Jackson Holliday was just “messing around.”

The Orioles rookie’s session in the batting cage with coach Cody Asche was ordinary — until it wasn’t.

“It’s kind of a funny story,” he said about why he changed his swing late in the season.

During the final week of the Orioles’ regular season, Holliday and Asche were doing what hitters and their coaches frequently do in the cage. They were testing out tweaks without the pressures of a game, allowing the joy of hitting soft toss take over.

In the visiting batting cage at Yankee Stadium, Holliday was trying to imitate Shohei Ohtani — the best left-handed hitter in baseball and the sport’s biggest star. Ohtani’s simple, elegant swing at times appears effortless thanks in part to the toe tap that allows the Los Angeles Dodgers slugger to stay balanced and on time.

Those two areas were precisely where Holliday, whose swing previously featured a big leg kick, struggled during his rookie campaign in which he hit .189 and struck out 33.2% of the time. So, he pretended to be Ohtani in the cage, and something clicked.

“I kind of like it,” Holliday recalls saying to Asche.He broke out the new-look swing in his next start a few days later. The results? The 20-year-old reached base five times, becoming the youngest MLB player to do so since Juan Soto.

What started with Holliday mimicking Ohtani ended with a swing change he plans to carry into the offseason and next year.

“We were just messing around in the cage, trying to imitate Ohtani. It put me in a good position to hit. I was hitting good [batting practice] with it. I was like, ‘OK, why not?’ It’s definitely something I’m going to build off of,” Holliday said in Baltimore’s clubhouse shortly after the Orioles’ season ended with another playoff sweep. “I’m excited with how it went in the few games that I got to try it out.”

How Holliday decided to implement the toe tap, which shares elements with Ohtani’s but is more traditional, wasn’t total happenstance, though. The common mechanism is one he sometimes employed during his high school years. It’s a technique the Orioles’ hitting coaches had implemented to brief success with Jorge Mateo in 2023. And it’s one Holliday said Baltimore’s brass “encouraged” him to try out when he was drafted No. 1 overall in 2022.

“It’s not like I just pulled it out of my back pocket,” Holliday said with a laugh, acknowledging it would be smarter to lie and say he did to make his success with it more impressive.

When Holliday was drafted out of high school, he weighed only 175 pounds. To have enough power to be an impact bat in the major leagues, he’d need to add muscle to his frame and have a swing that maximizes his bat speed. A big leg kick, like the one Bryce Harper used when he broke into the majors, is a common way for a hitter to get the most out of his swing. Holliday showed just that in July when he clobbered a 439-foot grand slam at Camden Yards for his first career homer.

However, a big leg kick doesn’t come without risk. It can lead to a longer swing, too much head movement and flying open with the front side. It’s also difficult to consistently time up with the pitcher’s delivery, making it a challenge to make contact with high fastballs and low offspeed pitches.

At different points throughout Holliday’s first year in the majors, he dealt with all these flaws that can be partially, though not solely, attributed to his leg kick. It was evident during his first stint in the show when he went 2-for-34 with 18 strikeouts. While his second attempt at being a big leaguer was much better than his first, he wasn’t consistent at the plate and still struck out too much.

In 2023, Holliday stuck with his high leg kick because, well, why wouldn’t he? Holliday’s age-19 campaign, his first full year in professional baseball, was historic as he climbed from Low-A to Triple-A while hitting .323 with a .941 OPS. He succeeded with it during major league spring training and then sprinted out to a torrid start in Triple-A to earn his big league call-up.

Why fix what isn’t broken?

But after he was demoted, he made changes to his swing to alter his bat position and lean more into his back leg into his stance. Those alterations helped once he came back up in the summer, but they weren’t enough — leading to his session with Asche in the Yankees’ visiting batting cage. Asche, the Orioles’ offensive strategy coach, is the only remaining member of the club’s hitting staff after co-hitting coaches Matt Borgschulte and Ryan Fuller parted ways with the organization earlier this month.

“You go through phases of swings,” Holliday said. “I was doing the no stride and I was spinning off balls. Now that I think I’m a little bit bigger and stronger and kind of understand my swing a little bit more, it was easier to go back to that. Last year, I did really well with the swing that I had with the leg kick and I never really had to pull it out. Here we are now making adjustments in the big leagues.”

The Orioles clinched a playoff spot Sept. 27 in Minnesota and had nothing to play for the final two days of the season. So, Brandon Hyde put Holliday in the leadoff spot — where the youngster spent most of his time hitting in the minors — and the Orioles’ manager was impressed.

Holliday, after walking in his first two plate appearances, came up in the fifth and roped a double that one-hopped the left field wall. It’s a pitch — a 98.2 mph fastball at the top of the zone — that Holliday frequently swung through with his leg kick, but with the toe tap, he was able to stay on the pitch and hit it the other way with enough juice to clang off the wall.

“I was kind of able to put my foot down whenever, and I was able to catch up to velocity,” Holliday said. “I got that double on a heater up, which I hadn’t done in a while. Yeah, I was very happy and encouraged with how it went.”

“I thought it was way simpler,” Hyde said about Holliday’s swing change during his end-of-season news conference. “He was getting his foot down early, was able to be on time with the fastball a bit more, especially the elevated fastball. … I’m sure they’re gonna be tinkering with things this offseason as well, but I really like that adjustment.”

Holliday was originally “a little hesitant” to move away from his leg kick in the minors because he assumed he’d lose power by going to a toe tap. Now, though, he doesn’t expect that to be the case, especially after he spent last offseason adding 10 pounds of muscle with an intense training regimen and expects to do so again this winter.

“We’ll find out during spring training and hopefully come back bigger and stronger and be able to do some more things with that,” he said.

Even more than the change itself, Hyde said he was impressed with Holliday’s openness to make a significant alteration late in the season.

“His eyes were wide open,” Hyde said.

With his new swing, Holliday could open others’ in 2025.

Have a news tip? Contact Jacob Calvin Meyer at jameyer@baltsun.com, 667-942-3337 and x.com/JCalvinMeyer.