![]() ![]() This is possibly the most important part of the swing. He’s able to do this because of his strong mechanics which allows him to cover a ton of different pitches and locations. He’s at the very back of the box and standing right on top of home plate. There is no wasted movement that may get Trout out of his rhythm. His hands are positioned to cock back and begin his swing path. Trout’s legs are balanced, with a strong back leg and a front leg that’s ready for a leg kick. While some hitters can deviate from the norm, almost all elite hitters begin in an athletic position. This model will help us walk through every step for successful hitting. To follow Trout’s step-by-step navigation towards hitting a baseball, I’ll utilize this nifty graphic from Elite Baseball Performance. I looked into all of the parts of his swing, including his stance, stride, rotation, and extension. To get a gauge on just how perfect it is, I decided to break it down in multiple parts. But Trout has improved his stance to the point where there are no real flaws in his swing. He’s always possessed uncanny traits at the plate, whether it’s his lightning-quick hands, superb balance, or ability to handle multiple pitches and locations. Trout has talked about a gap-to-gap approach in the past but recent trends show him moving away from hitting balls the other way.ĭuring this transformation, Trout’s swing has also undergone some changes. Unsurprisingly, he had baseball’s second-best sweet-spot percentage in 2019. Trout is both barreling up more baseballs and raising the launch angle of his batted balls. He has transformed into baseball’s best hitter by walking more, striking out less, and pulling more hard-hit baseballs in the air. Even if he had never suffered his addictions, he would still be impossible to predict.Trout has always produced elite offensive numbers, but he’s at an entirely different level now. Either way, Hamilton’s profile mirrors his career and life trajectory in its strangeness. That is probably what the Angels hoped for when they signed him. Since both his chase rate and his contact rate were career extremes, perhaps his plate discipline will return to the more-typical numbers of a few years ago. So what does it mean for Hamilton’s success as an Angel? I don’t know. And yet, their two seasons share in this unusual distinction. 285, was 32 points higher than Olivo’s on-base percentage in 2011. In 2012, Hamilton had a wRC+ of 140, making him 40 percent better than a league-average hitter. In 2011, Olivo had a wRC+ of 75, making him 25 percent worse than a league-average hitter. Hamilton may be the best hitter in baseball and Olivo may be the worst. Guerrero was a prodigy of see ball, hit ball, which manifested in a career contact rate of 67.4 percent on pitches outside the strike zone, which put him in the top-third in baseball most seasons. Guerrero had an 11-year run from 1998-2008 in which he never fell short of 129 wRC+, and he never struck out more than 14.0 percent of his plate appearances in a season. And while Guerrero never saw a pitch he did not like, his lack of discipline belied his incredible consistency as a hitter. Guerrero probably did not chase balls quite so frequently in his prime-FanGraphs has O-Swing% numbers that date back to 2002, and Guerrero was closer to 30 percent than 40 percent at that point-but his non-existent strike zone will always be in the first sentence of his legacy. Hamilton crossed that threshold for the first time in 2012 with a 45.4 percent O-Swing%, but he had not fallen too far short in 2011 at 41.0 percent. ![]() From 2007-2011, Guerrero swung at 44.0 percent or more of pitches thrown outside of the strike zone each season. The seed of that comparison is their penchant to chase pitches. ![]() On the field, I’ve always thought of him as the second-coming of Vladimir Guerrero, but while the two players share raw tools, plate discipline tendencies, and a presence that I can only think to describe as swashbuckling that always pulls my eyes to the television screen, Guerrero had a dependable greatness that Hamilton seems only to reach a few months at a time. Of the available free agents, Hamilton had the best offensive season in 2012, but given his history of substance abuse and his streakiness on the field, how does one predict what Hamilton will be in 2013, never mind in 2017? When Josh Hamilton signed a five-year, $123 million contract with the Los Angeles Angels about a month ago, I did not know what to make of it. ![]()
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