Giants’ rookie David Villar is hitting homers and finding his voice

Mirta Villar picked up her 19-year-old son at the airport and immediately noticed something wasn’t right.

His speech was slurred. He seemed dazed and he was talking through his teeth. Her David was always so responsible, so disciplined, so focused on giving his full effort to anything he wanted to achieve. He earned a black belt in Taekwondo. He was set on completing his degree in criminology from the University of South Florida. He even took his retail job at Lululemon seriously. He was the top salesperson on the floor. (“He got really good (at) telling women what they should wear,” Mirta Villar said.) Most of all, he stuck it out in baseball even when other kids’ abilities seemed to catch up to his own in high school. The last thing he would do was get drunk on a plane. So what in the world was going on?

“Oh, a ball hit me in the face,” he said.

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“No, Mom, I’m OK.”

He was not OK. Mirta Villar insisted that her son go to the dentist to check for a cracked tooth. The X-ray revealed something worse: a fractured jaw. Villar had been struck by a line drive in batting practice for the Danbury Westerners prior to Game 1 of their playoff series in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. Villar played anyway. He was scratched from the lineup for Game 2 the following night but he stayed to cheer on his teammates, then he cheered for them again in a Game 3 elimination loss the day after that. Then he flew home to Ft. Lauderdale.

Four days. All with a broken jaw that required two titanium plates to fix. Then a six-week liquid diet, which at least allowed for all the ice cream he could eat.

“If it happened to me, you couldn’t make me go back out there on that baseball field,” Mirta Villar said in a recent phone interview. “But he did. He pulled himself together. The motto in our family is, ‘Whatever you do, you do it well. And you do it to the best of your ability.'”

Villar’s power-hitting ability is one of the best developments for the Giants in an otherwise disappointing season. The 25-year-old rookie third baseman followed up an impressive year at Double-A Richmond with another at Triple-A Sacramento to earn his major-league debut on July 4. His first stint with the Giants was a struggle. But he’s gotten rolling on this latest swath of runway in September.

Villar hit 27 home runs for Sacramento and he has seven more in 134 major-league at-bats — and it’s adding up to something special. All told, Villar’s 34 home runs this season match the most by a Giants hitter at any level since 2005, when Todd Linden hit 30 for Triple-A Fresno and four in the big leagues. One more home run and Villar will have the most by anyone throughout the Giants organization since Barry Bonds hit 45 homers in 2004.

“Wow,” Villar said. “Bonds? That’s good company, huh?”

Stay hot, David Villar 🔥
— SF Giants on NBCS (@NBCSGiants) September 24, 2022

Villar’s home runs are not Bondsian blasts. He doesn’t put on a show in batting practice. He’s the first to note that all seven MLB home runs have come on the road and he is still pining for his first in San Francisco. He is not a Statcast darling. He ranks in the 24th percentile among MLB hitters in maximum exit velocity. He stands 6-foot-1 and he’s not scrawny by any means. But it’s not as if he and Aaron Judge shop from the same suit rack.

Yet everything about his power is functional. He can drive the ball gap to gap. His opposite-field stroke has been a strength since he was a teenager. And although the Giants are still figuring out how the former 11th-round pick will fit in their plans for next season, they can’t ignore this kind of power production. Especially when the major league team hasn’t had a 30-homer season since rubber chickens were top sellers in the Dugout Store.

“David for two consecutive years has been the best offensive player at his level,” Giants manager Gabe Kapler said. “He has earned this chance and we want to make sure that we give it to him. This doesn’t mean that he capitalizes on it, it just means we’ve made the determination that he’s earned this chance.

“We’ve talked about how instrumental David can be to the future of this franchise. We see him as a guy who is setting the stage for what might happen next season.”

The first time Mirta Villar handed a plastic bat to her 2-year-old son in the backyard, he hit the ball cleanly off the tee. So she tried lobbing him a couple. He hit those, too.

Mirta Villar, a high school Spanish teacher, was born in Cuba but didn’t come from a baseball family. David’s father, Lazaro Villar, a solutions architect for Hewlett-Packard, didn’t play baseball while growing up in New Jersey, either. But teachers know a prodigy when they see one. They also knew the importance of developing one’s gifts as early as possible. So David’s parents started him young. He was 3 years old when he played in his first T-ball league.

“I don’t think he was old enough but we signed him up anyway,” Mirta Villar said. “He played on one team in the spring and we found another that played in the fall. So we’d switch back and forth.”

The family found a way for David to attend American Heritage School, the pricy and private K-12 school that produced Eric Hosmer, among other big leaguers. Mirta Villar joined the faculty, which came with tuition breaks for David and his older sister, Natalie. If former Giants reliever Shaun Anderson still remembers how to conjugate his verbs, it’s all thanks to Mrs. Villar.

Villar was barely 3 when his parents signed him up for his first T-ball team (front row, second from right). (Courtesy of the Villar family)

David tried out for his middle-school team as a 7th-grader. They put him on the junior varsity. The next year, he made varsity as an 8th grader. But eventually, the other kids seemed to catch up to him.

“I kind of flattened out in high school,” David said. “Aside from junior colleges, South Florida was my only offer.”

He caught the eye of the right people at a Perfect Game showcase in Atlanta. South Florida coach Mark Kingston convinced the Villars to drive to Tampa on their way home and visit the campus. Kingston and his assistant, Billy Mohl, accompanied them — even though they had to turn around and drive right back to Atlanta to scout the rest of the showcase.

“That’s what we thought of David at the time,” said Mohl, who took over the program when Kingston left for the University of South Carolina. “He had a very simple approach at the plate. He had a mature presence. And he had that backside power. When he was in college, that’s what we called him: ‘King of the backside home run.’ I’d guess 90 percent of his homers were (to the opposite field).”

Villar gave everyone a thrill when he hit a home run in his first collegiate at-bat, but his freshman year was a struggle. His summer-league stint in New England included a separated shoulder and 3-inch gash above his eye in addition to the fractured jaw. But he kept at it, he spent more time in the gym, and he improved somewhat as a sophomore.

When he asked about going to the prestigious Cape Cod League, though, he was in for a letdown. There wasn’t a spot for him. Not even as an alternate.

“I’m not gonna name names, but they told me I wasn’t good enough,” Villar said.

So he went to another college wooden-bat circuit and caught fire. Playing for the LaCrosse Loggers in Wisconsin, he won the Northwoods League batting title and the Finest in the Field award as the league’s top defensive player. He carried that momentum into his junior year, hitting .374 with 12 home runs and an All-American Athletic Conference-record 24 doubles in 219 at-bats.

“He went from finishing last in our conditioning exercises to becoming our captain as a junior,” Mohl said. “He’s a self-made player in every sense. He went from a nobody to a big leaguer. I give him all the credit in the world. When your best position player is also your best leader, that’s a special accomplishment.”

Fortunately for Villar, South Florida’s best pitcher was pretty good, too. Shane McClanahan was near the top of everyone’s draft board. Every time McClanahan started on Friday night, there were three dozen scouts in the stands. MLB GMs and assistant GMs showed up. The Atlanta Braves sent former manager Bobby Cox as a special assignment scout.

“Shane pretty much helped me get drafted,” Villar said of McClanahan, who was taken 31st by the Tampa Bay Rays in 2018. “He helped me get an opportunity to show who I am.”

The two former teammates were supposed to reunite over the All-Star break in July. McClanahan was named the American League’s starting pitcher for the game at Dodger Stadium. Villar was supposed to be one of the Giants’ representatives in the Futures Game. But something else got in the way.

Villar’s first major-league promotion.

“I always knew David would be a big leaguer,” McClanahan said in a phone interview. “He has the most backside pop I’ve ever seen in my life. And truthfully, I thought he was going to be a big leaguer last year. The numbers showed he could have been. But to see him having success at the major-league level is awesome. I feel like every night, there’s a great play or a backside double or a home run.

“I told him how excited and how happy I was for him. And that this is just the beginning.”

When Villar took his first major-league at-bat at Arizona’s Chase Field, he provided another thrill. It wasn’t a home run. But a first-pitch double off the right field fence against Madison Bumgarner was pretty good, too. And it might have been a more fitting introduction.

“That’s the way I hit going back to high school,” Villar said. “My power was always to right field. As I got into college, guys started coming in so I had to learn to hit that ball out to left. It’s been a back and forth between being able to pull the ball and using the opposite field. I wasn’t always able to figure that out. I just wasn’t as polished a hitter as I’ve become the last two years.”

Shocker, a backside double……saw that a lot @davidavillar at @USFBaseball
— Billy Mohl (@USF_CoachMohl) July 4, 2022

Villar’s pro debut with short-season Salem-Keizer in 2018 was solid but he had a sense that he was in trouble after he hit .262/.334/.421 with 144 strikeouts in 423 at-bats for High-A San Jose in 2019. He knew he didn’t make enough consistent contact to inspire confidence that he could compete at upper levels.

“It’s like, I did OK,” he said. “But striking out in 30 percent of your at-bats in High-A? I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ If I’m striking out this much here, I’m only going to strike out more in the big leagues.”

So when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered the 2020 season, Villar returned to the same backyard in Pembroke Pines where he was a 2-year-old plastic bat-swinging prodigy. He studied video of hitters like Mike Trout and recognized that they all loaded the same way: not by shifting their weight onto their back leg but by shifting down and forward. He started his hands lower. He eliminated moving parts. The only live pitching he faced came in informal workouts against college kids whose seasons were canceled. So he wasn’t sure if his changes would work until he got to spring training in 2021.

“Luckily, the season went well at Double A,” said Villar, who set a Richmond record with 20 homers in a notoriously difficult hitter’s league. “And that’s when I knew the adjustments made me a better hitter.”

All through his journey as a professional hitter, Villar felt tugged in two directions. He had a talent for driving the ball to right field. But as pitchers showed greater aptitude for locating inside, he knew he had to learn to pull the ball. It took a few years, but he found a mentality that allows him to do both.

OK, I have power to right-center field so let’s stick with that because it allows me to stay on pitches longer. And if I need to turn on a ball or I see a pitcher or a team is starting to pitch me that way, let’s switch it up, use the pull side and make sure that’s in my back pocket.

“I feel chasing isn’t a big issue for me,” he said. “It’s more the in-zone swing and miss. So that’s what I focused on: being ready to put impact swings on mistakes. You don’t get as many good pitches up here. But you do get them. So you’ve got to be ready.”

The pandemic gave Villar the time to achieve something else. He finished the last credits to receive his criminology degree from South Florida. He chose the major as a precursor to law school one day, either to enter sports law or to become a prosecutor. Those ambitions will have to wait. But when your mother is also a dedicated educator, you don’t put off celebrating a graduation.

“At one point he told me, ‘Ah, I’ll be playing ball, there’s no point, I’m not going to walk,'” Mirta Villar said. “And I said, ‘Oh yes you are. You’re going to walk no matter what. Even if you’ll be walking across the living room.'”

That’s what he did. The ceremony was virtual. But the cap and gown were ordered and worn nonetheless.

Villar and his mother Mirta Villar after his MLB debut July 4 at Chase Field. (Courtesy of the Villar family)

Villar is receiving a second education in pro baseball now. At the advice of his agent, he records voice messages to himself and he listens to them whenever he needs motivation. The gist of the recordings: be hungry, play with an edge, be yourself and believe that you belong.

He also receives affirmation from Evan Longoria, the veteran third baseman whose job he might end up taking. A couple weeks ago, after he went hitless in two games against the Phillies, Villar approached Longoria and asked if he’s noticed anything about his at-bats. Longoria told him that he looked caught in between, as if he was afraid of striking out. If you’re going to hit for extra-base power in the major leagues, Longoria told him, you have to accept that strikeouts are part of the bargain.

“That was when the light went on for me,” Villar said. “It was like Longo gave me that approval. He opened that door to be like, ‘Be yourself, dude. Strikeouts are going to happen. But you balled out in Triple A. Go out and do the same here. Hit your doubles and hit your homers and know strikeouts are going to happen.’ Honestly, I credit him with some of the success I’ve had. I feel like I belong here. I am a big-league player. That’s the edge you have to have. If you’re not confident in yourself, this league will eat you up.”

Villar has come a long way from the 19-year-old who was too reserved to say something when he played with a fractured jaw. He’s learning that just because you carry a big stick doesn’t mean you have to speak softly.

“I need to be myself and be that guy that has an edge,” he said. “Because I was constantly overlooked as a player. That’s kind of what’s fueled me to get to this point in my career.”

Mirta Villar was at Chase Field for her son’s major league debut in July. The little 3-year-old swimming in a Diamondbacks T-ball jersey was all grown up.

“His dad and I planted that seed of hard work, effort, determination,” she said. “If you believe it, you can achieve it. If that’s what you want, you commit yourself to it. Have faith. And be humble.”

But maybe it’s all right to speak loudly now and again.

“Neither his dad nor I brag about David,” she said. “But sometimes I tell him, ‘David it’s OK. You can boast a little bit.'”

(Top photo: Kamil Krzaczynski / USA Today)