go back up to the cages and hit.
“He was not going to go to sleep unless he had a good round. And he was not going to sleep until he figured it out.”
A week after that five-strikeout game, Goodman homered twice on the same day, one dinger in each game of a doubleheader. He didn’t look back, and that afternoon was one omen sandwiched between many that foretold his rise into one of the majors’ preeminent power hitters.
At 2, Goodman would wait on the porch for his dad to get home to hit tennis balls past dark. At 6, he gave his mom a bloody nose when he cranked a whiffle ball into her face in the front yard.
At Memphis, as he burst onto the college scene as a sophomore, he hit a grand slam in three straight games in a single series. After he fell to the Rockies in the fourth round of the 2021 draft — there were concerns about him coming out of a mid-major, as well as over Goodman’s strikeouts and potential behind the plate — Goodman kept hammering harbingers.
He blasted 36 homers across his first season of pro ball. Then 25 homers for Double-A Hartford in ’23 before getting promoted to Triple-A Albuquerque, whereupon Goodman hit a grand slam in his Isotopes debut.
The power hasn’t let up since his establishment in the majors, as he set a Rockies record for homers by a backstop over the past two seasons while becoming only the fourth NL catcher to hit 30-plus dingers in consecutive seasons. The 26-year-old’s list of accomplishments dates back to those late nights in the Memphis cages, where Goodman would hit round after round of breaking balls off the pitching machine to address what was then a kryptonite.
“I hit some home runs in high school, but it wasn’t a crazy amount,” Goodman said. “College is when I started to realize I could hit a lot of homers and that I can do a lot of damage. Learning to adjust to the breaking ball and be able to pull that, and get it to the pull side in the air, I focused on that a lot. That was a turning point in my hitting career.”
Swing path, barrel rate, bat speed
A combination of swing mechanics and approach cemented Goodman’s status as an elite big-league power hitter, which in turn has made him the subject of an array of trade rumors leading into the Aug. 3 deadline.
At 5-foot-11, 200 pounds, Goodman’s lower half is built like a tank. He is a traditional pull-hitter with his power — all but eight of his 31 homers so far have gone to left or left-center. But that pull-happy approach is enabled by an opposite-field mindset.
“He’s trying to hit fastballs just off the right of center field, which puts him on time for all the offspeed,” Greene explained.
That strategy also enables Goodman to keep his barrel on plane in the zone. Hence his in barrel rate at 17.6%. That, combined with bat speed (75.4 mph average, which ranks in the 88th percentile), enables Goodman’s consistent power despite a of 34.9% that only ranks 102nd.
“His bat is in the zone for a long time, from deep in his swing all the way to extension,” Rockies assistant hitting coach Jordan Pacheco said. “That’s why he can get sliders out front with power, and he can handle hard 98 (mph fastballs), too.”
Goodman’s high leg kick is central in his fluid power swing, as it enables his back leg to corkscrew into the ground.
“He generates a lot of force in his back leg, so even though he has that big forward move (with the leg kick during load), he’s still holding the ground really well to generate power from the back side,” explained Spokane Indians manager Tom Sutaris, who worked with Goodman as the Hartford Yard Goats hitting coach in 2022 and ’23, shortly before Goodman’s debut.
During his time in Hartford in ’23, Goodman went through a June slump (.207 with only two homers and 27 Ks in 24 games). His power waned, his swing looked tired, and he wasn’t consistently tapping into his backside strength because he was jumping at pitches. But he worked with Sutaris and Rockies minor league hitting coordinator Nic Wilson and he debuted less than two months later.
Goodman still leans on the lessons from that slump three years, two all-star selections and a Silver Slugger Award later.
“It was a blessing in disguise that (a horrible slump like that) happened then, because when I go through it here in the majors, I can lean back on moments like that and then figure it out from there,” Goodman said.
There are still improvements for Goodman to make at the big-league level, even as he’s mastered the art of torquing his hips in preparation to create a slingshot effect on the pitch as soon as his front foot comes down from what oufielder Mickey Moniak describes as “one of the most controlled leg kicks I’ve ever seen.”
While Goodman can hit the ball as hard as just about anyone — his max exit velocity is 116.2 mph, the 10th-best in baseball — he still strikes out too much (32.3% K rate ranks in the bottom 5% of MLB), swings too much (54.2% of the time) and chases too much (swings at 40.4% of pitches outside the zone).
But none of that matters much to the buyers on the trade market, especially those who are in desperate need of a catcher who can rake, and rake in the clutch. Goodman’s 11 homers in the seventh inning or later this season lead the majors, and since the start of last year, he’s tied for the second-most homers in that category with Mariners backstop Cal Raleigh.
A massive haul for Goodman?
Three teams from the American League East are likely about Goodman.
The Rays, in the divisional lead by 2.5 games over the Yankees, have gotten a combined six homers from their two catchers. The Yankees’ Austin Wells (.158 average, 6 homers) is having a dismal season. And the Red Sox, who climbed back into the playoff chase with a recent hot streak, have gotten four homers from their two catchers.
Rockies president of baseball operations Paul DePodesta acknowledged he’s received ample interest on Goodman, as well as other players, from clubs around the league as Colorado stands as a clear deadline seller.
DePodesta wouldn’t go so far as to say Goodman () is untradable, noting that “there are probably a lot of players that would be very difficult for us to trade. Goody being one of them, because we see him as part of our future.”
But DePodesta left the door slightly cracked to a potential deal for the slugger, if a team was willing to give Colorado the moon and the stars in return. Such a package could include a big-league starter and/or high-caliber starting pitching prospects that Colorado desperately needs.
“For us to move him, the pieces that would be coming back would have to be really meaningful for us to even entertain that,” DePodesta said. “We’re also under no sense of urgency to do it.”
Goodman’s salary is $810,000 this season, but using Fangraphs’ WAR he would be worth $19.2 million this year in free-agent dollars. By that metric, the Rockies are getting about 24 times more value out of Goodman than for what they are paying him.
A major factor in Goodman’s trade allure, beyond his home run tally and contract controllability, is that he can’t simply be dismissed as a product of Coors Field. Entering Wednesday’s series finale against the Nationals, he’s done far more damage on the road than in LoDo, with a higher average away from Coors Field (.282 vs .231), more homers (18 vs 13), a higher OPS (.964 vs .814), and a significantly higher (156 vs 92).
Goodman says he’s not expending energy thinking about the possibility of a trade, or in another vein, a multi-year extension with Colorado that could be on the horizon. The even-keeled, chaw-chewing, small-town Tennessee outdoorsman is simply worrying about mashing more homers.
Meanwhile, as the phone rings in DePodesta’s office, the Rockies could have a major, franchise-altering decision to make as Colorado tries to climb out of the hole of the last three 100-loss seasons. The massive haul that a trade for Goodman would demand could drastically accelerate the rebuild.
On the other hand, as Goodman’s homer pace flirts with the Rockies’ single-season record of 49 (set by Larry Walker in 1997 and then matched by fellow Hall of Famer Todd Helton in 2001), it’s easy to see the catcher as a centerpiece of the next competitive Colorado team.
Whatever happens, Rockies manager Warren Schaeffer notes the whirlwind of the trade deadline clearly isn’t affecting Goodman in the box.
“The trade rumors have been swirling for a while now, and (Sunday) he hit three homers, and (Tuesday) he hit another game-winning homer,” Schaeffer said. “I ain’t worried about Hunter Goodman right now. He’s got his head on his shoulders.”
