Brandon Nimmo, forged by failure, hunts for self-improvement: ‘He’s chasing perfection’

The pole barn stood 2,600 square feet, complete with a construction heater, a basketball court and just enough space for a hitter to stand 60 feet, 6 inches from a pitcher.

But for a preteen Brandon Nimmo, the only space that mattered was the 25 feet that separated him and his dad, Ron, for batting practice each day.

Advertisement

Ron built the barn on the edge of the family property as an acknowledgment that the Wyoming winters — hell, the Wyoming springs and autumns — were too unforgiving for baseball. The heaters could get the barn to 40 degrees — “that’s plenty warm in Wyoming,” Ron quipped — and the insulated walls kept out the wind.

That barn in Cheyenne is where this all started, where Brandon Nimmo first displayed a nearly fanatical approach to self-improvement and the humility that must inherently inspire it. Those traits are the prime movers of Nimmo’s unceasing evolution — from a long-legged kid in a baseball outpost to a first-round pick, from a struggling pro to the Mets’ longest-tenured major-leaguer, from a fourth outfielder into one of the game’s best leadoff hitters. Above all, he’s evolved into the kind of player in whom the team that knew him best wanted to invest $162 million — precisely because that evolution isn’t over yet.

“He’s always chasing perfection,” Buck Showalter said, throughout last season and again when the Mets announced Nimmo’s re-signing. “He’s chasing perfection every day he walks through that door.”

The 2023 Mets season will start on Thursday afternoon in Miami, when Nimmo steps into the box to face Sandy Alcántara. The plan is he’ll be stepping in to lead off the Mets’ 2024 season and 2025 season and right on through the 2030 season, when he’ll be 37 years old.

Why did the Mets feel comfortable with handing out the longest free-agent contract in their history?

Well, history.

Showalter and general manager Billy Eppler have only known Nimmo for a year. But there were those in the Mets organization who have witnessed almost every step of his unlikely ascent. It was Sandy Alderson who took the initial chance on Nimmo in the 2011 draft. Glenn Sherlock, who’d been with the Mets early in Nimmo’s career, returned last year as part of the coaching staff and marveled at the ways he had steadily improved. Showalter took note of that — and then saw how and why.

Advertisement

“There were quite a few nights I heard this thump-thump-thump in the cage,” he said in that re-introductory news conference. “I leave here late, and Brandon would be here.

“You get to a point where you trust the human being.”

Nimmo has earned the Mets’ trust by steadily isolating each of his weaknesses, developing a plan to shore them up, and then executing that plan. He couldn’t hit left-handers, until he could. He couldn’t stick in center field, until he could. He couldn’t play a full season, until he could.

What other weakness is just temporary?

“He still has so much potential in his tank,” Francisco Lindor said. “He’s still got at least five to 10 percent more in him.”

The genesis of self-improvement is humility. Fortunately for Nimmo, humility is often aggressively reinforced when you’re the youngest of three. Brandon is eight years younger than his brother, Bryce, who played college baseball at Nebraska. He’s six years younger than his sister, Kristen, who excelled at soccer.

“Anytime he thought he was really good at something,” Ron Nimmo said, “it didn’t take long for him to get put in his place. That was kind of part of his upbringing.”

Watching Bryce, in particular, dominate the Wyoming baseball scene before struggling at times at Nebraska hammered home that, in Ron’s words, “there’s always somebody, somewhere that’s probably better than you.”

So Nimmo went to work in the pole barn, entering each day with a goal (“Turn on the inside pitch”) and not exiting until it had been accomplished.

“I’d go out there and say, ‘I’m going to do 10 of these in a row perfect. If I don’t, I have to do it again,’” Nimmo said. “If I feel like there’s something to work on, I’m just going to pound it until it works.”

With that attitude came one stance almost anathema to any adult, let alone a kid.

Advertisement

“I’m not afraid,” Nimmo said, “to look stupid.”

He didn’t mind flailing at his father’s ad-hoc curveballs if it made him better, the same way he didn’t mind spending one spring training as an established major-leaguer learning how to slide headfirst. To get better against left-handed pitchers, Nimmo took BP one winter against Clover Park clubhouse manager Drew Dunton. “It’s not going to be pretty,” he warned Dunton at the start.

“I’m OK with not looking like I have it all figured out for the sake of being better at it when the time comes to perform,” Nimmo said. “So it’s putting your pride to the side and being willing to learn, to take advice from people who have done it well.”

Usually, Nimmo is self-aware enough to know what requires work. But as the Mets have tapped into the sport’s greater emphasis on analytical information, Nimmo has been as open as anyone to its suggestions. After the 2020 season, Nimmo sat down with Jared Faust, the club’s manager of research and development, to talk about his defense. Nimmo had not thought it was much of an issue.

“Your first reaction is you get a little defensive about it,” Nimmo said. “But you have to be a big enough person to be able to step outside of yourself and look at yourself without emotion or bias. He just showed me the 10 plays that were against me that year. I watched them and I was like, ‘OK, those are easy plays to turn around. I can make those plays.’ So here’s how we start to improve that.”

Nimmo altered his depth in center field, from being as shallow as former Mets Gold Glover Juan Lagares to standing 15 to 20 feet deeper. He reworked his offseason routine with a focus on speed and according to Baseball Savant added nearly a foot per second to his sprint speed. Nimmo needed both those changes last summer to make a game-saving play like this one against the Dodgers.

“Every little thing matters in these games,” Nimmo said that night. His career has helped prove that.

Does anything happen to that ambition when one has been rewarded with, say, a $162 million contract? Ron Nimmo mused that maybe his son will have a little less internal pressure now. Maybe.

Advertisement

“Let’s be honest: Brandon was never on the cover of Baseball America,” he said. “He’s been one of those guys that fights to survive every year. You’ve got to go prove that you deserve to stay. I don’t know that that attitude has changed a lot.”

“I’m overjoyed by it,” Nimmo said of re-signing with the Mets, “but it just means being the same person and still evaluating myself and acknowledging that there’s room for improvement. The player that I am is someone they wanted to bring back, so I just keep trying to find more meat on the bone without taking away from the strengths.”

To that end, he’s been working with minor-league infield coordinator Jemile Weeks on his base stealing. Nimmo and the Mets’ analytics department came up with a blueprint for more steals in the middle of last season, but Nimmo thought it’d be easier to implement over the offseason and spring training — the way he’d done with his defense in center. He looks at stealing bags as “another step I can take.”

Nimmo turned 30 on Monday. For most players, the 30s mark a steady decline phase, a time to make sure steps aren’t lost. Nimmo hopes to unlock yet more.

“As a ballplayer, you want to age like wine, not like milk,” Pete Alonso said. “He’s one of those guys who’s just gotten better and better the longer he’s been doing it.”

“I think there’s another level,” Showalter said.

“We’re chasing perfection that we’ll never get to,” Nimmo said. “But we chase it anyway.”

(Top photo of Brandon Nimmo: Brad Penner / USA Today)