The conversation between Dylan Beavers and Justin Santonocito in the batting cage that day in December had nothing to do with baseball. Santonocito and Beavers talked about the College Football Playoff, particularly the impending matchup between Arizona State and Texas, and it was only interrupted by the crack of Beavers’ bat as he made contact with Santonocito’s pitch.

Finally, only after a full round of a drill that reinforces Beavers’ front hip placement, Beavers’ hitting coach broke from the Texas-Arizona State dialogue.

“Ball’s jumping today,” Santonocito said.

“Yeah,” Beavers agreed.

They were in Beavers’ hometown of San Luis Obispo, California, training for the day they knew would come. They have only worked together since July 2024, but in those few months — and in the time since — they have grown close.

With it comes an understanding of what makes Beavers tick, and while Santonocito wasn’t there when Beavers was at his nadir, he knows it all too well.

To fixate on the task at hand, to demand perfection with every little movement of the body en route to connecting with the ball, would send Beavers down a spiraling chasm, the likes of which would negate any progress they hoped to make.

So they talked football.

“It’s a lot more fun if you’re not obsessing over the swing,” Beavers said, and he can say that from experience.

Four years earlier, when breaking through into the major leagues was still a distant dream, Beavers fell into a similar pregame routine. He was a sophomore at California, preparing for his first full season of college baseball, and Beavers wanted to be great. So great, in fact, that the mental stress of his perfectionism manifested itself into physical pain.

Before he even picked up a bat and stepped onto the field, Beavers felt the all-consuming anxiety that twisted his stomach into knots.

“I felt a lot of nerves,” Beavers said. “I felt like I was putting too much pressure on myself. In college, I was super stressed out every game and I felt like it was inhibiting my performance.”

Even with that self-imposed stress, Beavers performed for the Golden Bears. That sophomore season, Beavers’ 18 home runs and .303 batting average placed him firmly in the sights of major league scouts. But before he could reach this level with the Orioles — before he could put together one of the most impressive first months Baltimore has seen from a rookie — Beavers needed to recalibrate the way he approached baseball.

It started with the most basic, yet most impactful, human necessity.

“Breath is our greatest reflex,” said Danielle Martin, a mental performance coach who began working with Beavers in 2021. “It’s the quickest and best thing to bring you to the present moment.”

In the years since, Beavers didn’t rid himself of the drive that was necessary for reaching this level. He didn’t completely shut down the nerves that are a natural part of anticipation. But he learned to channel it in a beneficial way, and at times, he learned it was better to think of something else entirely.

Who was going to win, Texas or Arizona State? That was the topic of conversation as Beavers swung again and again, honing a swing that would lead him to primetime.

“Once I get it right, I can feel it,” Beavers said. “It doesn’t need to be said.”

Mind games

When Beavers thinks back on his experience at California, the angst that went unseen almost derailed his path here. He performed well in the short sample that was his coronavirus-shortened freshman season, but that only heightened his expectations.

Before games, nerves gripped him. Once he entered the batter’s box, all of the intricate details that make up a swing — his stride, his elbow placement, his follow-through — played through his mind. On top of that, Beavers racked his brain for the scouting report, attempting to guess what the pitcher would throw on this pitch, and the next, and the one after that — all those swirling thoughts before he even saw strike one.

“There was just too much going on between my ears,” Beavers said. “I wasn’t even focused on competing in the at-bat or what my approach and my plan might be.”

On paper, Beavers still put up positive results. His draft stock rose. But internally, he knew something needed to change if he was to reach his ultimate goal. After a conversation with his longtime agent, Danny Horwits, a phone call was set up with Martin.

Her first question: How far did Beavers want to go?

And when Beavers told her he wanted to reach the very highest level, she smiled. Good, Martin thought. That is a goal worth chasing.

“Dylan wants to be the guy,” said Martin, who’s based in San Diego. “Of course he’s nervous. Of course he’s nervous and feeling anxious, and what if I can’t, and what if I fail, and what if this and this and this? But he beats the voices because he chooses to compete.”

That choice wasn’t made overnight, but over years of work between Beavers and Martin, Beavers’ mentality began to shift away from the perils of what-if rabbit holes to one of actionable methods.

It starts with breathing. And it starts long before a game begins.

“I’m trying to feel the air go into my lungs and go out, and that’s what slows your heart rate,” Beavers said. “When you’re in a high-stress situation, you think you’re breathing, because it’s subconscious, but you’re not breathing as much as you need to, or it’s really fast, shallow. Really, if I just remind myself to be conscious of it, feel it going in my lungs and out of my lungs, I feel like then I can feel my heart rate start to slow and then I can lock into kind of whatever my approach is or what I need to execute for that particular pitch.”

It can also slow down a racing mind. When Beavers engrossed himself in every possibility at the plate, he and Martin worked to break an at-bat into a series of miniature battles. The outcome upon the final pitch mattered less than how Beavers approached every individual moment.

Beavers tries to win each pitch — and that might mean taking a strike, deciding that a certain pitch is not one on which he can do damage. Breaking the plate appearance into those smaller fragments helped declutter his mind.

“Everyone is guilty of thinking of swing stuff in the box,” Beavers said. “I’m sure there’s not many people who haven’t done that, whether you have 10 years in the big leagues or you’re in the minor leagues. I just feel like if I get into that mode, I can talk to [Martin] and she helps me kind of reorganize and redirect my thoughts to something that’ll be more beneficial.”

Unlocking the next step

Santonocito maintains this has nothing to do with him.

There was no secret formula delivered in their first day working together to unlock another level to Beavers’ game. And yet, after a morning session with Santonocito — their first together — Beavers went out that night for Double-A Bowie and blasted two home runs.

“That’s Dylan. That’s not me. That’s him,” Santonocito said. “That’s him being willing to do these things, give them a shot and saying, ‘To hell with it, let’s just give it a shot.’”

When Beavers hears a direction, his rapid ability to introduce it into his game stands out to everyone with whom he works. Martin’s breathing exercises became ingrained in his pregame routine almost immediately.

It isn’t a shock, then, to those who know Beavers that the individual drilling he received from Santonocito helped to unlock another level in his game.

After all, Beavers’ work with Martin helped him become the No. 33 overall pick in 2022. But when he appeared to stagnate in Double-A midway through 2024, another recommendation from his agent, Horwits, set progress in motion once more. Santonocito, the head coach at Canisius High School and owner of Academy Sports in Buffalo, New York, already worked with another player whom Horwits represents, Texas Rangers catcher Jonah Heim. A few calls later and Santonocito began diving into video of Beavers hitting.

Santonocito loved almost everything about Beavers’ profile — he calls him a five-tool player, with speed, contact, power, fielding and throwing skills that can make him stand out in the majors.

But Santonocito began working to clean up Beavers’ bat path, ensuring he would have a short stroke to the pitch. And while his two-homer game on July 24, 2024 showed the possibility of a breakout, their months of work fermented into something even more poignant earlier this year. Neither have forgotten the swing.

It was April 16, and Beavers was playing in Omaha, Nebraska for Triple-A Norfolk. He saw a sinker on the first pitch of the game on the outer edge of the plate, and the swing from Beavers captured everything he and Santonocito had worked on over the course of the offseason.

Off his bat the ball flew, up and away to left-center field, for his first home run of the year.

“It was legit,” Santonocito said of that blast. “Everything came together on that.”

“First pitch of the game, I didn’t really think at all,” Beavers said. “I was just direct, right to the ball, and I clipped it, swung it good. It was a good swing because I was direct, good flight to the left side, and that’s something I’ve been trying to work on.”

Part of the reason that swing stands out to them is because it came against a pitch that is near an area of the zone that has caused Beavers trouble in the past. Beavers’ plate coverage is strong and his eye for the zone is elite, but the up-and-away heater is a weak spot.

When Beavers hears scouting report information from those within the industry, he acknowledges there is a sense of frustration at a particular prevalent knock on many players. There’s a hole in his swing, those reports often read.

Every player, Beavers said, has a hole in his swing. The difference between the best hitters and those who are merely average is that they are selective to the point that a hole is unnoticeable. That is, with fewer than two strikes, the best hitters won’t be baited into swinging at a less-than-ideal pitch.

In that sense, Beavers chooses not to swing, and even if it’s a strike, he stands by that decision.

“He’s so good at what he does well, there’s going to be holes, there’s going to be cold areas, but you’ve just got to trust yourself,” Santonocito said, “and the more you can trust yourself, the more you’re going to hit your peaks.”

Each rise in level, though, brought a unique challenge. And when Beavers stood in the box during a major league game for the first time last month, he admits those practices flew out the window; the moment was overwhelming.

He looked around, taking in the scene. He went to the plate with a passive mindset, hoping to watch a few pitches before swinging. And the resulting three-pitch strikeout was emblematic of a mind running at high speed.

What came next, though, is a result of years of practicing his breathing and an effort to reorganize his thoughts.

“After that at-bat, I felt like I had gotten to the spot where I was thinking, ‘OK, I can do this,’” Beavers said. “I was like, ‘OK, I got that one out of the way.’”

He was ready, then, for the fastball from right-hander Bryan Abreu in the ninth inning of that game. Beavers didn’t think that time, nor did he wait to see a few pitches. He pulled it for a double, the first knock of his big league career.

“Playing and taking more at-bats and seeing good arms, I feel like these guys aren’t on a different planet, you know? They are regular people playing the game,” Beavers said. “I think it’s ingrained in minor leaguers’ minds and kids’ minds that people out here are not human. But they’re just playing the game. They’re good at it, they have a good process, they’re prepared, and I feel like if I do all those things, there’s no reason I can’t go have success.”

Little went wrong for Beavers in his first two weeks in the majors.

But on Aug. 29, playing left field, Beavers attempted to make a play at the plate. His throw was well off line and the subsequent error brought home a second run for the San Francisco Giants.

There was a part of him that wished, however unrealistically, that he’d never make such a mistake.

“One of the greatest things, but also something that can hurt you, is that perfectionist mindset,” Martin said. “And it’s one of the most unrealistic, irrational approaches in baseball. But it plagues a lot of the guys.”

And it struck Beavers heavily.

“I think my first mistake in the field, that sucked,” Beavers said. “It’s the worst feeling ever. I now know that’s going to happen, and before I was maybe hoping I would never make a mistake in my whole career, which is completely unrealistic. But after experiencing that, I was like, ‘OK, it sucked, but it’s not like I’m going to get released. It’s part of the game.’ There’s definitely more peace of mind knowing I’ve done that before. I am not going to be perfect. I feel like I accepted that.”

So he came back the next day and recorded two hits and drove in a runner as part of an Orioles win.

Perhaps earlier in his career, when Beavers would fight through stomach pain just to make it onto the field, that error would’ve lingered longer in his mind. But in the same way that Beavers breaks a plate appearance into one-pitch segments, he boxed off the disappointment and turned the page.

It’s that growth that allowed Beavers to come to the plate last week with the bases loaded in the 10th inning of a tie game. He didn’t think about what could happen, either positively or negatively. He fell behind, 0-2, then worked the count full. He breathed, feeling the oxygen enter his lungs.

And with a clear head — a head that was as clear as it had been while listening to Santonocito talk football in the batting cage nine months earlier — Beavers ripped a walk-off single.

He has been in Baltimore a month. And apart from his first at-bat, nothing has seemed to rattle the man who learned how to think — and when not to.

“This is him, man,” Santonocito said. “I think this is what you get with Dylan Beavers. I really do.”