With less focus on homers, more focus on line drives, Bell has finally surged back

Back in May, when his batting average was in the low .130s and his OPS dipped below .500, Josh Bell made a conscious decision to stop doing what he intended to do all season for the Nationals.

His plan all along was to seek more home runs, believing a high slugging percentage was more important than any other stat at this stage of his career and in this current baseball environment. The results were ugly, so the veteran designated hitter revamped his swing in-season with hitting coach Darnell Coles and decided to forget about home runs and just focus on hitting the ball hard on a line.

“I just tried to lower my launch angle, tried to focus on squaring up the ball as best as I can, try to get my OPS over .600,” he said. “So I’ve done that. Now I’m fighting for seven. We’ll see where we go from there.”

As Bell spoke late Monday night following the Nationals’ 10-8 win over the Reds, his OPS for the season officially resided at .695. What he may not have realized was that he did actually get it over the .700 for a brief while a couple hours earlier after he launched a solo homer into the second deck in right field. It may have been his first homer since June 27, but it was just one of many well-struck base hits for the 32-year-old over a sustained stretch.

The infamous Josh Bell early season slump has long been replaced by the infamous Josh Bell midseason surge. After slashing just .151/.254/.289 through his first 45 games this season, he’s now slashing a very healthy .297/.371/.480 over his last 42 games.

“I feel like that’s kind of the player we all know he is,” teammate James Wood said. “It’s just good to have him rolling the way we know he can.”

For quite a while this season, it didn’t look like Bell would ever get rolling to this extent. Though he’s always been prone to slow starts, this one was especially slow. And now that he’s in his 10th big league season, there were reasons to question if he just didn’t have that kind of production in him anymore.

Turns out he does. It just required a change of mindset and a different swing than the one he utilized to less-than-ideal impact through most of the season’s first two months.

“I think it’s all mechanics,” he said. “I was trying to do too much too early, and that’s the name of the game. I felt like I was one swing away, and I felt that way for 150 at-bats. You can’t take them back now, but I’m just trying to salvage what I can.”

Bell has salvaged it not with home runs. He has 12 on the year, but only three of them over his last 38 games. He’s done it with way more singles and doubles, including a key two-bagger Monday night during the Nationals’ four-run bottom of the first.

“I feel like there’s multiple ways that you can have OPS,” he said. “You can get on base. You can not strike out. Or you can slug. I was trying to slug, and it really didn’t work out. I was looking maybe two months into the season, and I had one double. That just can’t happen. You can slug hitting a ball in the gap, hitting it down the line. I’ve tried to do that the last couple months, and it’s been working out.”

Bell’s surge may have come too late to change the Nationals’ fortunes in 2025. But it’s coming at just the right time for interim general manager Mike DeBartolo to seek more in return for him at the upcoming trade deadline. If he’s moved, it would be the fourth consecutive year Bell was traded at the July deadline, a streak that began in 2022 when he was included in the Juan Soto deal that brought back Wood, CJ Abrams, MacKenzie Gore, Robert Hassell III, Jarlin Susana and Luke Voit from the Padres.

As much as he wanted to be part of a resurgent Nats team playing meaningful games in September this season, Bell may still get a chance to play meaningful games down the stretch with another contender, hoping he’s still swinging a hot bat at that point and producing numbers more in line with his career marks than what he put forth in April and May this year.

“I trust myself,” he said. “Obviously, I’m always fighting for more, but I think I have a pretty consistent floor. I’m just trying to push my ceiling, and that might get me in trouble from time to time. But I think the floor at the end of the year is always going to be at a certain level, which is why I’m still here.”