Jacob Wilson Is an Unbalanced Load

He doesn’t look like he’s riding a horse so much as he looks like he’s pretending to ride a horse. I have been thinking about it for a while now, and that is as well as I can describe the way Jacob Wilson gets ready for the pitch. He looks like he’s pretending to ride a horse. I say this with love.

Baseball is hard. The ball is small and very dense. A big, strong man stands not very far away and repeatedly throws it pretty much right at you with a great deal of force. The ball performs all sorts of twists and turns on its short journey toward almost breaking your fragile human body, and not only are you expected to not run away, you’re expected to hit it with a stick. So if the only way that you can manage to do all that is by pretending to ride a horse for a few seconds while you’re waiting for the missile to be launched, then by all means, pretend to ride a horse for a few seconds:

(I started writing this article the day after the Statcast team released all their new fancy bat tracking information, including wireframe models of every player’s average swing. Naturally, I offered MLB.com’s Mike Petriello $20 to find me a few seconds of wireframe footage of Wilson doing his bouncy pre-pitch routine. He declined like a principled jerk, even after I upped the offer to $23.)

Wilson is leading the league by a mile in the all-important category of Most Fun Stance, and he is very much aware that his stance is unusual, mostly because people won’t let him forget it. It tends to come up in his interviews. “I think it’s kind of just a rhythm thing,” he said a month ago. “It keeps me in rhythm. I’m not an athlete that can stand still and be very explosive. So for me being able to be in a rhythm, continually moving and being able to get ready to hit it’s kind of always just been my thing. I have always been moving in the box.”

That makes complete sense. Some players like to stay balanced and on time by keeping everything quiet the entire time they’re in the box. Others don’t feel like they can jump into a max effort swing from such a tense starting point. They need to be in motion already for the same reason that infielders creep toward the plate as each pitch is delivered. “I need to be twitchy,” Wilson said earlier this week. “I need to just kind of constantly be moving. So for me, slow is not really a part of my game.”

Wilson has been asked about his stance so often that this is actually something of a canned answer. It was one of the very first questions he was asked on his first day as a major leaguer. He replied, “It’s pretty much been the same foot movement my entire life. As soon as I started playing baseball. Being able to get that rhythm for me was huge. It gets me ready to hit and I’ve just done that my entire life.” Strictly speaking, that isn’t totally true. Wilson is the son of former major leaguer Jack Wilson, and because it is legally mandated that all second-generation professional athletes make childhood footage of them playing their sport available to the public, we can attempt to verify the claim. I don’t know about you, but I see very little pre-swing movement here, especially in the lower half:

Honestly, I’m not sure that Wilson would have made it to the majors with this swing. It’s one of several reasons there haven’t been many professional baseball players below the age of three.

Toddler footage aside, Wilson’s stance really has grown more distinctive over time. Here’s footage of him as a fresh-faced teen at Thousand Oaks High School in California. You only need to watch the first few seconds, both to see his batting stance, and to listen to one of his teammates let out a glorious, guttural, “Oh yeah!” as soon as his bat meets the ball. Sound very much up:

I would love it if that became a thing. Every time Wilson hits the ball, the whole crowd should do their absolute best Kool-Aid Man impression. Anyway, back to the important baseball topic at hand, here Wilson has an open stance, and he’s bouncing back and forth from one leg to the other. He’s got the pronounced bat waggle, but the bat is still mostly bouncing behind him. He’s not yet starting to wave it menacingly in the direction of the pitcher. As he gets into his hitting position, he does already have the intense elbow- and bat-shaking move that reminds so many A’s fans of Carney Lansford. The biggest difference is in his feet. He’s not sitting in as deep of a crouch. He’s not yet in full-on Bouncedy, Bouncedy, Bouncedy, Look at Me I’m on a Horse mode. Although his stance is open, the angle isn’t as dramatic as it will one day become. He only needs one step in order to close himself off and get into the hitting position.

In college at Grand Canyon University, Wilson did open his stance a bit more from time to time, but for the most part, it looked pretty similar to his stance in high school. Once again, you can just watch the first swing in the clip below. Notice how Wilson drags his front foot closed at he gets into hitting position:

That was in 2023, Wilson’s draft year, and he looked similar in his first taste of pro ball later that summer. But watch him last April with the Double-A Midland RockHounds. His bat is more vertical, and he gets into a much deeper crouch as the pitcher starts his delivery. But the biggest change is in his feet. He takes a pivot step to close it some before he goes into his leg kick:

Wilson’s stance is so dramatically open that he needs two steps, the pivot and then the leg kick, just to get into position to hit the baseball. Now here he is this season. He’s starting out so deep into his crouch that he really does look like he’s pretending to ride a horse. Frankly, he looks like he’s trying a lot harder than anybody in Monty Python and the Holy Grail ever did. More importantly, watch his feet:

His stance is so open that sometimes, he no longer closes it with his leg kick, or even with a bonus step and then the leg kick. He takes half a dozen little baby pivot steps, angling himself a bit more toward the pitcher each time. It is quite possibly even more adorable than the toddler video:

It sort of looks like he’s moving his body the same way you would move something really heavy, like a washing machine, rocking it back and forth to angle it one way and then the other, hopefully gaining an inch or two each time. Jacob Wilson is the washing machine.

If you speed up the tape enough, it sort of looks like you’re watching a master chef slice vegetables with those impossibly quick, precise strokes that would send any normal human cook to the emergency room with a bloody dish towel wrapped around their fingers:

I keep coming back to the washing machine, though, and there’s a reason for that. In writing this article, I let the videos of Wilson’s batting stance loop and watched them for far longer than is healthy. I’ve got the whole pre-pitch routine down.

After he takes a pitch, he smooths the divot he’s made in the batter’s box and steps backwards, swinging his bat straight back behind him twice with his right hand. He brings his hands together and taps the bat once on the toe of his left cleat, sometimes once on the right cleat too, then swings it back up and takes a half cut to remind himself of his bat path. He steps back into the box, right foot, left foot, while adjusting his helmet with his right hand. He taps the plate with the bat in his left hand, adjusts his elbow guard, then back to the helmet with the right hand while the left raises the bat in a kind of salute to the pitcher. He swings it back down across his body and back up into position by his ear. All 18 or so of these steps happen before he’s gotten into the frenetic batting stance that everyone keeps asking him about.

Then he starts riding the horse. The lower half is bouncy, but things are herky-jerky upstairs. It’s rhythmic, but it’s anything but smooth. It’s violent, the way he leverages the head of the bat forward then suddenly yanks it back, leading with his elbow and torquing the handle with his left hand while his right serves as the fulcrum:

After watching this motion for far too long, I finally I realized what it reminded me of. One time I was visiting my parents and I ran a load of laundry that was too small. It created an unbalanced load in the washing machine, which started vibrating and erupted in a terrifying, rhythmic thunderstorm of roars, clangs, and squeaks. I had no idea washing machines could do that. I recorded the audio on my phone, figuring I’d use it as the rhythm track for some potential future song that needed to sound like a distorted hellscape recorded from the inside of a factory that manufactured pistons and human misery. Anyway, that’s what Wilson reminds me of. Alas, my file has been lost to time, so I borrowed the (much less hellacious) audio of someone else’s washing machine going unbalanced. The timing even matches up:

“I’ve had a couple coaches along the way just try to tell me to slow down a little bit,” Wilson said earlier this week. But he explained that aside from adjusting his hands, the A’s have mostly left his stance alone. “Once I got here, they actually kind of just let me be. They kind of just let me hit. They haven’t tried to change it once here. So it’s been great just being able to just work with these coaches and know that they trust in me and the weird batting stance that I have.” As long as he’s hitting like a Rookie of the Year candidate, why would they even think about changing anything? The A’s have been content to let him do what he does, and his 147 wRC+ has allowed what he does to get more peculiar than ever.