Can Trea Turner's electrifying game propel another Dodgers run? 'Hopefully, it's a long month' (2024)

Trea Turner does not run. He glides. It’s his defining trait, and it’s still awe inspiring.

Everything he does is smooth. He is baseball’s fastest runner, and as he pushes his cleats into the dirt, the dirt does not churn or fly out behind him. His slides have gone viral, as he sails in and pirouettes back up to his feet with the grace of a dancer. He makes it look so easy.

Turner says it’s how he’s always slid. Just how he moves. Watch him enough, and it’s easy to believe.

But to define Turner only by his speed is a disservice, as is referring to him as just part of what looks to be the best trade deadline deal in years. He is an MVP candidate, with all-around prowess to boot. No hitter in baseball has collected more hits over the last two seasons, with Turner claiming his first batting title this year. His wiry frame uncorks to hit bombs. His motions are incredibly quick. He’s slender enough to slide into a dugout cubby, as he did back in his days in college as a prank.

But his impact is wide. As the Dodgers inquired about Max Scherzer, the pitcher-of-his-generation candidate who could slot into the hole in their rotation created by the absence of Trevor Bauer (he will not pitch again this season amid allegations of sexual assault), they looped around to Turner, the brilliant Washington Nationals shortstop who thought he would stay there for life as their franchise shortstop.

Now he’s a Dodger, reinforcements arriving just in time to try to help them try to win another World Series.

“Hopefully,” Turner said with a smile as the Dodgers wound down their regular season in Arizona, “it’s a long month.”

Turner has tasted that glory before. Just two years ago, he stood in the visiting dugout at Dodger Stadium as Howie Kendrick slugged his Game 5-sealing grand slam in the NLDS to unseat a Dodgers club seen as juggernauts. The Nationals, who had started the season 19-31, would go on to win their first World Series. The crowd, the atmosphere, stuck with Turner then. He will have a little more than a year until free agency to decide whether he wants to be part of more runs like this one, a run that begins in earnest Wednesday night in the National League wild-card game against the St. Louis Cardinals.

Turner has turned himself into more than just the game’s pre-eminent speed demon, a different, singular player on the most talented roster the sport has seen in years. While in Washington, he and Anthony Rendon — another superstar the Dodgers pursued in free agency, who wound up getting $245 million from the Angels — referred to Los Angeles as “the Monstars,” with Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman building rosters seemingly capable of snatching up or creating a star at a moment’s notice.

“I’m just like, man, we can’t get any of these guys out,” Turner said. “All of their pitchers are unbelievable. They’ve just done a great job of drafting, retaining the talent and then developing it. You look up and down the roster and these guys weren’t necessarily free-agent signings, they were drafted and developed. … It’s hard to do, especially over a long period of time.”

Now Turner is one of them.

Nobody in the game can run like Trea Turner. But he spent this winter, and the winter before and the one before that, finding a way to refine his running form.

It helps maintain his durability, Turner said, and helps his mobility in ways other than being the game’s pre-eminent speed king. But he also knows his speed is the first thing people talk about when they discuss him.

“It’s what first comes to mind, I guess, for a lot of people,” Turner said. “For me, it’s just something I do every day. It’s normal to me.”

Take the time during Turner’s senior year at Park Vista Community High School in Lake Worth, Fla., where he ran a 60-yard dash at a 6.3 clip, well above average. Surely an operating error in time. So he ran again. Another 6.3. A few hours later, he ran again. Larry Greenstein, Turner’s coach, looked down again at his watch: 6.3 seconds.

“Oh, my,” Greenstein recalled. “This kid, in my eyes, just went from a Division I prospect to a major-league prospect. The sign was on the wall. … That just doesn’t happen.”

Or when he swiped 57 bases as a freshman at North Carolina State, and probably could’ve stolen 75.

“He had the green light,” said Elliott Avent, his coach at NC State.

Or when, in Turner’s first week as a Dodger, he broke for second as AJ Pollock grounded a ball that barely rolled into the outfield grass — and Turner scored all the way from first.

“I love it,” said Dino Ebel, the Dodgers third-base coach, who is now armed with the best weapon anyone in baseball in his position can deploy. “It’s fun for me because I can come down the line and I can let the play develop, because (he’s) got such good speed. … I know I’m on my toes when he’s on first base.”

It’s a constant pressure on the opposing club, one Friedman learned all too well as the Dodgers prepared to face Turner and the Nationals in the 2016 and 2019 NLDS. It’s an element Friedman was quick to point to in terms of what adding Turner could do for a lineup already littered with stars.

“It’s everything,” Friedman said. “All focus and effort is on keeping him off the bases.”

“Managing against Trea, in a postseason series,” manager Dave Roberts said, “it’s scary.”

Trea Turner asked for the heat. At age 17, he wanted the smoke. After all, he and his high school teammates were at the batting cages preparing to face a tall, hard-throwing Cuban right-hander out of Tampa’s Braulio Alonso High School in a state tournament. His name was José Fernández.

Hitting off 80 mph was too easy. So was 90 mph. The group around him with the requisite mettle to hit such velocity thinned. But Turner wanted more. As Greenstein turned it up to 95 mph, the crowd thinned even more. Even at 100 mph, Turner was finding the barrel. When Turner did face Fernández in the state playoffs that year, he was ready.

Facing the future NL Rookie of the Year, Turner couldn’t help but laugh after fouling an offering straight back. The reason was obvious — Turner held out his chipped aluminum bat in awe. Then he grabbed a new piece of metal and smacked a triple. He’d finish with a double and single that day, for good measure.

“That was like, holy cow,” Greenstein said.

The quickness that allows Turner to blaze the basepaths also fires into his bat, the rotational energy allowing him to turn on velocity.

As he got stronger, it turned into power. He hit one home run his senior year of high school. He hit 20 over his three years at NC State, not including a ball that, to this day, Avent was shocked didn’t make its way out of TD Ameritrade Park during the College World Series. Coming up in the Nationals’ farm system, he hit just 19 in the minors over parts of five seasons.

But his game has evolved. He topped that home run figure within his first 162 games as a big leaguer, a full season. His speed is a weapon, not his offensive identity.

“You hit the ball on the ground in this game, you’re out,” Turner said. “There’s shifts, there’s really good defenders. Everyone plays defense now. Yeah, I may get a few more hits here or there than somebody else, but when I’m 32 years old, I’ll be a bad hitter.

“I always wanted to be a complete hitter, and a complete hitter, those guys, the best hitters, don’t hit the ball on the ground, or at least not always. For me, I think that’s very limiting. I never liked it. I always want to hit doubles and homers. There’s definitely a balance point with doing too much swinging and missing and this and that, but for me, I think the power and hitting the ball in the air is a very important part of a good hitter’s game.”

Turner’s bat does not seem like it should generate enough pop to launch balls out of every part of the ballpark, yet it does. His barrel carries through the zone for extended stretches, regularly scalding baseballs that set him off to the races on the bases or allow him to ease up as they soar into the seats. As he spoke in Arizona in the last week of September, Turner sat with a batting average over .300 as a Dodger. His underlying numbers all looked the same as they had in Washington before the trade. He felt he wasn’t driving the baseball. But he was close.

He roped a double that day. The next day, he launched two homers. The next, he hit a homer and just missed another that banged just under the yellow home run line in center at Chase Field. He’d launch six homers and total 10 extra-base hits over the final week and a half of the season as L.A. chased first place, becoming the first Dodgers player in two decades to hit a pair of grand slams in a three-game window. Turner stole a base, too. Every skill of his game popped.

It’s what separates Turner when he gets hot, the ability to go nitro and make an impact on the game in every facet — “as five-tool a player as there is in the big leagues,” as Avent put it. Take his 28th birthday this June 30, when he opened against the Rays with a single and then stole a couple of bags. Then in the third inning, he ripped a changeup down the line for a double. When Michael Wacha left a 96 mph fastball over the middle in the fourth, Turner pounced and drove it the other way a few rows deep into the seats. Before facing Wacha again in the sixth, Turner turned to Nationals hitting coach Kevin Long and made a proclamation.

He was going for the cycle, the third of his career (matching a major-league record), and was going to smack a triple down the right-field line to seal it.

Turner got an elevated 1-1 pitch and did just that, sending a searing liner over Manuel Margot’s head down the line in right and motoring around to cement the cycle as he punched the third-base bag.

“It’s impressive,” said Long, whose resume includes a stint with the Yankees during their 2009 World Series run. “Just the things he can do and how he’ll think about those things before they happen. And he’s able to make those things happen. He’s one of a kind. … He’s able to do things no one else is able to do.

“I remember Derek Jeter, watching him, and he was the same type of player. From a physical standpoint, you’d look at them and go, ‘All right,’ but then once they got on the baseball field, it was dynamic.”

Turner now has a full season’s worth of superstar production to his name, in addition to his breakout 2020, when he led all of baseball in hits. His late barrage put him just shy of his first 30-30 season, as he cataloged a career-best 28 home runs along with 32 stolen bases. He exchanged playful barbs with his ex-teammate Juan Soto over text as he held him off for his first batting title with a .328 mark — “Kind of handed it to me,” Turner joked Sunday when he’d clinched the accomplishment. He put up the best all-around full offensive season of his career. According to FanGraphs’ Wins Above Replacement, no position player in baseball this year was more valuable than Turner.

“He’s had a year that not many players can have,” Dodgers right-hander Walker Buehler said. “He’s just a special player and kind of a game-changing player. I think Trea Turner needs to be on the minds of some people, that maybe he’s not being spoken about enough.”

It was a shock when Turner got moved. Not just to a new team, but also to a new position.

He had been a first-time All-Star this season among a crowded field, having settled into the finest full season of his career as Scherzer found himself the subject of faint trade conversation. The Nationals were still feasibly in the race. Even as Washington slipped in July, the idea that Turner could move seemed slim. He tested positive for COVID-19 the week of Major League Baseball’s trading deadline; confined to quarantine, he had little to distract him from social media as rumors circulated.

The Dodgers had been engaged on Scherzer. They needed a starter, and few deadline targets in recent memory boast such a resume. But around 48 hours before the deadline, the Nationals expressed a willingness to discuss one of their franchise-level talents — Turner — in a package.

“(That was when) we started to feel there was some chance,” Friedman said.

“There aren’t a ton of elite, upper-echelon players, and there are obviously even fewer that are available.”

The haul, when it was finalized shortly before the deadline: Scherzer and Turner for the Dodgers’ top two prospects, Keibert Ruiz and Josiah Gray, along with minor leaguers Donovan Casey and Gerardo Carillo. It represented what the Dodgers have excelled at in recent years — trading for the premium option on the market to integrate them into the organization in hopes of retaining them. Doing so with Turner, at least this year (he remains under contract through 2022), meant another change altogether.

He is a shortstop by trade, and a good one, whose positive defensive grades are confirmed by visual observation. The Dodgers traded for Turner with a reigning World Series MVP in Corey Seager already at the position, so they moved their new star. It went without incident.

“I didn’t really have a choice,” Turner said. “For me, I like being happy. I can sit here and say, ‘Oh, I would love to play shortstop’ or I can go out there and compete and have some fun enjoying my teammates and make the most of my situation. … The goal is to win. Let’s win some games.”

Turner has played 50 games at second base this season, his first experience at the spot since his rookie season and a move that has changed how he plays defense (as Turner explains it, he plays shortstop “one-handed” to make up for having less time to get the throw on to first; accommodating the different angles, balance, additional time and shorter distance at second base has forced him to play more two-handed). It’s been a midseason evolution in addition to adapting to a new environment and postseason race, but he has largely held his own.

“He’s a well-above-average major-league shortstop, and his willingness to come over here and move to second base — when everyone in the industry knows how good he is at short — speaks volumes to who he is and how much he cares about winning,” Friedman said.

Turner has sat just one of the Dodgers’ games since they acquired and activated him, or, as he said, he got benched. He missed just one of the Nationals’ 60 games last season. Two years before that, he led all of baseball with 162 games played. As Washington spent much of the summer of 2019 digging out of its early-season hole, Turner was reworking his swing and throwing motion to learn how to throw with a broken finger suffered four games into the season. The finger was so mangled that Greenstein joked it resembled a fishing hook. Long sat with Turner at the batting cage at Petco Park that summer and said his swing wouldn’t be the same — but Turner rebuffed that notion.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

He’d missed weeks, not months with an injury that wouldn’t fully get right until after the season, but reached base every game that series. From the club’s stretch in San Diego that June until the end of the season, Turner hit at one of the best clips of his career (an OPS of .870). During the postseason, he hit a critical home run in Washington’s wild-card game victory as part of their run to win a World Series.

“He went off,” Long said. “It was incredible.”

So much of this is still new. But October isn’t. Turner has spoken about his admiration for the playoff-like atmospheres each night at Dodger Stadium. He has enjoyed the winning, a look under the hood at what has made this franchise so successful for so long.

“It’s funny to see, just looking down at the lineup and it’s like, ‘We’ve got this guy hitting seventh, this guy hitting eighth,’ ‘this is our fifth starter’ and, I mean, the amount of depth we have is just crazy,” Turner said. “You look at the scoreboard, see all the stats — it’s a high payroll, but that’s what you get with a high payroll. You get a lot of good players, and everyone can contribute so much to a game.

“They’re so efficient here … for them to win the division eight years in a row with a shot at nine, it’s ridiculous. It shows you how good they are at a lot of different things.”

But that conversation, on how he figures into this next stretch of the Dodgers’ history, hasn’t come up yet.

There are other aims in mind, notably another run in October. That’s why he’s in Los Angeles now, the newest Monstar.

“We’ve loved having him,” Friedman said, “and look forward to having him being part of what we do for a long time. But I think from our standpoint, from everyone’s standpoint, all of our focus right now is next month, and then we’ll get to the offseason. Hopefully after a parade.”

(Photo: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)