Whenever fans see Michael Morse come to the plate to hit, he does a contortion that looks like a flamingo attempting martial arts. What is it? Fans have wondered ever since he began using the hitting tip last year and quickly had his best breakout season as a slugger.

“That’s ‘The Move,’ ” Manager Davey Johnson said on Monday night. It’s the first hitting move, the trigger mechanism that starts the swing, that Hank Aaron taught Johnson in 1973 that transformed him late in his career into a 43-homer hitter. But it is also at the core of a hitting theory that Johnson has gradually infused throughout the Washington Nationals organization, to an enthusiastic response from hitting coach Rick Eckstein and General Manager Mike Rizzo, to players like Morse and Ian Desmond, who have flourished with the approach. Finally, after almost a year of waiting, the Nats have exploded, ranking second in baseball in runs scored since the all-star break entering Monday’s games.

It better keep working. With Stephen Strasburg due to be shut down fairly soon, the Nats’ offensive evolution needs to continue. Luckily, their transformation is already in its 14th month. Since the day Johnson took over as manager, he vowed to eradicate, root and branch every theory of hitting that he saw the Nats employing when he took the job last June.

Johnson believes “the previous regime” insisted on an almost comical overemphasis on hitting to the opposite field, usually singles. That should slowly be replaced by a focus on all-fields power. He empowered Eckstein to teach hitting the way the coach wanted to, but has never before had across-the-board support.

“This is going to take time,” Johnson told Rizzo. “We have some real bad philosophy in here. It takes time for players to change habits.”

For almost a year, Johnson sounded wacky when he talked about how much hitting talent the Nats had and how sure he was that it would emerge.

Actually, he was “Wack-o,” which became one of Johnson’s nicknames.

“WACK-O!” Johnson would exclaim, walking up to a Nats player and showing him “The Move.” Johnson would smack the back of his left hand downward, from his right shoulder to what would be a waist-high pitch, showing how you could have a short, quick swing that got the bathead’s sweet spot to the ball while it was still at or in front of the plate.

“How’s our ‘dumb’ hitting coach doing these days? He sure seems to be getting smarter,” Rizzo said. With their best possible lineup finally available (except for catcher Wilson Ramos), the Nats seem almost as excited to find out how well they can hit as they are by the pennant race itself.

From now on, the Nats must cope with hot starting rotations, like the Atlanta Braves who are now in Nationals Park, or the strong staffs from Los Angeles, San Francisco or Cincinnati that may wait in October. In order to succeed, they’ll have to keep hitting as they have recently.

In Monday’s series-opening 5-4 win against the Braves, the Nats showed their progress and the work that still remains as the excruciating pressure of late-season games makes hitting far more difficult than mere theory in these close, crucial games.