JD's Swing Mechanic Adjustments

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Good stuff as always,Ian. I makes you wonder how many players are out there that, with better coaching and minor adjustments could make a significant leap.
 

DeweyWins

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There's more than a little philosophy to baseball, to hitting, pitching, etc.

Wade Boggs always aimed for the top of the ball, as I recall, to generate topspin. There's a great archived SI article on the subject that I remember reading back in the day. Williams was completely against the philosophy of hitting that Hriniak/Lau preached and that Boggs/Brett/Mattingly followed. A "slight uppercut" makes a good hitter. There is plenty of evidence to show that no one way is the best for everybody.

No matter the style/philosophy used, it's all about adjusting to the adjustments and then readjusting to the readjustments.

As someone who grew up closest to Baltimore, seeing the many different batting stances of Cal Ripken Jr. was really telling in how even someone who played every single day had to be constantly making adjustments. Rip was such a streaky hitter that even his adjustments weren't always the right ones.

I look back to him whenever I think about the tweaking of a swing. In his case, the swing remained pretty consistent. The mechanics of triggering that swing are what he seemed to change the most.

Joey Bats is another player whose change in triggering mechanism to his swing seemed to transform him as a player.

On the flip side, Paul Molitor had next to no pre-pitch motion that indicated a timing mechanism to his swing. I don't think I ever saw him take an awkward swing.

Changing the plane through which someone swings may be easier said than done, especially to make it repeatable, but to be where they are today, these guys should be able to do it. The question remains whether or not they should change their swings. If we see early season troubles with swing mechanics, I wouldn't be surprised to see guys abandon the philosophy of the uppercut swing. I can see it causing more rather than fewer problems with hitting.
 

Green Monster

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....................Changing the plane through which someone swings may be easier said than done, especially to make it repeatable, .................................. I wouldn't be surprised to see guys abandon the philosophy of the uppercut swing. I can see it causing more rather than fewer problems with hitting.
Great points Dewey, I could not agree more!
 

DeweyWins

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That's a perfect example.

I'm pretty confident I remember a brief in-game interview with Hank Aaron in the booth, possibly during an All-Star Game or Home Run Derby in which he discussed that exact method of swinging down to produce backspin to create loft and carry, with a focus on the carry, if I recall correctly.

Heck, while I hate to use a player from the Yanks as an example, watching Tino Martinez take practice swings, it was abundantly clear to me that he was swinging down to produce that same backspin effect.
 

uncannymanny

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Yeah the idea was to hit the ball like a line drive and generate your loft with the spin. It kind of blew me away at the time in that I’d always assumed you needed an uppercut swing to get loft.
 

shaggydog2000

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Makes sense. In tennis you uppercut for topspinand hit down the ball for backspin.
But rackets are flat and work differently than round bats. If you strike a round ball with a round bat and you don't square it up, you don't transfer all the power you could.
 

uncannymanny

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It’d be interesting to see HR sorted by swing plane or something. I wonder if the new school takes into account the strength point where it’s more advantageous for a particular batter to uppercut.
 

Snodgrass'Muff

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I don't understand why this discussion is happening in this thread. Martinez has been a pretty extreme flyball hitter since reinventing himself four offseasons ago and it obviously works for him. And there are no indications that he's going to make any changes to his swing since joining the Red Sox.
 

DeweyWins

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I must admit, as one of the "newer" posters here, that I may be guilty of expanding the scope of the initial subject of the thread. Or at least contributing to it.
 

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It's fine, it is an interesting discussion and no real need for Snodgrass to be play thread policeman.
 

Snodgrass'Muff

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It's fine, it is an interesting discussion and no real need for Snodgrass to be play thread policeman.
Sorry, wasn't trying to. Just seemed an odd place for it. Was going to suggest a new thread, actually as I do agree it's an interesting topic.

Edit: To clarify, JDM led the league in FB% at xstats.org last year, which is measured as launch angles between 26 and 39 degrees (I removed hitters with fewer than 450 PAs). When you combine that with HD% (balls hit between 19 and 26 degrees), he edges out Freddie Freeman for the top of that list as well.

He's the hitter on the Red Sox who has the least to gain from tweaking his swing to increase loft, and I'm pretty sure that means they won't be messing with his swing at all.

I actually wrote about the rest of the Sox lineup and how much Tim Hyers might be able to help them by tweaking their swings for dot com this winter and found that the hitters who were lowest in that combined FB/HD% range of launch angles were Mookie, Xander, JBJ and Devers (though I posit that Devers was low on that list more because he was adjusting to major league breaking pitches than because of his approach).

This discussion is an interesting counterpoint to the idea that Hyers can improve the offense by just adding some loft to a few swings, though. So maybe a new thread really is in order.
 
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Saints Rest

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There's more than a little philosophy to baseball, to hitting, pitching, etc.

Wade Boggs always aimed for the top of the ball, as I recall, to generate topspin. There's a great archived SI article on the subject that I remember reading back in the day. Williams was completely against the philosophy of hitting that Hriniak/Lau preached and that Boggs/Brett/Mattingly followed. A "slight uppercut" makes a good hitter. There is plenty of evidence to show that no one way is the best for everybody.

No matter the style/philosophy used, it's all about adjusting to the adjustments and then readjusting to the readjustments.

As someone who grew up closest to Baltimore, seeing the many different batting stances of Cal Ripken Jr. was really telling in how even someone who played every single day had to be constantly making adjustments. Rip was such a streaky hitter that even his adjustments weren't always the right ones.

I look back to him whenever I think about the tweaking of a swing. In his case, the swing remained pretty consistent. The mechanics of triggering that swing are what he seemed to change the most.


Joey Bats is another player whose change in triggering mechanism to his swing seemed to transform him as a player.

On the flip side, Paul Molitor had next to no pre-pitch motion that indicated a timing mechanism to his swing. I don't think I ever saw him take an awkward swing.

Changing the plane through which someone swings may be easier said than done, especially to make it repeatable, but to be where they are today, these guys should be able to do it. The question remains whether or not they should change their swings. If we see early season troubles with swing mechanics, I wouldn't be surprised to see guys abandon the philosophy of the uppercut swing. I can see it causing more rather than fewer problems with hitting.
For me, growing up in the Boston area in the 70's, it was Yaz who was the king of the different batting styles/stances. Your namesake, Dwight Evans, was another one who changed batting stances a bunch until he found the Hriniak method, at which time, his hitting took off.
 

BaseballJones

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My post here isn't about JDM, it's about the new swing approach, the "launch angle revolution". Interesting article here by Tom Verducci: https://www.si.com/mlb/2018/03/21/evolution-swing-home-run-opening-day

"Imagine a globe hanging in front of home plate, and a hitter swinging a sword at it, envisioning its core as the sweet spot of contact. Traditionally, a batter would be trained to bring his hands from their starting position toward the globe as quickly as possible in a direct, downward line. He’d try to strike the globe with the sword just north of the equator, continue down to the sweet spot at the core and then turn upward after contact—exiting the other side of the globe still in the Northern Hemisphere, without the sword ever crossing the equator. Hitting instructors called this the classic “in and out” swing path.

As recently as 2013, in comments to Fangraphs.com, then Tigers hitting coach Lloyd McClendon and Red Sox assistant hitting coach Victor Rodriguez recommended this downward trajectory. McClendon: “You want to focus on the top half of the ball ... and work your hands down through the ball.” Rodriguez: “You want a direct path to the ball and to hit the top part.” The idea was that you could enhance distance by imparting backspin if you clipped the ball just right—like a wedge hitting a golf ball and then the turf. McClendon and Rodriguez were not just any hitting coaches: They worked for the two highest-scoring teams in baseball that year.

This technique was standard practice. It also created a small window for optimal contact because the bat was in and out of the strike zone quickly. The average MLB fastball starts out six feet, one inch off the ground at 92.5 mph. By the time it reaches home it typically is two feet, seven inches off the ground and traveling at 85.2 mph. The drop of 42 inches creates a six-degree angle of decline. (Curveballs drop by at least 10 degrees.) A downward swing to meet a dropping pitch often produces contact on the top of the ball, resulting in grounders, which are outs 75.5% of the time.

Meanwhile, two trends were rendering the in-and-out approach even less effective. First, velocity ramped up. From 2002 to ’14 the average fastball jumped from 89.0 to 91.8 mph. Because a pitch travels an average of 54 feet, four inches from the release point to the plate, an increase of 2.8 mph meant the ball arrived .0127 seconds sooner—a huge reduction in the hitter’s margin of error. Second, defensive shifts became mainstream. Players who had been taught to drive the ball up the middle saw repositioned infielders turn their grounders into outs."


Sounds revolutionary, right? Well, it's actually just harkening back to the greatest of all time, Ted Williams. Williams advocated this very approach. He also faced a massive defensive shift. Look at this image from his book, "The science of hitting".



I've always thought that made the most sense. If you can match the swing plane with the plane of the incoming pitch, you have longer for the bat to make contact.

It seems like Teddy Ballgame was right.
 

JimD

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Interesting piece by Jen McCaffrey in The Athletic on JDM:

What does he think causes the early sluggishness?

“It’s definitely finding my routine for that season and finding my swings for that season. It’s tough,” Martinez said. “You’re up there and trying to find last year’s swing. I heard this thing, Dwight Evans said, and he heard [Carl] Yastrzemski say it to him, and it makes perfect sense. He pretty much said, ‘If you’re trying to find last year’s swing, good luck because you’re going to be in the cage all day. That was last year, you’ve got to find this year’s swing.' That’s kind of what it is, it seems like. I feel like I really don’t feel comfortable in the box until I get those good amount of at-bats underneath me and then it’s like ‘Oh OK, I kind of have an idea of what I’m doing out there now.'”
https://theathletic.com/307005/2018/04/10/mccaffrey-j-d-martinez-staying-calm-as-he-searches-for-this-years-swing/