This is the third installment in a five-part series examining how swing biomechanics and the proliferation of technological tools are helping hitters. Part 1 explored the history of this field and the origin of a few key devices. Part 2 looked at newly emphasized swing traits and how they’re being applied. Part 3 addresses the mental aspects of hitting and the visual cues that batters must look for while in the box.
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Growing up on Long Island, about 25 miles east of New York City, Eugene Bleecker took 10 years of lessons at a local baseball camp. He went on to play college baseball, catching for four NAIA schools over five years with what he calls “very old-school” mechanics. When he started his coaching career, Bleecker taught the same drills and preached the same philosophies that he had learned in his youth.
But attending the 2010 American Baseball Coaches Association convention in Dallas made him reconsider everything—a “100% epiphany” is how he describes it. That’s where Bleecker met former big league catcher Don Slaught, who would go on to create the Right View Pro video analysis tool for hitters. Slaught showed Bleecker slow-motion clips of Derek Jeter in action. Though Jeter had been a vocal proponent of swinging down on the ball, the footage proved otherwise.
“When he showed me video of Derek Jeter and that he never swung down in his entire life, it made me feel stupid,” Bleecker says, “and it made me go back and rethink everything that I did—and change everything.”
The founder 108 Performance, which operates two player training facilities in Southern California, Bleecker sought to understand why coaches said what they said. He pored over video technology, such as Slaught’s Right View Pro, and perused an extensive collection of clips compiled on Google Drive by Dustin Lind, now a Seattle Mariners quality assurance coach who works with hitters at all levels of the organization. Bleecker sought to reconcile empirical evidence with the misguided coaching truisms that still produced very successful players.
The crux of it all: The exact same verbal cue can produce two completely different actions. Language is a matter of individual interpretation.
“A coach can’t talk to a player about feel because we have no idea what they’re feeling,” says Slaught, who had his own dugout epiphany in 1989 at Yankee Stadium “We ask them what they feel, and so we start coaching with their words.”
Modern technology is able to illuminate the kinematic sequence of a hitter’s swing, but those assessments top out at the athlete’s torso. What happens above the neck just as critical, and it’s hard not to lean into baseball’s most famous truism of all: Yogi Berra famously said the game is “90% mental,” which makes perfect sense if you ignore that fact that he said the other 50% is physical.
Regardless of the proportions, it’s clear that mastering the physical demands of the swing isn’t enough. And new tools are available to help: virtual reality, pitch-recognition drills, vision training, and EEG. Even those who have closely studied swing biomechanics, such as Motus VP Ben Hansen and former ASMI researcher Dave Fortenbaugh, agree that pitch recognition, plate discipline, and timing are of paramount importance. “As much as I’m a mechanics guy,” Fortenbaugh says, “I wholeheartedly believe that, if there’s just a lot more focus on the mental training of being a hitter . . . it can be a lot more helpful.”
Applying and interpreting the data is necessary too. 108 Performance, for instance, utilizes K-Motion wearables, Blast Motion bat sensors, and HitTrax and Rapsodo ball trackers. The coaches also collaborate with the 3-D motion biomechanics lab Movement First and its clinic director, Dr. Emily Ferree. But for all that technology, Bleecker insists that coaches need to understand the thought process of a hitter and the movements that create all the data.
“The old school is not wrong,” he says. “It just didn’t understand why it was right.”
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Astros All-Star third baseman Alex Bregman stands in an indoor batting cage, the hood of a purple sweatshirt pulled up over his hat, a bat in his right hand. Addressing the camera, he explains how he tries to trick himself during every at bat.
Bregman prefaces his remarks by acknowledging that of course his body will rotate toward the pitcher as he tries to hit the ball. But that’s exactly what he tries to stop himself from doing. A righty, he pretends that he is shining beams of light toward the first-base dugout for the entirety of his swing.
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“Well, for me personally, I never, ever think about rotation at all,” he says. “I think I have two flashlights right here on my hips pointing that way. I have them on my shoulders, on my hips, on everything…
“And all I am trying to do—the only thing I look for—is, when I load, to have my hands travel high across my chest forward like this and the knob of the bat get out there past the inside part of the baseball. I am trying to do this while keeping everything facing directly [toward the first-base dugout].
“Now, of course, it’s not going to happen, but that’s how my brain has to think in order to stay closed and not spin off the baseball.”
Alex Bregman shares his own approach to hitting.
(via @ABREG_1) pic.twitter.com/gFfi7IGTGU
— Play Ball (@PlayBall) January 22, 2019
As he speaks, Bregman seems to realize that the inner workings of his mind sound a little ridiculous even though his results are undeniable—his 57 home runs and a .932 OPS both rank sixth in the American League since the start of 2018.
Similarly, some of the greatest hitters of a generation—Mike Trout, Albert Pujols, and Alex Rodriguez—have spoken about wanting to keep their “barrel above the hands” or to “swing down at the baseball.” Just like Bergman’s advice to not rotate his hips, their advice isn’t backed up by video analysis of their swings.
Gurus such Bleecker and Jason Ochart, the Philadelphia Phillies’ hitting coordinator, have explored the rationale behind this disconnect: When a player tilts the bat down in his swing, the barrel might feel as if it’s above the hands. This tweet by Ochart helps explains why a player such as Pujols might feel that way. If you rotate a picture of his body, mid-swing, so that his spine is perpendicular to the ground, the barrel indeed appears to be above the hands.
Some new school coaches like to poke fun at Pujols for saying “I try to keep my barrel above my hands.”
Of course the hands are higher than his barrel in space..but relative to his shoulder plane, they are not.
Before we ridicule, we must try to understand the feel. pic.twitter.com/bkxGXIDnaB
— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) February 12, 2019
“I had to have the availability of the technology to understand it,” Bleecker says. “But the openness towards understanding why things have been said and why things work and why coaches have said what they’ve said for so long to get to the deeper meaning behind everything.”
That’s why hitting coaches such as the Minnesota Twins’ James Rowson and the Cincinnati Reds’ Donnie Ecker want to build relationships with players to first understand how they think and then provide individualized support. “My philosophy is, ‘The player I’m currently speaking to, what does he need?’ ” Ecker says. “What we know is half as important as what that player in front of us needs.”
Dr. Greg Rose, a co-founder of OnBaseU and golf’s Titleist Performance Institute, says the sports world’s understanding of the kinematic sequence has grown over the last two decades, with technology allowing hard data to supplement and, at times, supplant intuition. But expressing those insights to the players who needed to execute them had long been a challenge.
“We had the data for many, many years,” says Michael Bentley, who developed both the Blast Motion and K-Motion technologies. “We had the signatures. But they’re too complex, right? It looks just like a bunch of squiggly lines. The problem was the communication. For years, I would put people to sleep talking about kinetic chains and different sequencing of data.”
“I typically give hitters permission to have one swing thought at a time,” Tewksbary says. “Anything more than that is a little messy.”
One of the primary goals of the OnBaseU training seminar—which certifies coaches in biomechanics instruction—is to create a uniform language for players, coaches and trainers. A growing number of MLB organizations have hired former players to be de facto analytics liaisons between the front office and the clubhouse.
“We’ve grown much better in the last six, seven years at teaching other people how to read this,” Rose says. “I think it was over people’s heads for a while. And in baseball I think we’ve gotten really good at dumbing it down so that coaches can start to really get into the intricacies.”
But here’s a baseball truism that no one can argue with: As Crash Davis puts it in Bull Durham, “Don’t think. It can only hurt the ball club.” Big thoughts need to be reserved for the batting cage. Hitting in a game should be reactionary.
“I typically give hitters permission to have one swing thought at a time,” says independent hitting coach Bobby Tewksbary, who is most famous for his work with the Atlanta Braves’ Josh Donaldson, a former AL MVP with the Toronto Blue Jays. “Anything more than that is a little messy.”
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Mets third baseman Todd Frazier entered the season 0-for-8 in his career against Washington Nationals ace Max Scherzer. He had never reached base and only once hit the ball out of the infield—a sacrifice fly in 2015.
New for the Mets this season is the installation of the WinR virtual reality program that simulates an opposing pitcher’s repertoire. Frazier says the virtual Scherzer is 90 to 95 percent accurate, if not an exact replica of the three-time Cy Young winner. On May 22, Frazier notched his first hit off Scherzer, doubling to deep left-center field.
“I’m skeptical about everything just because, when you come up, you like to go on your raw skill,” Frazier says. “You want to be hands-on in the cage, with a bat and with baseballs. I tried this virtual reality thing, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. It’s unbelievable. The person looks the same—their windup, their ball. It’s all about tracking too. I’m not swinging when I’m watching. I’m just trying to see how his slider moves or how his fastball moves. . . . I actually think that’s helped me out a lot along the way this year, for sure.”
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Muscle memory for the swing and knowledge about an opposing pitcher must be so ingrained in a hitter’s mind that he can almost instinctively recognize a cue that means a fastball or a certain breaking ball is en route—and react accordingly in no more than four-tenths of a second. “It’s almost like you’re in the batter’s box with the pitcher, it’s pretty cool,” Tampa Bay Rays second baseman Brandon Lowe says of the VR tool.
The goal, says WinR CEO Chris O’Dowd, a former minor league player, is to add another dimension of preparation to a written scouting report. “I already feel like I’m in sync, and I know the information about this pitcher and his pitch shapes and his usage probabilities,” O’Dowd says. “I can now just react.”
WinR is one of three VR vendors being used in the majors, along with Trinity and Monsterful. Dr. Daniel Laby, a leading sports vision expert who advises Trinity, has advocated for the reduction or even elimination of traditional BP in favor of more game-like conditions (though he says the hardware technology needs to improve before VR gains widespread acceptance). Monsterful CEO Jaret Sims says foveated rendering—a new tech feature that renders the pixels a user is focusing on with the highest graphic fidelity at the expense of peripheral areas—is a key step forward. “We test and try everything,” Sims says.
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Not everyone believes in the transference of VR to the field. “Baseball’s all about perception,” Mets first baseman Peter Alonso says. “We’re all trying to do the same thing, but every single person has different little quirks to them and they see everything through their own lens.”
Indeed, this field of study might be one of hitting’s next great frontiers. “I think visual perception is still the skill we know the least about—how to measure and improve versus swing mechanics or plate discipline behavior,” says Cardinals hitting coach Jeff Albert.
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Vision training has risen in popularity across baseball in recent years. While one’s visual acuity is a static trait measured on the 20/20 scale, other skills related to performance, such as tracking and focus, can be improved with practice. Laby, who has four World Series rings owing to his work with the Red Sox, Astros, and Cubs, employs several technological devices to help players, including the Sports Vision Trainer, a Dynavision board, and uHIT.
The latter is a cognitive gaming software for batters made by the neuroscience company deCervo, and it challenges hitters to recognize pitch types and locations. EEG technology is an optional add-on feature to provide additional context about the decision-making process. By affixing electrodes on a hitter’s scalp, coaches can monitor a player’s brain waves and identify when he chooses whether to swing or not while using the uHIT app. Says deCervo founder and CEO Jason Sherwin: “Was there any fundamental cognitive change under the hood, so to speak, in terms of making decisions on pitches? Across the board, you saw the impact on a brain level: it was deciding faster for pitches in the zone. They were deciding more efficiently.”
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The full EEG test, however, takes nearly an hour—a perceived eternity in the daily itinerary of a pro ballplayer—so deCervo hasn’t supplied any of those exams in two years. But uHIT remains in regular use, mostly by minor leaguers wanting to develop their pitch recognition skills but also by a few big leaguers who want to stay sharp. “When you frame this as a mobile game for better hitting vision, that has a huge impact,” Sherwin says. “So they’re playing Fortnite—but for their hitting, if that makes sense. Fortnite for hitting!”
Pitch occlusion is another way of sharpening vision skills. Peter Fadde, a professor at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation at Purdue on the use of video to aid visual training and pitch recognition. He later developed gameSense, which shows only a pitcher’s release before prompting hitters to discern the type of pitch and whether it’ll be a strike. A few MLB clubs use the program with some encouraging early returns on improving on-base percentage and slugging percentage.
“Guys are picking up the ball earlier and can put a little more giddy-up in their swing,” Fadde says. “In sports science, that’s one of the main themes right now—we’ve got to include more contextual information. The perception is still within some kind of context.”
Bleecker, now 35 and author of the recently published Old School vs. New School hitting book, recently heard a pastor preach that there may be lots of information and knowledge in the public discourse, but there’s not a lot of truth. That resonated with him and relates to his approach in baseball. Technology provides a wealth of data and shapes a player’s skill set, but how a hitter thinks and executes his swing creates his reality.
“An important thing that the baseball community needs to understand: although technology is amazing and although it helps tremendously, you have to have a feel for how it’s being used,” Bleecker says. “You have to be able to use it properly.”
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