ANAHEIM — If it’s possible to have a “successful” injury, Kole Calhoun had one.

In the seven weeks since Calhoun returned from a stint on the DL to recover from a strained oblique, he has engineered a remarkable turnaround to his season.

By the numbers, he went from being one of baseball’s worst hitters to one of the best.

He was hitting .145 with a .374 OPS when he hit the disabled list June 1. His OPS was the worst in the majors, with a minimum of 100 plate appearances, by 78 points.

Since coming back June 18, he’s hitting .292 with a .996 OPS. To put that into perspective, Mike Trout won the 2016 MVP award with a .991 OPS.

The sample size for Calhoun 2.0 is now up to 175 plate appearances, which is almost as much as the 185 plate appearances of his slump.

“It’s crazy impressive,” hitting coach Eric Hinske marveled. “Look at him. He’s a fire hydrant. He’s strong as an ox. He just needed his body to work the right way for him. For him to make that swing adjustment in the middle of the season is definitely a tough thing to do. He’s a stud.”

By now you know about the swing adjustment. Calhoun returned from the DL with a new stance, more crouched than before.

Clearly, it’s worked.

To understand how it’s worked, and how he got into the hole that necessitated this in-season makeover, you have to go back to last season.

Calhoun hit .244 with 19 homers and a .725 OPS in 2017. The numbers were slightly down from his career .266 batting average and .764 OPS coming into the season.

What frustrated Calhoun was the inconsistency within the season. His monthly averages were, starting in April: .255, .158, .324, .169, .300 and .245.

“Last year was so up and down,” Calhoun said. “I’d go good. I’d go bad. I’d go good. I’d go bad. I didn’t really have a stable base of what I was doing. I kept trying to find something. I’d find it for a minute and then I’d lose it.”

So Calhoun spent the winter trying to change his swing. Although Calhoun said it was simply to find more consistency, Hinske said he was also trying to join the launch angle revolution.

“He was trying to hit the bottom half of the baseball and hit the ball in the air and drive the ball out of the yard,” Hinske said. “It turned into an uphill swing on him and he couldn’t find his way out.”

Despite the success of spring training – “To be honest, I kind of got lucky,” Calhoun said – the season began and he was almost immediately a mess.

Essentially, Hinske said, Calhoun was trying to get under the ball with an uppercut swing, but he was doing it from such an upright stance that it required him to bring his head and hands down and then back up. All that motion, which obviously also included his eyes moving, made it difficult to track the baseball and square it up.

Hinske also said Calhoun’s back hip was locked in place by his upright stance. Power comes from the legs turning the hips and then pulling the barrel through the zone.

Calhoun’s problem was his hands were pulling the barrel out front before his hips could catch up, Hinske said. That resulted in weak contact and pulled ground balls.

Calhoun hit the ball on the ground 55.7 percent of the time in the first two months, up from his 42.5 percent previously. All those ground balls, even the hard hit ones, were being gobbled up by defensive shifts.

Calhoun’s average plummeted, dragging his confidence along with it.

“Day in and day out, I was beating myself up, honestly,” Calhoun said.

He was physically punishing himself, too, as it turns out. He took so many extra swings in the cage trying to get right that it was almost inevitable that eventually something would pop.

On a steamy May 31 afternoon in Detroit, Calhoun was grinding away in the cage when he felt his back lock up. He talked to the trainers.

“They said if you keep going, maybe you blow it out for a while,” he said. “Or you can take a step back. When you’re hitting .145, it’s kind of hard to plead your case, honestly.”

The Angels placed Calhoun on the disabled list with a strained oblique. Instead of staying with the team to rehab, he went home to Arizona. For five or six days, he didn’t touch a bat.

“I went home and kind of relaxed, I guess,” he said. “Tried to clear my mind.”

When he was ready to begin swinging again, Calhoun met with Jeremy Reed and Shawn Wooten, the Angels’ Arizona-based minor-league hitting coordinators. They showed him video and helped him understand where his swing had gotten lost.

Concepts that might have been difficult to grasp – amid the noise of daily games, crowds and questioning reporters – suddenly connected in the quiet of Arizona.

“Everything just kind of made sense,” Calhoun said.

Reed and Wooten helped Calhoun develop a new stance, which was actually just a snapshot of a position he’d been trying to achieve all along. Instead of starting off upright and crouching slightly as the pitch approached, he began in the crouch. He eliminated some of the bat-wagging as he waited for the pitch. It was as if he took a video of his good swings and edited out the beginning.

“I tried to really simplify it and get closer to a spot that I feel powerful,” Calhoun said. “Instead of all this stuff that helped me get there.”

Having more bend helped Calhoun get his hips around before his hands, Hinske said. Starting with his head lower prevented Calhoun from dipping while trying to track the ball, which allows him to see the ball better.

“You are trying to eliminate moving parts,” Hinske said. “This is freeing him up to take him to the baseball, which is where we want everything to happen in the first place.”

The results showed immediately. On the first at-bat of a rehab assignment at Triple-A, Calhoun hit a home run. He went 6 for 19 in five games at Triple-A, and then returned to the majors.

On June 18, Calhoun stepped to the plate and unveiled his new stance to the major league baseball world. Zack Greinke was on the mound for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The former Cy Young winner threw him a first-pitch fastball, and Calhoun yanked it into right field, through the shift, for a single.

“Hey, I can do this,” Calhoun recalled telling himself.

He got another hit that night. The next night, he hit his first homer since opening day. The next night, he hit another one.

“You start rolling and get a little bit of confidence,” Calhoun said. “Hopefully you’ve turned the corner.”

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Angels get an optimistic glimpse of the future in win over Padres Since coming back, Calhoun has cut his ground balls from 55.7 percent to 31.6 percent. His line drive rate went from 16.8 percent to 23.1 percent. His percentage of hard-hit balls went from 35.1 percent to 47 percent.

After hitting one homer in two months, he’s been on one of the best power binges of his career. His 14 homers since returning are the most in the American League over that span. His 10 homers in July were his most in any calendar month of his career.

What’s more, Calhoun believes this is not just a hot streak, but a sustainable change to his swing.

“It’s something I feel like is easier to repeat, day in and day out,” he said. “I have a good understanding of it.”

Manager Mike Scioscia agrees that Calhoun has done better than rediscover his old self. He’s improved on the hitter he used to be.

“The struggles he had in April and May have ended up putting him in a better place right now with the adjustments he’s made,” Scioscia said. “There’s never been a question he was going to find where he needed to be. He’s done that, plus. He’s reworked some things in his swing from even when he was very productive in the last couple years. … He’s more free. He’s looser. There’s a confidence level that he’s able to handle a wider array of pitching even from the last couple years. His numbers are off the charts since he came back.”

UP NEXT

Angels (RHP Felix Peña,1-3, 4.97) vs. A’s (LHP Brett Anderson, 2-3, 4.74), Friday, 7:30 p.m., Fox Sports West, KLAA (830 AM)