Cody Bellinger Not Hitting Home Runs
The worst I was ever fooled was in Game 2 of last year’s World Series. Before all the madness in extra innings — before all the madness in the following five games — there was Cody Bellinger, batting against Ken Giles with two out and none on in the bottom of the ninth of a 3-3 contest. Giles fell behind 1-and-0, and then he wanted to go away with a fastball. What he did instead was throw a fastball over the middle of the plate, just above the knees. Bellinger took one of his mighty rips, and he made what looked to be perfect contact. As the ball rocketed off the barrel, the fans in the background all rose to their feet. The camera showed much of the black night sky. At one point, the screen cut off part of the right fielder’s lower body, cementing the expectation that the ball would land several rows deep. Bellinger had hit a walk-off home run. Except that he hadn’t — Josh Reddick caught the ball on the track. The inning was over, and some time after that, the Dodgers would lose.
Bellinger is not the only guy to ever trick a viewer. Anyone who’s followed even a handful of games on TV or radio knows that even the professionals get fooled. It can be hard to read a fly ball, after all, so for the first few split seconds, you’re trying to read the swing. Sometimes a good-looking swing just gets under the ball. Sometimes a good-looking swing hits the ball off the end of the bat. Batted balls can be deceptive. I’m not telling you anything you didn’t know.
What seems to be true about Bellinger is that he’s deceptive unusually often. I don’t even watch the Dodgers on a regular basis until the playoffs get started, and I can recall multiple times that Bellinger has tricked me. He got me again yesterday, if only for a moment. Cody Bellinger seems to have a knack for hitting apparent home runs that aren’t home runs. Mostly, they’re outs. The opposite of a home run. Each one is an emotional roller-coaster, concentrated within a matter of seconds.
In honor of this weird Cody Bellinger quirk, then, I will present to you a whole bunch of videos. This isn’t even exhaustive or complete. A man has only so much time in the day. But, below, you’ll find 13 video clips of Bellinger not hitting a home run. They’re not all equally deceptive, but they’re all some degree of deceptive, each and every one. Let’s watch Cody Bellinger almost get all of it, together.
Might as well start with the biggie. Here’s the non-homer I’ll never forget.
(1)
Here’s the non-homer from Tuesday.
(2)
And now here are all of the rest, arranged in no particular order.
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
(9)
(10)
(11)
(12)
(13)
As I mentioned, they’re not all the same. Sometimes, Bellinger fools himself. Other times, you can see from his reaction that he realizes he just missed his pitch. In one of the clips above, you can see that Bellinger is mad at himself, even though he hit the ball to the track. I didn’t even realize a track-ball felt different off the bat than a bleacher-ball. Seems like even the worse contact is still pretty good. But in all of those clips — and also in other clips, surely — there’s just this brief instant where it seems like the ball is a goner. Pulled fly balls are the most dangerous fly balls, for almost anyone. Bellinger is a better-than-average power hitter, and when he swings, it’s seldom a compromise. I think Bellinger’s mechanics are the biggest part of it. It’s how he gets around on the ball, and it’s how his swing follows through. Bellinger isn’t the most dangerous pull-side hitter in the league, but he’s got the visuals down pat. In certain cases up there the camera makes it all the more misleading, but the camera is just following Bellinger’s lead. Bellinger can trick even the experts. If you’ve been fooled, don’t be too hard on yourself. Bellinger has a swing that tells lies. It’s not honest often enough to trust, and yet many of us can’t help ourselves.
I’d be interested to know whether, for Dodgers fans, this makes Bellinger more or less likeable. On the one hand, a promising fly ball that comes up short is supremely deflating. It’s such a steeper drop-off, relative to a boring can of corn. Bellinger keeps getting one’s hopes up. But on the other hand, he keeps getting one’s hopes up. That way you feel when the ball comes off the bat — that’s real. That’s a chemical reaction. That’s a feeling that gets associated with the player, and it’s the feeling of a partial home run. Of a potential home run in development. The crash is real, too, and that’s another chemical reaction, but I don’t know which of them is stronger. I don’t know which of them wins out in the long run.
All I know is that Bellinger fools me like no other player. I guess at this point, I’m looking for it, so it’s easier to notice, but Bellinger’s developed a habit of this. Cody Bellinger hits a lot of home runs. Cody Bellinger has also hit a lot of non-home runs, non-home runs that looked like home runs off the bat. In a lot of ways, a win-expectancy graph reads like a plot of fan emotion. As the odds of winning shift around, so does one’s mood. Yet a win-expectancy graph is based on the outcomes of every at-bat. Sometimes — oftentimes — Bellinger’s outcomes tell only part of the story.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
i used to always notice this at ballgames – the crowd rising and gasping and then it’s just a routine fly ball. glad to know it’s not a rangers-specific phenomenon.
Time to hit the gym.
Yeah, I don’t think the guy with 64 career homers in 2 seasons has a strength problem.
I’m a Dodger fan and it doesn’t affect my opinion of Bellinger either way. The Game 2 World Series one I will never forget either. I was so certain that I started jumping up in my living room to give a bear hug to my brother. Then I saw the look on my brother’s face which just floored me. I thought we had basically just won the World Series. I have never been so sure about a HR that I was wrong about, and I have never been fooled by anyone more often than Cody Bellinger.
Yeah its crazy how if that ball goes just a tiny bit further the outcome of the entire series changes. A forgotten moment to many
I remember several of these. The thing about Cody’s mishits is that they usually have home run pop off the bat but are hit at too steep an angle. Even so several of these balls are often home runs. Even outside the ATT triple and the ball off the wall in Cincy, many of these have hit/hr probabilities in the mid-20s.
I wonder what his xwOBA on these 13 balls is. I bet it’s better than you’d expect
I will admit I occasionally laugh at the Dodger Stadium crowd reaction, which seems to be continually rooting for fly balls and then getting surprised when they’re caught, but it’s basically an artifact of the extreme fly-ball approach at the plate, where the hitters are doing likewise.
That was my thought too. I think that dodgers fans tend to be overly optimistic.
What is the exit velocity like on these? Is he hitting them hard but too high?
Pitcher reactions on the first two sort of suggest they also thought they were homers.
With his severe uppercut Bellinger has less margin for error on contact quality / angle at impact. It’s not shocking that he gets under more than his fair share plus he hits more balls in the air than average. Add in his reputation as a sluggardly slugger and how hard he swings and it’s not shocking that he fools so often.
On another note does he redefine “warning track power”?
I’d submit that in #8, it’s ATT park that fooled you. Looks like he hit it well over 400 feet.
I have attended 7-8 games this year(Milwaukee and St. Louis) and have watched 145-150 games thru the MLB app and I whole-heartedly agree that there has been a lot of “warning track” power on display by Bellinger. I usually listen to XM broadcast while cutting the volume on tv as Hershiser won’t say shit if he has a mouthful and Stiener’s voice goes up an octave many times only to come up short. This is something that I haven’t given any thought until you brought it to my attention and I thank you.
Small bat?
It almost looks like he kind of inside-outs the ball in # 8…which is insane, because he then proceeds to hit it out to triples alley.
Also, you must have edited #10. That ball should be on the moon.
I still don’t understand how the WS Game 2 flyout wasn’t a home run twenty rows up. It was absolutely crushed and had a lower launch angle than most of these other examples.
To be honest the majority of these don’t look like homers to me off the bat. For (1) for example i was surprised it even got to the warning track. The general impression i have is that although the contact is good and generally the launch angle is good (although for a few it’s too high) his legs aren’t squared up nearly enough, so he gets relatively little power behind the swing.
Pretty amazing example of how baseball is a game of inches, nay millimetres, and why Clay didn’t hit 38 homers this year to almost equal last year’s 39.
Well, I think one part of it is that the ball does not carry very well at night at Dodger Stadium. So it looks like a home run off the bat but doesn’t quite carry far enough. Also, if you focus solely on the trajectory and speed of the ball of the bat, it might seem like a home run. However, I have found that the best measure of how well/far/hard the ball was hit is to look at the reaction of the hitter (in this case, Cody Bellinger). If you pay attention to the reaction of the batter, most of the time you can tell that the batter (Cody Bellinger) knows he didn’t quite get all of it.
Having 64 HR at the age of 23 puts Bellinger in rare company according to historic MLB standards, 54th all time , 1 HR behind Mays and Barry Bonds at the same age. Out of his 43.3% fly ball rate , 20.1 % of them go for HR. So when you stand up thinking it is a home run each time he hits a fly ball, consider yourself wrong about 91.3% of the time. In other words, don’t stand up unless you are sure of it, Be like Dennis Drinkwater who sits behind home plate in Fenway. Sit still on fly balls while others stand. Or get up and scurry for the exit the moment of the crack of the bat when you know its a HR ala Manny Ramirez game winning HR in Fenway 2007 ALDS game 2. Drinkwater is in blue jacket just left of catcher above the word office. He is still behind every Boston home game, roughly same spot and will show all of us how to react on fly balls.
I was definitely fooled on the one last night as well. I was sure it was gone and said, something like “there’s some of it back” only to have the ball fall comfortably into Betts’ glove shortly thereafter.
1. usually I like it, despite the close calls, when he does get ahold of one, it’s so satisfying.
2. usually. however that first gif, the WS game 2 non-homer, kind of broke my fandom. it was useful though, a good demonstration why not to commit so much desire to things outside of one’s control.