By Matt Weiner (@mattweiner20) – Baseball Beat Reporter // Photo Via SJSU Athletics
It was an autumn day in 2021 like any other.
Dalton Bowling hitting in the cages with SJSU teammates Hunter Dorraugh and Nathan Cadena while having no luck working out a fatal flaw in his swing.
That was until Cadena offered Bowling a suggestion that was resolution at first sight:
“He was like, ‘How about you tilt your head up and turn it to the left a little bit more so now both eyes are on the baseball.”
Cadena’s suggestion unlocked the mechanical bliss Bowling perpetually failed to find and has flipped his future at SJSU from bleak to bright.
In 2022, Bowling went from being out of the Opening Day lineup to SJSU’s clean-up hitter during its unheralded run to the Mountain West Championship.
A year later, Bowling’s only gotten better.
Before SJSU kicks off a three-game series at New Mexico on Thursday, Bowling leads the Spartans in home runs (4), RBI (25), slugging percentage (.556), on base plus slugging (.944) and total bases (50).
“Nate telling me that played a huge difference of my success going into the future at that time,” said Bowling.
Bowling’s continued excellence has put SJSU a .5 game out of first place in the Mountain West behind San Diego State.
“I’m as happy for him and the success he has had as I am anybody,” said SJSU head coach Brad Sanfilippo.
Sanfilippo heavily pursed Bowling when he was assembling his first recruiting class after becoming SJSU’s head coach in 2018. He was enamored with the Bowling’s power and projected that he could be the “physical” presence SJSU needed in its lineup.
Bowling, a 6-foot-4-inch local standout at Fremont’s John F. Kennedy High School, was being recruited by SJSU before Sanfilippo took over and already had a great relationship with the team. The coaches reached out regularly and he was friendly with pitcher Chandler Giles and infielder Samuel Liang.
SJSU also had the local aspect working its favor which was a priority for the family-centered Bowling.
But the real engine driving his decision to commit to SJSU in August of 2018 before his senior year was SJSU’s consistent communication with him throughout his recruitment.
“They were welcoming me in unlike some of the other schools. Not knocking on the other schools, but I just felt more welcomed,” said Bowling.
Sanfilippo invested in Bowling financially as well, making him one of the 11 players on scholarship on SJSU’s 37-man roster.
Bowling’s smooth ride into SJSU quickly diverted into a bumpy ride that spanned nearly two years.
On January 5, 2020, Bowling lost his grandmother someone he said was “one of his favorite people on the planet.”
When the right-handed hitting Bowling stares down pitchers, staring right back at him on the top of his left forearm is a tattoo in honor of her.
“It has two roses and then in the middle is a banner of the day my grandma died,” said Bowling. “She was one of my biggest supporters besides my mom and my dad. She came to every single travel ball game. Every single high school game.”
Difficult circumstances only snowballed from there.
Bowling hit .192 in his freshman season before it was cut short due to the COVID-19 Pandemic after 17 games. He started in 13 of the 17 games he appeared in and had difficulty adjusting to Division I pitching.
The jump wasn’t made any easier by the passing of his grandmother, but Bowling said it wasn’t a major contributing factor to his struggles. “Just being a freshman it was hard just getting the hang of things,” said Bowling.
Right before Bowling’s sophomore campaign kicked off in 2021 several of SJSU’s players got COVID-19 and the Spartans didn’t play its first game until over a month after the season was scheduled to begin.
During the salvaged 36-game season, Bowling mirrored his lackluster 2020 campaign. He hit .203, slugged .270 and struck out nine more times than he walked. He started in 19 of the 28 games he appeared in and wasn’t able to adapt to the inconsistent playing time.
“It was tough just get into that rhythm. Baseball is a rhythm game,” said Bowling.
The Spartans finished 6-30 after ending the season on a 17-game losing streak. Their .095 conference winning percentage was their worst by a lofty margin since joining the Mountain West in 2014.
When the fall season came around in 2021, Bowling still hadn’t made any strides. If anything, he was going backward after accumulating a dangerously high swing and miss rate.
“Just a bunch of thoughts were going through my mind like a million miles an hour,” said Bowling.
It wasn’t for a lack of trying, but he just couldn’t find the one adjustment that helped him rise from swing purgatory.
When the fall season ended, Sanfilippo along with his coaching staff voiced their doubts to Bowling that they were unsure what his future role at SJSU was.
“There were some question marks at the end of that fall, like ‘Hey man I don’t know where we are at. At some point in time, we are expecting you to be the guy and right now I’m still not sure if you are,’” said Sanfilippo. “‘I can’t have you frustrated if you come back and you’re not.’”
Bowling wasn’t surprised by what Sanfilippo, assistant coach Thomas Walker, and former pitching coach Seth Moir said to him. He also didn’t take Moir’s suggestion of transferring to a community college for a year to figure things out then come back to SJSU with restored confidence as a slap in the face.
The conversation was as difficult as it was productive.
By the end of it, Bowling came to the conclusion that he belonged at SJSU.
“I think he took the challenge of like ‘Oh there’s a question mark if I’m the guy or not? Watch this,’” said Sanfilippo.
Besides, Bowling had already found the adjustment that answered the ‘Is Dalton Bowling the guy?’ question with an emphatic ‘Yes, he is that guy.’
Bowling knew he was swinging and missing, but couldn’t figure out the why behind the whiffs.
It all made sense after Cadena suggested Bowling turn his head toward the pitcher and look at the mound with both eyes instead of just his left one.
Hindsight is always crystal clear.
A key reason behind Bowling’s inability to keep his eye on the ball was that his eyes were constantly shifting planes.
“I had a big leg kick which was causing my hands to be super late when I landed,” said Bowling. “I would dive at the ball which was making my eyes bounce and I was swinging and missing a lot which is obviously very bad in baseball.”
Bowling was able to relay his newly acquired physical stability into mental stability at the plate. His stance was still open, but he replaced his “big leg kick” with a smidge of a toe tap which helped his head stay still and eyes on the same plane from pitch to contact.
The newly found success carried over into the winter break when Bowling was hacking away at his local cages in Fremont and when he returned for intrasquads the month before Opening Day.
It was an admirable thing for Cadena to do who was competing with Bowling for the starting spot at third base.
“Flip comes up to me the day before Opening Day and says, ‘Hey, we are going to have Nate start. He’s been consistently doing well.’ Which is fine. I was like, ‘Awesome for Nate. He’s a freshman he did what he was supposed to do.’”
Cadena struggled to begin the 2022 season, hitting just .160 in his first 25 at bats.
On March 6 against New Mexico, Bowling started over Cadena at third and went 2-for-3 and drove in a run to begin a six-game hitting streak. Bowling then got a hit in 14 of his next 16 games and became SJSU’s clean-up hitter. A role he hasn’t given up since.
Meanwhile, Cadena has found himself back in the starting lineup as SJSU’s designated hitter and has vastly improved in 2023. He’s now hitting .280 with an .837 slugging percentage and went 3-for-4 during last Saturday’s win over Nevada which clinched Sanfilippo’s 100th all-time victory as SJSU’s head coach.
“Everybody I talk to I take with my heart. If you have something to say that might better game, I’m going to listen to that,” said Bowling.
