Grudzielanek Is Plugged In at Plate Early, Socks It

Mark Grudzielanek is just as surprised as anybody when talk comes to his early-season home run binge. He’s just jumping on pitches earlier in the count.

Last week, the normally slap-hitting Grudzielanek homered in a career-best four consecutive games and had a team-leading five home runs, tying him with the Toronto Blue Jays’ Carlos Delgado for second in the majors behind the Arizona Diamondbacks’ Luis Gonzalez, who hit his sixth Tuesday.

Grudzielanek, whose single-season career high of 10 home runs was set in 1998, when he hit eight with the Montreal Expos and two with the Dodgers after the July 31 trade, isn’t trying to go deep.

“Me? C’mon. You can’t do that,” he said. “I just try to get a pitch. I’m an aggressive hitter and I swing at some balls sometimes so I got to really try to narrow it down to a pitch.

“The one thing I really tried to concentrate on in spring training this year was really capitalizing on [opposing pitchers’] mistakes. When you get ahead in the count and they make a mistake up in the zone, I take advantage of it. Hopefully I can keep doing it and keep hitting the ball hard.”

Grudzielanek’s homers have come early in the count. After homering for the first time on a first-pitch offering, Grudzielanek has gone deep on counts of 0-and-1, 0-and-1, 0-and-1 and 1-and-0.

Last year, Grudzielanek dropped nearly 20 pounds after suffering a viral infection in July and his batting average dropped from .326 in 1999, the highest by a National League shortstop in 63 years, to .279 in 2000, when he made the switch to second base. He hit seven home runs last year.

His recovery from the illness and the addition of new hitting coach Jack Clark have made a difference.

“He believes I have a lot of power that I could use that I don’t use,” Grudzielanek said of Clark. “He told me, ‘You’ve got a lot of power. You can definitely hit some home runs.’

“It’s not that I’m trying to do it or anything like that, it’s just that I’m understanding some of the things he’s telling me to work on and, really, early in the count, get a pitch and drive it, not swing too hard but really go after it.”