Welcome to the D-backs Beat Newsletter! I’m Steve Gilbert and I’ve been writing about the D-backs since 1998. This edition was written by MLB Pipeline's Sam Dykstra. |
JD Dix is just like any other baseball sicko in the best way. Given a spare moment, he’s diving into MLB Film Room except, while some might find every Shohei Ohtani dinger or each Jacob Misiorowski strikeout for their own entertainment, Dix is in the archives seeking the ups and downs of baseball to find something about himself. “It’s really cool, those guys have millions of videos up there,” said the No. 6 D-backs prospect. “You go through every single home run. You can go through a groundout. It’s pretty fun to see, and then internally we have this cool system that we can see all of our swings and easily depict our at-bats and compare. Like, where do I catch this ball?” Some of Dix’s favorites for recent swing inspiration: Juan Soto, Alejandro Kirk and another infielder in the NL West. “I'm trying to get my barrel through the zone as long as possible,” he said. “So the first month, we were seeing that it was a little slopey and coming through the zone too quickly up and out. We leveled it out and wanted to take through the zone a little more. Manny Machado is perfect evidence of that and how it works so well because he can stay on pitches so well. He can hit a fastball the other way, and then pull the slider that comes into him. We started to think about that, and that worked pretty well.” “Pretty well” might understate the results of that mental trigger and physical adjustment. |
Dix -- the 35th overall pick in the 2024 Draft -- returned to Single-A Visalia (where he played 50 games last year) to begin his second full season and hit just .187/.292/.307 with two homers over 19 games in April. A .214 BABIP might have explained some bad luck out of the gate, but the switch-hitting second baseman identified the types of bad contact that affected his performance and worked to erase them. “You see that you're popping the ball up a lot more or topspinning balls on the ground,” he said. “Once we have identified that, then we can go back and see, 'OK, we can have this flattest bat path past the ear [in the beginning of my swing] and then just go straight through the zone.' The bat works really well. You’re catching balls more out front and definitely with more backspin.” Since May 1, Dix has hit .295/.446/.621 over his last 24 games, a stretch of 122 plate appearances. To his point on catching balls out front with backspin, he is tied for fourth in the California League in that span with seven homers; he hit two in 89 games between the Arizona Complex League and Visalia total in 2025. His .651 slugging percentage in May alone marked the first time he’d slugged above .570 in a month in Minor League Baseball. Considered a future average power hitter heading into the season, Dix’s slugging surge is a promising development in his age-20 campaign on his way to being a potential 15-20 homer threat in the Majors, all while he stays a perfect 19-for-19 in steal attempts. |
Because of his switch-hitting, Dix has to balance the differing mechanics that come with batting from both sides. He’s a natural right-handed hitter who took up switch-hitting at his father’s insistence around 11 years old, and because of the years of focus needed to take up hitting lefty along with the prevalence of right-handed arms at most of his stops, he’s actually been a better performer from that side in 2026: .268/.403/.559 in 159 plate appearances as a lefty vs. .186/.314/.256 in 52 plate appearances as a righty. There are still the more natural movements as a righty (“I can open my hips much more from the right side”), but he’s trying to become a similar and consistent hitter at least in terms of his approach from the left side. “Just be slow, as slow as possible,” he said. “Once your body starts moving slow, your eyes slow down and the ball slows down. That's really helped me on both sides. I think that's probably the biggest cue when I'm struggling. I like to speed everything up, so now, I’m slowing everything down. Slowing my load, my actions, my breath, my everything.” As Dix continues to trend up offensively, that puts his defensive work at the keystone under even more of a microscope. The Wisconsin native was technically drafted as a shortstop in 2024, but save for one seven-inning game in the ACL, he’s been exclusive to second base in pro ball. A big reason for that is his lack of arm strength coming off right shoulder issues in high school, including surgery for a torn labrum in the fall of 2023, with some scouts saying it played near the bottom of the scale. The D-backs have pushed back against those evaluations, but they put Dix on a throwing program this offseason, introducing weighted plyo balls into his training to get some extra oomph back. |
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“I still feel like there's gas in the tank,” Dix said. “I'm not fully back yet, and it's been two and a half years [since the surgery]. But we're working on that with the throwing program and everything, and it's been feeling great for about probably a year and a half. There are no issues pain-wise, but the velo isn't there yet. We're working hard. We're getting back, and throwing with more confidence than ever right now. I’m pretty psyched about that.” Refinding that arm strength could be big for Dix considering Arizona’s depth at the keystone. Even in a down year, Ketel Marte remains the shining star at the top while Arizona boasts three of the Top 10 second-base prospects in the game: No. 3 Tommy Troy, No. 5 Demetrio Crisantes and No. 8 Dix. Troy has been exclusive to the outfield since his MLB debut on May 24, and Dix understands it could take a similar change for him to find a place in future D-backs lineups, so long as his offensive growth holds. All the more reason to keep searching the MLB Film Room archives. “I think just learning from them is really, really fun and a good, good learning experience for me,” Dix said. “Tommy Troy's in the big leagues now as an outfielder, but he didn't probably expect to be an outfielder this year, last year, the year before. You never know what will happen, and you just try to learn, adapt and play baseball hard. That’s what it is.” |
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