Dave Reardon: Former ’Bow Josh Rojas finds big-league success thanks to his old-school approach

If Josh Rojas were on this grumpy kinda-old man’s lawn, I would not yell at him to get off.

I’d tell him he could use it to work on an old car, leaking oil all over the grass. He could invite a bunch of loud friends over for a garden party. Pitch a tent and camp out.

And I’d thank him for his old-school approach to baseball.

Actually, I don’t really have a lawn, and Rojas is busy with the Arizona Diamondbacks, annoying and destroying big league pitching. He’s batting .354 for the month of May. And if you’re a fan of baseball before computers took over, you gotta love the way he’s doing it.

That should be ways he’s doing it, plural, because, in addition to the capability to play almost any defensive position, Rojas, a former University of Hawaii standout, can and often does manage to hit the ball anywhere he wants, away from defenders — no matter where they shift.

It brings to mind one of the first bits of advice many kids get about baseball: Wee Willie Keeler said, “Hit ’em where they ain’t.”

There’s lots of video evidence of the left-handed batting Rojas going the other way, including a bunt to beat the Reds’ shift last September.

I was watching the Dodgers and Diamondbacks the other night, and, thanks to Rojas, got a reminder of what baseball was when it was a game full of nuance and a lot more than just how hard you pitch or how far you can hit the ball if you’re fortunate enough to make contact.

Radical shifts are nothing new, but they were used against just a few players in baseball history, most notably Ted Williams. Over the past few years shifts have become common and they are among the hottest, most controversial topics in baseball. Some hitters have a hard time with them. Others, like Rojas, adjust.

Here’s why I think shifts are often an overused gimmick.

>> I was at a game a couple of years ago at Fenway Park. A second baseman was playing in right field, but close enough to make a play at first on a sharply hit ball. That’s exactly what happened, a one-hopper right to him. But he threw the ball away. The batter did what was expected, but the defense did not execute. I believe that bad throw could be due to it not being in that second baseman’s muscle memory. He had not taken thousands of balls there in practice and games since he was a kid like he had with the normal spots where second basemen make plays.

>> Pitchers are forced to throw just certain pitches because the shift requires it.

>> Some of these shifts are based on small sample sizes of plate appearances, and there is a lot of variances in baseball and in many cases you need more data than is available to accurately predict where a guy is going to hit the ball next time you play him.

>> More batters will become like Rojas and use the entire field, especially the side abandoned by the shift.

Rojas had two hits in that game against the Dodgers and they were both grounders to the opposite side of the field that might have been outs if the players were in their normal positions.

After a stellar spring training but a slow start in April, Rojas, now in his third year with the Diamondbacks, caught fire this month. He has some pop in his bat, too: he hit four homers in five games ending in early May.

Although Rojas performed well as a senior at UH, few expected him to make it to the big leagues. College seniors are considered old and suspect in the draft. Prospects with elite-level power are in more demand than guys who are pretty good at everything, like Rojas.

Rojas was more than pretty good in 2019. The Astros’ 26th-round pick in the 2017 draft had 23 homers, 33 stolen bases and a .332 batting average in 479 plate appearances in AA and AAA.

“Josh is one of those rare guys who hits better with a wood bat,” his college coach, Mike Trapasso, said. “There are only a few guys like that. Mark Teixeira was one, even though he did very well not hitting with wood in college.”

Rojas was traded to Arizona, his hometown team, in 2019 and called up that season. He hit just .217 in 157 plate appearances in his first season against big league pitchers in real games. In the pandemic season of 2020 he hit .180 in just 70 times at the plate.

But he was a pleasant surprise in spring training this year and is now making a big impact at the plate, in the outfield and at shortstop and third base.

The memory of Rojas that stands out to me is his baserunning. During his senior year he scored from second on a bunt, on a play with no errors. I’d been wanting to see that in a real game since watching Willie Mays Hayes do it in the movie “Major League” in 1989.

Rojas was a good-sized infielder who could run, hit line drives and occasionally for power. I don’t have the scout’s eye to determine if a player has big league potential, except for the obvious ones. But there was something about Rojas that made me think “maybe” … something besides the measurables.

“If you know Josh and his drive and his confidence level it’s not a big surprise,” Trapasso said. “That senior year when he showed the versatility defensively was great. He played at a major league level as an infielder on the left side. He’ll go down in history as one of the all-time best defensively here at third base.”