FSU catcher Mat Nelson's staggering season has been years in the making
Mat Nelson isn't what you might expect the national leader in home runs to look like.
It's not that he's tiny by any stretch. It's just that he's not enormous. He's not one of those 6-foot-5 gargantuan sluggers who can seemingly hit a baseball 400 feet on a check swing.
And despite the monster season Nelson is currently enjoying, he's not considered a sure-fire first-round Major League Baseball draft pick.
No, the Florida State star is just a 5-foot-11, 190-pound catcher who happens to be hitting the ball better than just about anyone who has ever worn a Florida State uniform.
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Nelson currently leads the country with 19 home runs, 55 RBIs and a slugging percentage of .872. And he's able to do it without even being 6 feet tall.
"You can't look at the physical side of it," Nelson said. "I mean, size doesn't mean anything. You can look at a 6-3 behemoth who can hit a ball out in (batting practice) and not hit a lick in a game. Or you can watch a guy just hit line drives in BP the entire time and then get up there and start whacking balls over the scoreboard.
"Physicality and size doesn't really matter in this game. If you can do it, you can do it."
And Nelson has turned into his own personal Nike slogan this year: He just does it. Over and over and over again.
Heading into this weekend's series against visiting Troy, Nelson's 19 homers are four more than anyone else in the country, and his slugging percentage is just .07 points behind what Buster Posey did during his incredible 2008 season.
It's been a truly remarkable campaign. For someone who has never really considered himself a home run hitter.
"They would kind of come and go," Nelson said. "I'm never a person who tries to use just power. I'm always a person who just tries to hit the ball in the gap. The power is there. So, if I get into one, it will go. But otherwise, I just try to live gap to gap. Even now, I don't ever think, 'home run, home run, home run.' I just stay with the mindset of gap to gap, stay in the middle of the field, and you'll catch a barrel.
"If it goes, it goes. If it doesn't, oh well."
They've been going at a staggering pace for the redshirt sophomore catcher.
He came into 2021 with seven career homers in 216 at-bats. So, about one in 31.
This season, that has jumped to one homer in every 6.58 at-bats.
So what does Nelson attribute this sensational surge in power to?
For one thing, he lost about 20 pounds during the extended COVID-19 offseason, and then replaced it with 15 pounds of muscle. So, he's stronger. That certainly helps.
And he has always used a wood bat in batting practice. As much as possible, anyway.
A wood bat, he said, will tell you better than anything else how well you're hitting the ball. If you're barreling up pitches, hitting them on the sweet spot, a wood bat isn't all that much different than ones college players use. But when you don't hit the ball with the barrel, a wood bat lets you know real quick.
"Wood will teach you how to hit," Nelson said. "Because, if you hit it wrong, it's going to hurt. Or if you hit it wrong, it's going to break. So, it teaches you to hit the ball on the barrel. And then you can start to play with loft and power and swinging aggressively."
More than anything, he said, it's the approach head coach Mike Martin Jr. is always preaching: Stay back, go up the middle, drive the ball to right-center field.
And once this season started, and Nelson started seeing those drives to right-center start going over the screen with more frequency, he has stayed laser-focused with that approach.
It's how he has hit a home run in four straight games. And six of the last seven. And seven of the last nine. And on and on and on.
It's also how he also leads the Seminoles in batting average (.336), runs (36), doubles (10) and OPS (1.329), along with those nation-leading statistics.
"I always knew I had power, that I could put it over the right-field fence," Nelson said. "But when I got into a couple of them, put them 400 [feet] to right field, it was like, 'OK. Well, that's where all the juice is. If [opposing pitchers] are going to live middle-away, then why not put them over that wall?"
Why not indeed?
There's no way to know how Nelson's 2021 season will end. Will he lead the nation in homers and carry FSU back to Omaha? Will he wind up being an early-round selection in the MLB Draft?
No one has any idea. Least of all him.
But there's no denying that, through the first 36 games of the 2021 season, Mat Nelson has enjoyed one of the most prolific stretches in the history of the Florida State program.
He's just not thinking about it.
"We've still got a month of baseball left to play," Nelson said. "One thing I always do before games is I like to manifest a lot. Like, I like to envision myself doing good things on the field. And I envision myself doing it in the game. I don't think ahead. I always tell myself to live in the moment: Pitch by pitch, out by out, inning by inning, game by game.
"You have to live in that mindset. You start living in the past or you start living in the future is when you start getting out of yourself. And that's not something I want to start doing."
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