‘Whip it like an axe’: What it’s like to spend a day at the batting cage with former Phillies manager Charlie Manuel

CLEARWATER, Fla. — A few hours before the Phillies’ spring opener on Saturday afternoon, Darick Hall stepped into the batting cage. He took a few swings as Charlie Manuel, leaning against the railing as he often does, looked on.

After he was done, Manuel slowly walked up to Hall and motioned for his bat.

“You got to keep your top hand loose and whip it like an axe,” Manuel said, swinging the bat down as he talked. “If I’m going to saw a log, and I’m shoving the saw forward, you’ve got to catch it and saw it back.”

“All right, Charlie,” Hall responded. “I appreciate it.”

He went back in the cage, and this time, he swung down.

“You’re looking good, Big Hall,” Manuel said.

This is not a new message Manuel is preaching. Hall says the former Phillies manager has been preaching it since spring training 2016, when he was a 20-year-old left-handed slugger headed for low-A Williamsport. Back then, he was all about launch angle and swinging up. But over the years, he thought more about Manuel’s words and came to a realization.

“That’s what the good hitters do,” Hall said. “Charlie believes in swinging down, not overusing the top hand, swinging level at the high ball, swinging down at the low ball.

“You’re young and you think a certain way, and then you get older and the same guy is saying the same thing for seven years, and you realize that he’s right. It’s kind of like when you actually listen to your parents.”

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Hall says he is the type of hitter who needs to learn things on his own. He heeded Manuel’s words but eventually realized that there were multiple ways to swing down — and the way he was doing it wasn’t working for him. He compared his swing to how a golf swing looks on TV. Hall was trying to scoop the ball up and ended up with a lot of top spin as a result.

But then last year, he realized that golfers don’t scoop the ball; they swing down on it. So he tried applying that to his swing, and the results were immediate: .254/.330/.528 with 28 home runs at triple-A Lehigh Valley and .250/.282/.522 with nine home runs in his rookie big-league season.

“I realized that you just have to drop it on there — and that’s what Charlie’s been trying to tell me since 2016,” Hall said.

Before he walked off the field on Saturday, Hall stopped Manuel one more time.

“You know, Charlie, the most I ever thought about swinging down was when I hit the most home runs in a season,” he said. “Last year, 37.”

Manuel liked that.

The Phillies won their Grapefruit League home spring opener on Saturday, 7-4, over the Yankees ahead of a sellout crowd of 9,534 at BayCare Ballpark. Playing their first game under MLB’s new rule changes, the Phillies committed no violations. The pitch clock helped speed up the game, especially in the later innings, to a brisk 2 hours, 34 minutes.

The news wasn’t as good out of Lakeland, as the Phillies fell to the Tigers, 4-2.

Nick Podkul’s two-run double in the seventh inning was all the offense could muster.

Manager Rob Thomson said that 19-year-old right-handed prospect Andrew Painter likely will get into a spring training game Wednesday or Thursday.