Failure to launch: Giants' Matt Chapman still searching for his home run swing

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It’s everything that followed that allowed Lee to do something that no San Francisco Giants hitter had ever achieved in 557 games strewn over 65 seasons at Dodger Stadium. The ball caromed off the low fence down the left field line. Los Angeles Dodgers left fielder Teoscar Hernandez overran the ricochet. Lee, to his credit, never stopped running. Giants third base coach Hector Borg windmilled an arm. The relay throw to the plate was high. There was only one way to score it: inside-the-park home run. They don’t happen often at Dodger Stadium, which lacks the asymmetrical quirks and mixed materials that lead to occasional chaos at the Giants’ waterfront ballpark and elsewhere. There hadn’t been an inside-the-parker at Chavez Ravine in eight years. Lee became the first Giants hitter to be credited with one against the Dodgers since 1981, when Larry Herndon raced around the bases against Fernando Valenzuela at Candlestick Park. Lee’s mad dash was the rarest of quetzal feathers in an otherwise drab capper to the four-game series. The two-run flare forged a momentary tie, but the Dodgers pushed ahead in a three-run sixth inning and their 5-2 victory allowed them to rally for a series split. The Giants offense got shushed Wednesday night by Shohei Ohtani, and their hitters went down almost as quietly against right-hander Emmet Sheehan. Most notably, Casey Schmitt had a miserable night as the designated hitter, striking out in all four of his plate appearances. And Matt Chapman has been so silent at the plate in May that he might need a library card to check his bat out of the rack. It’s a cruel game. On a night when Lee somehow turned a 73.2 mph snort into a home run, Chapman staged another losing battle while hoping for a conventional one. He’s still sitting on one home run this season, which came back on March 31 at Petco Park. Chapman was hitting a respectable .271 with a .353 on-base percentage at the end of April, but even those modest numbers have plummeted over the past two frustrating weeks. He is 4 for 43 in May with two walks and 15 strikeouts. Home runs aside, he’d probably give anything to touch the plate. He hasn’t scored a run since April 30 and Game 1 of a doubleheader in Philadelphia. The 13-game streak without scoring a run is the longest of his 10-year career, surpassing an 11-game streak in 2018 with the Oakland A’s. When analyzing a struggling hitter, sometimes a quick peek into the Statcast data will yield inconclusive or conflicting information. With Chapman, the issue screams at you louder than the thumping, center field speakers in Chavez Ravine. His average launch angle is 8.1 degrees, which is down steeply from his career average of 17.1 degrees. His attack angle, which measures his bat position at the intercept point with the ball, is 3 degrees, which is a drastic change from his 6-degree average in each of the previous two seasons. It’s also one of the flattest attack angles in the major leagues. The league average is 10 degrees. Only four qualified hitters have a flatter attack angle than 3 degrees and two of them, the Mets’ Bo Bichette and the Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr., are going through pronounced power outages as well. Chapman’s bat speed also continues to rank in the 92nd percentile, which would suggest his issues are entirely mechanical and, in theory, fixable. How to get there remains the question of the hour, though. “Guys throw hard in this league, guys throw a lot of four-seam (fastballs), so I’d been working on getting on top of fastballs,” Chapman said prior to Thursday’s game. “And then I really started getting on top of the ball. And then I’m not driving the ball in the air as much as I’m accustomed to doing. “I don’t know exactly why. I just know that I always make a point in the offseason to be on top of the ball with thoughts of being a good hitter, and maybe I took it to the extreme. It’s something I’m aware of.” Chapman received a text message about it from Boras Corp. vice president Mike Fiore and followed up with in-person discussions during batting practice. Fiore, a former infielder who played on Team USA’s 1988 Olympics squad, said the numbers told such a clear story that he had to mention them. “It’s one thing to know that’s what you’re doing but it’s another to go out and fix it,” Chapman said. “The last thing I want to do is try to hit homers. But I’m aware that what I’m doing right now is not sustainable and it’s not the player I am. So I’m willing to make those changes. But I’ve got to figure out how I want to do it.” It might help that new Giants hitting coach Hunter Mense is more familiar with Chapman’s swing than any of his other new pupils. Mense was a hitting assistant with the Blue Jays during Chapman’s two-year stint in Toronto from 2022-23, including a scorching run in his final season that resulted in the American League Player of the Month award for April. Chapman hit .384 with 15 doubles and five home runs in the month. Although a hand injury derailed his momentum that season, he was still leading the league in doubles as late as the All-Star break. “I’ve seen him when he was essentially the best hitter in the big leagues for a period of time,” Mense said. “He was doing serious damage. He wasn’t really striking out. He could do anything he wanted with the bat. I’ve seen him hit for power. I’ve seen a bunch of different tools in his belt. It helps knowing the swing, but I think it helps me more just knowing the person — knowing who he is and what he needs and what he doesn’t need.” Chapman has gone through stretches like this before. During his first season as a Giant in 2024, he hit two homers during a season-opening series at San Diego and then went cold, hitting just three homers over a 45-game span that reached into mid-May. Then he homered in three consecutive games at Pittsburgh and finished with 27 for the year. His way out of that power slump two years ago was to get in a stronger position with his lower half. So that’s what he’s working to achieve now. Although he was one of the hottest hitters in the Cactus League this spring, a taller, narrower and more open stance hasn’t served him well thus far. “We’re thinking if I can start using my legs more, my base a little bigger, that will allow me to drive through the ball,” Chapman said. “Just clean up everything from there, as oppose to me trying to think, ‘Oh, I need to lift the ball.’ So I’d like to get back to that, back to coming in with some length. I don’t think it’s an overnight thing. We’ll just continue to work on getting in a better position and trust that everything evens out from there.” The Giants would welcome that. They’re already getting much better and more productive at-bats from Rafael Devers in May. Willy Adames was hitting .194 on May 6 before recording multiple hits in five of six games. The Giants are 18-25 but entering a softer pocket of the schedule to end the month — three games against the Athletics at Sacramento and three at Arizona, followed by a homestand against the Chicago White Sox and Diamondbacks, then a road trip that begins with a three-game series against the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field. If the Giants can get the beating heart of their offense pumping homers over the fence, it’s not hard to imagine an 11-4 record over that pocket that would allow the Giants to hit the reset button and enter June with a .500 record. If only establishing liftoff were so easy. “It’s tricky because you don’t want to … go the opposite way, and then you start missing underneath a lot of fastballs,” Mense said. “So much of it goes into his intent, what he’s trying to do. When it’s going really well, none of that’s really a thought. It just happens and he’ll drive balls in the air like he did in spring training and like he’s done the rest of his career. But when he tries to overexaggerate things, and then you’re kind of bouncing back and forth. We just haven’t quite found the groove yet. It’s not for a lack of work or a lack of trying. “There’s still so much season ahead. He’s been a good big-league hitter for a long, long time. Each year presents different issues or different problems that you have to kind of figure out, but he’s consistently found ways to do it.” The Giants have other lineup questions to answer. They haven’t figured out how to incorporate rookie Bryce Eldridge on a day-to-day basis, and in retrospect, maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to pick the two games against Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto to start him in Los Angeles. Eldridge’s ability to take a walk might have made Roki Sasaki a better matchup in Monday’s series opener, and for Sheehan, who leans heavily on a high fastball, a 6-foot-7 left-handed hitter probably wouldn’t have been a welcome sight. The Giants also have to think through the playing time at catcher now that Daniel Susac is primed to be activated for Friday’s series opener at Sacramento. Now that the Giants have additional lineup options, there will be additional pressure on anyone who isn’t performing. But Chapman is signed through 2030. In every sense, the Giants are invested in getting him right again. “As long as we keep at it, it’s gonna click,” Chapman said. “And it’s gonna stick.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms