It was a sunny day on the back fields at Peoria, and I was standing near a scout from one of the Dominican League baseball teams. He was wearing out an American player he knew from previous teams, offering him fifty bucks for every batting practice home run he could hit. John Andreoli was in that player’s hitting group. When he stepped up, the scout whistled. “Who is that?” he asked the scout next to him. “I like that swing.”

This interaction surprised me because John Andreoli doesn’t have a particularly beautiful swing. It’s not the lefty poetry of Junior or Canó; it’s not the uprooted piece of the Acropolis Nelson Cruz swings through the air. Andreoli’s swing is quick and to the point, East Coast-y in that it’s brusque but not in a rude way, more just wanting to get on with things, keep the line moving.