CHATHAM, Mass. — Cole Johnson beats himself up sometimes. Dennis Cook, the Anglers’ manager, has noticed it over the course of the summer. When the Georgia outfielder gets mired in a slump, much like the one he began his Chatham career with, he tends to underestimate himself.

“Sometimes, that's not the best way to be,” Cook said. “Especially in this game.”

Baseball is, inherently, a sport where failure is the norm and success is an aberration. But the levels of failure that Johnson began his A’s tenure with were far from normal for him. He entered Friday with a .143 batting average, well below the .310 mark he had as a freshman at Georgia. Through his first 20 games in Chatham, his .460 OPS was over 400 points below his figure at Georgia, and he’d only had one extra-base hit in that span.

Cook has several sayings he uses consistently. One of his favorites, that he uses when heaping praise on his batters: “Hitters hit, and he’s a hitter.” He knew Johnson was a hitter. Johnson just needed to remind himself that he was a hitter.

So, that’s what he did Friday, going 3-for-4 and reaching base four times to spark Chatham’s (12-17-3, East) 13-hit outburst in its 9-1 win over Yarmouth-Dennis (25-6-1, East) at Veterans Field. He drove in the A’s first three runs, and gave Chatham its first lead of the night with his first home run of the summer. And, thanks to Christian Chatterton’s (Auburn) stellar 12-strikeout start, that lead was never once endangered.

“Hitting is contagious,” Cook said postgame. “When one guy hits, it tends to be contagious.”

Johnson, evidently, was patient zero. In the bottom of the first, after Chatterton gave up a run to Y-D, he came up to the plate with two outs and runners on first and second.

It took Chatham over seven innings to find their first run in its 2-1 loss to Falmouth Thursday. But Johnson got it done in the first against Y-D, driving in Armani Guzman (West Virginia) with a line drive single into left field, tying the game up at 1-1.

Two innings later, Johnson’s second turn in the lineup came around. Facing off against Y-D starter Ty Brooks (Indiana State), he worked a 2-2 count before fouling off the fifth pitch he saw, a curveball. Johnson pulled it, so he knew he was out in front of the pitch.

When Brooks’ sixth pitch to him — also a curveball — sailed through the zone, Johnson sat on it and gave it a hearty hack, blasting his first homer of the summer onto the right-field hill. Johnson, never one to pimp a homer, ran around the bases as if it wasn’t a roundtripper.

But, if he’s being honest, he needed that blast.

“It was a huge relief,” Johnson said postgame. “It felt great.”

Good hitting, a virus Chatham seemed immune to entering Friday, began spreading through the A’s dugout quicker than COVID-19 in the winter of 2020.

The inning after Johnson’s homer, Guzman made it a 4-1 game with a line drive single into right. The inning after that, Johnson led off the frame with his third hit of the contest, and Eddie Marshall (Florida) brought him in with a lengthy two-run home run into the trees beyond the left-field fence. In the sixth, Marshall drove in another run with a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch. And in the seventh, Bino Watters (LSU) scored Chatham’s ninth run on a triple from Guzman.

And it all started with Johnson. Heading into Friday, he felt that he had put a lot of good swings on the ball this summer, and they were leading to hard outs. Because of that, he hadn’t been trying to change up his swing too much. The only mechanical adjustment he’d made through his slump was wrapping his bat around less, instead focusing on having a more direct bat path.

“I've put in a lot of work in the cage, trying to work on my approach at the plate,” Johnson said postgame. “Making sure that I'm not trying to force things to happen.”

Johnson’s biggest adjustment, really, was mental. Baseball’s fun, and he needed to remember that. It’s a game for children. Only the best of the best get to play it as adults.

Pregame, the Chatham dugout was enjoying itself. As they hit on the field, hours before the contest, the Anglers debuted their own speaker, playing curated tunes such as Kodak Black’s “Skrilla” and Drake’s “Headlines.” It was a stark contrast from the selections blaring through the Veterans Field public address system, featuring artists such as AC/DC and Kenny Chesney.

“Music relaxes people,” Johnson said postgame. “It gets you excited, it just helps you.”

Before the game, Cook had the A’s play a game of Pepper. The way Johnson explains it, there’s one person throwing a ball, three players in the field and one player with a bat, trying to drill the ball into the ground. A pop up is an out. A swing and a miss is an out. Only ground balls will suffice in this game. “Like a fungo,” Johnson says.

Johnson wouldn’t say they were goofing off, because they weren’t, but Johnson could sense that the team was relaxed. They were focused, but there was joy, the kind that Johnson hadn’t been having much of in his slump. He earned it tonight.

His self-critique, relentless as it is, will be saved for tomorrow. He can take the night off.

“I hope that he'll understand how good of a player he is,” Cook said.