The power is on at Smith’s Ballpark, as the Bees blast home runs at a record pace

The subject is appealing, and Salt Lake Bees hitting coach Donnie Ecker is eager to discuss it in the fewest words.

“We like home runs,” he says, and then he helpfully offers to keep talking a little more.

“With the way the game is going, with how good pitching is,” Ecker says, “it is really important to learn how to change the game in one swing.”

The Bees have done a lot of game-changing in the Triple-A Pacific Coast League, leading Minor League Baseball with 108 homers in 72 games and trailing only the New York Yankees in all of pro baseball. Halfway through the season, Salt Lake (41-31) is on top of its division and on track to break the franchise’s season record of 185 homers, set in 2000 when the likes of Brian Buchanan, Doug Mientkiewicz and Torii Hunter were slugging for the Salt Lake Buzz, a Minnesota Twins affiliate.

That explains why “185” is written on the board in Ecker’s office, with the biggest variable in that pursuit being how the parent Los Angeles Angels recently had a club-record 15 players on the disabled list.

Those injuries affect the Bees, having lost Jabari Blash to the Angels for two stints. Blash, who has hit 18 homers in 47 games for Salt Lake, again was optioned to the Bees as they begin a four-game series vs. Tacoma on Thursday night at Smith’s Ballpark. Even while Blash was away, the Bees hit eight homers on their seven-game road trip — including five in Tuesday’s 17-9 win at Colorado Springs.

The Bees look a lot different than the team that hit 68 homers all season in 2016. The biggest reason for the power surge is better power hitters, and more of them. The Angels acquired veteran sluggers such as Blash and Chris Carter (since traded to Minnesota) and assigned them to Salt Lake this spring.

Standing in the third-base coaching box, Bees manager Keith Johnson enjoys seeing the ball fly out of the park. “It’s been a fun year,” he said. “We’ve gone so long in our organization when we just had to scrape, scratch and claw to try to score runs, and have other teams hit three-run homers off of us. It’s good to be on the other side of the ball.”

Johnson added, “For a baseball purist, all it is, is I want guys who hit the ball really, really hard and hit it consistently. … The home runs are going to be a byproduct.”

Carter’s 13 homers in 38 games were a bonus. Carter, who led the National League with 41 homers for Milwaukee in 2016, was traded by the Angels in May. His 500-foot homer at El Paso in April remains among the most memorable blasts for the Bees this season, along with Blash’s 460-footer at El Paso, Michael Hermosillo’s grand slam that completed his hitting cycle vs. Fresno and Matt Thaiss’ grand slam Monday at Colorado Springs that sent the Bees ahead in the ninth inning, before they ended up losing.

Salt Lake’s success stories include Jose Fernandez, who hit 10 homers in the first 38 games and was summoned to the Angels, and David Fletcher, who was among the PCL leaders in multiple categories before being called up. Fletcher’s specialty is hitting doubles, yet even his six homers showed how the power game caught on with the Bees.

“When you’ve got an offense like ours that scores a lot of runs, it’s definitely fun to be a part of that,” Fletcher said last week.

The team’s hitting resurgence is directed by Ecker, who hit a total of two home runs in his career in affiliated baseball, playing for Texas’ rookie league team. Having spent the past two seasons at the Class-A level in the St. Louis Cardinals organization, he’s making an impact in Salt Lake.

Ecker, 32, is credited with improving Blash’s discipline, resulting in more pitches to hit. Now, he’s helping develop prospects such as Thais, who has hit six homers in 23 games, and Taylor Ward, who homered twice Tuesday as the two went a combined 9 of 11 at the plate.

“He’s doing a great job with all these guys,” Johnson said.

“We have a really clear plan through our hitting coordinators,” he said, involving “making really good decisions … based around pitches that you can hit really hard.”

Art and science both are part of hitting, with the physics of having the plane of the swing mirror the plane of the pitch. “Sometimes, they match up really well,” Ecker said, “and [the ball] goes really far.”