How new Red Sox slugger Curtis Mead learned to stop tinkering with his approach and started raking
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — For parts of three years, Curtis Mead was a marginal big leaguer who couldn’t find a foothold in the majors. This year, he became a breakout contributor for a contending Nationals team before being identified by the Red Sox as a potential difference-maker worthy of the considerable cost of lefthander Connelly Early.
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“Huge impact,” Nationals manager Blake Butera told the Globe by phone of Mead’s role this year. “I can’t put words to how important he’d been to us.”
So how did Mead — who entered his Sox debut Monday against the Athletics hitting .254/.352/.500 with 17 homers in 87 games, but left with what the team described as a left wrist contusion after being hit by a 95-mile-per-hour fastball — emerge as a revelation this year, and someone the Sox acquired to contribute to their lineup for years to come?
Mead isn’t an out-of-nowhere talent. The 25-year-old Australian was viewed as one of the top pure hitting prospects in the minors across multiple years, hitting .321/.378/.533 with 15 homers while rising through the lower levels in 2021 and then .298/.390/.532 in Double-A and Triple-A in 2022.
He posted big exit velocities while zipping liners across the field and rarely swung and missed, a combination that offers a great foundation for a valuable big league hitter.
“The athleticism, the approach in the box at such a young age, a really good understanding of what he was trying to do and how pitchers were trying to attack him at a young age, that all kind of stood out right away,” said Butera, who met Mead in the Australian Winter League after the 2019 season, then worked with him in the Rays farm system from 2021-25. “He hit the ball really hard. He still does that.”
But Mead fiddled with the dials on his routines, as well as everything he did in the box: Going from crouched to upright in his posture, wide to narrow in his legs, open to squared in how he faced the pitcher, and switching from holding his bat upright to letting it rest on his shoulder.
“Some of my best seasons in the minor leagues, I was a very different hitter depending on the week,” Mead said in the visitor’s clubhouse at Sutter Health Park. “If I didn’t get a hit, I felt like something had to give. A lot of times that was where my hands were, how my body was set up, and it’s a challenging way to live when you live like that.”
Mead’s natural bat-to-ball skills were good enough that such experiments didn’t hinder him in the minors. The big leagues were a different story.
After a promising rookie year in 2023 (.253/.326/.349 in 24 games), Mead got worse in 2024-25, hitting .235/.294/.309 with the Rays and, after a trade in mid-2025, the White Sox. His attention turned to his swing rather than the opposing pitcher. As a result, his chase rates spiked — 32 percent in 2023, 38 percent in 2024 — and pitchers got him out without throwing hittable pitchers.
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“He’s always tinkered,” said Butera. “I think if he had to probably go back and if there was anything that he wished he probably didn’t do, it was probably tinkering when he was trying to perform at the major league level. That’s really hard.”
Mead realized he needed a stable foundation both in his pregame routines and batting stance to have success. As a member of the White Sox in 2025, he started working with the hitting coaches to limit his pre-swing movements in order to have more time to recognize which pitches to attack and which to ignore.
“I’m trying to just stay out of my own way, keep it as compact as possible,” said Mead. “Guys just seem to keep throwing harder and harder, so I probably try to cut it down a little bit and just be a bit more direct with my swing. I don’t want to go up there feeling like I have to cheat to a good fastball.”
This year, Mead moved his feet closer together, becoming more upright, and employed a slightly more open stance than the one he’d used in 2024 and 2025. He moved two inches closer to the inner edge of the plate. Most critically, he moved his hands from above his shoulders to just above the letters, a setup that made his swing more compact.
The result? More time to see the pitch and react to it, and less distance to travel in order to move his contact point out in front of his body – resulting in more pitches driven in the air for power to the pull-side.
Butera wasn’t focused on those adjustments when the opportunity emerged for the Nationals to acquire Mead after he’d been designated for assignment by the White Sox at the end of spring training. He simply saw an opportunity.
“I was fired up,” said Butera. “I was like, ‘Look, I’ve seen Curtis when he was at his all-time best. That doesn’t just go away. He’s still only 25 years old. He just hasn’t really had an opportunity to get settled into the major-league level.’”
This year, Mead got his shot. He hasn’t missed. He views his breakout year not as a reframing of expectations but instead as the realization of long-anticipated promise that simply required time to fulfill.
“My belief never really wavered,” said Mead. “It’s been cool to get that opportunity in Washington and make the most of it, and then ultimately end up in a place like [Boston].”
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