Barber: Joe Dillon making Nationals hitters uncomfortable

Joe Dillon usually ends up where he wants to be. Getting there, though? The guy takes some interesting routes.

Dillon, a Santa Rosa native, was nearly 30 years old when he made his Major League Baseball debut with the Florida Marlins. When his playing career was done, he repped pharmaceuticals and worked for a company that sells baseball equipment before getting back in the game. Now here he is, about to make another MLB debut: as assistant hitting coach for the Washington Nationals.

So far, so good, I guess you could say. “I’ve got the best assistant in baseball,” Nationals hitting coach Kevin Long told the Washington Post recently.

Dillon is not approaching the role tentatively. He has brought a bat bag full of creative ideas and innovative techniques to spring training.

Dillon has always been a student of the game, but here in Sonoma County, a lot of people simply remember him as a slugger. He crushed it as a Cardinal Newman High School shortstop (he pitched for the Cardinals, too), and he crushed it at Santa Rosa JC. With limited Division I offers, Dillon played at Texas Tech, and he crushed it there, too, setting a Red Raiders record with 33 home runs in 1997.

The Royals drafted him in the seventh round in ’97. The next 13 years would be a baseball odyssey for Dillon.

Before making that Marlins debut on May 18, 2005, he would play in Spokane, Lansing, Wilmington, Omaha, Wichita, Edmonton, New Britain, Albuquerque and Carolina, in the farm systems of the Royals, Twins and Marlins. He hit pretty well, but was repeatedly sabotaged by a bulging disc in his back.

“I had a hard time staying on the field,” Dillon said by phone from West Palm Beach, Florida, where the Nationals train. “I was tired of dealing with it. I basically retired and decided to shut it down.”

Dillon moved back to Lubbock, Texas, finished his degree in exercise sports and coached for a year as a graduate assistant. Then came a small miracle. Dillon underwent a surgical procedure in 2003 to remove material that was pressing on a nerve root along his spinal cord. He immediately felt rejuvenated, and he returned to action.

In 2004, Dillon hit 39 home runs while splitting time between Triple-A Albuquerque and Double-A Carolina.

Alas, Dillon’s career did not become a fairy tale. He wound spend the next six years bouncing up and down between the big leagues and Triple-A. He played Winter Ball in Mexico and Venezuela, and spent a year with the Yomiuri Giants of the Japan Central League in 2006.

“Basically, as a low service-time player, you can make more money overseas on a minimum-salary basis,” Dillon said. “I planned on that. But it didn’t work out well. I ended up getting hurt.”

Back he came to American baseball. He signed with the Marlins again in 2006, signed with the Brewers as a free agent in 2007, was claimed off waivers by the A’s in 2008 and then traded to the Rays for Adam Kennedy in 2009, re-signing with Tampa Bay for 2010.

Dillon retired with modest MLB career totals of 137 games, 217 at-bats, three home runs, 19 RBIs and a .263 batting average.

Par for the course, Dillon came to coaching from a side angle. He and his wife, Tilleri, moved to Rockwall, Texas, a Dallas suburb, in 2011. Joe worked in pharmaceutical sales for a year and a half, then for a company called D-Bat Sports for another year and a half. Tilleri built a successful real estate business. The couple has two boys, now aged 15 and 9.

Joe Dillon figured his days on the baseball diamond might be over.

“Obviously, it’s my passion, and what I wanted to do,” he said. “But I had a chance to be home with my wife and kids. To have a quote-unquote normal life.”

The Nationals came calling in 2014, shattering the normalcy. Dillon spent two seasons as hitting coach for Triple-A Syracuse, then was hired by the Marlins to be their minor-league hitting coordinator. Washington lured him back this year. Dillon knows manager Davey Martinez from Tampa Bay, and he calls Long, the hitting coach, a mentor. Long was Dillon’s batting instructor in the Royals organization in 2000 and 2001.

Considering this is Dillon’s first bench job in the majors, you might expect him to take a passive role, content to implement whatever principles Long passes down. Dillon had no such intentions.

While coaching for the Marlins, he was introduced to SportsSense, a Nashville-based company that was founded by two Vanderbilt neurology professors. SportsSense’s goal is to quantify the cognitive skills that everyone agrees are imperative to playing baseball - for example, a batter reading and reacting to an incoming pitch - but no one had ever made much effort to measure.

It was a revelation for Dillon.

To challenge his hitters, he has brought in pitching machines that can be set to different release angles, mimicking both right-handers and left-handers. And he is trying to change the mindset in the batting cage. Ballplayers traditionally use the cage for muscle memory, hacking at a steady diet of three-quarters-speed strikes. Dillon, in contrast, doesn’t want his guys to swing at batting-practice pitches if they’re out of the strike zone.

“It’s just a progressive way to train,” he told me. “But it makes sense. We’re the only sport in the world that doesn’t train at game speed.”

Dillon has introduced exercises designed to throw his hitters off-balance, mentally and conceptually. I asked him for some examples, and he laughed. “That’s proprietary information,” he said.

Well, have it your way, Joe Dillon. But the Washington Post got some intelligence from Nationals players. In one drill, Dillon lines up four home plates, one of them at regulation distance, the other three progressively closer to the mound. He sets the pitching machine to typical big-league speed and release point. The hitters begin at 60 feet, 6 inches away, then move forward and backward through the line. At the plate closest to the machine, the pitches are exceptionally hard to pick up.

“And then you work your way back and get to the back plate and you’re like, ‘This isn’t throwing as hard as I thought it was anymore,’?” infielder Matt Reynolds told the Post. “And you’re actually early now.”

To their credit, Martinez and Long have welcomed Dillon’s ideas. But Dillon emphasized that all of it is voluntary. Some of the Nationals hitters have embraced the SportsSense-inspired drills. Others (reportedly, Bryce Harper among them) have distanced themselves.

“The environment is: This is available if you want it,” Dillon said. “Some guys haven’t tried it yet. That’s with any drill we do. It’s a suggestion. Like, ‘I think this might help you.’ Or, ‘Let’s try something else.’?”

The Nationals are considered World Series contenders. If Dillon can help some of them make a leap at the plate, it could put him on the fast track to a position as lead hitting coach somewhere. That would be a weird situation for Dillon, who has spent most of his career on the slow, steady track.

For now, he’s content to enjoy this new shot at MLB.

“Absolutely,” Dillon said. “Obviously, big-league hitters are the best in world. The way I see it, each of them is one of the best 30 at their position in the world. So obviously that’s fun. They’re already really good. Our job to help them sustain that, and to make them incrementally better.”

By making them incrementally less comfortable.

You can reach columnist Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: ?@Skinny_Post.