Marcus Semien Is Picking Them Up and Putting Them Down

The bat waggle is by far the most popular way to stay loose at the plate. Presumably that’s because waiting for a pitch is one of the few situations when it’s socially acceptable to waggle something. Life just doesn’t offer that many opportunities to waggle. Also, it’s a two-fer. It doesn’t just keep you loose; it also keeps your bat loose. It’s all well and good if you’re body’s ready to hit, but good luck trying to catch up to a Justin Verlander fastball with a tight bat. (Fun Fact: It turns out that bats — you know, the actual winged creatures — have their own waggle.)

But even after you waggle your bat, those last couple seconds are tricky. You’re locked into your batting stance, and now you’re just waiting there at the mercy of the pitcher (and the pitch clock). You’ve got to do something to maintain attack readiness. Some players bounce the bat off their shoulder, or bounce a little bit deeper into their crouch a few times. They rock back and forth, raise and lower their hands, or grind the toe of their cleat into the dirt. Some even make sure their pelvis is loose. Like, really loose. Like, very, extremely, possibly even dangerously loose.

That’s an entirely different kind of waggle.

Fortunately, J.D. Davis’ pelvis is not our focus today. Today we’re talking about Marcus Semien. He’s the kind of player who’s easy to root for. A sixth-round pick in 2011, he was a Fringe Five fixture throughout 2013. After a 2014 trade to the A’s, we got to watch him slowly figure things out at the big league level, first at shortstop, then at the plate, until eventually he’d grown into a star right before our eyes. This piece, written just after the Oakland trade, captures the odds Semien overcame. It’s also worth reading just for the chance to enjoy the erstwhile Managing Editor of FanGraphs and current Player Personnel Manager for the Toronto Blue Jays referring to someone as “Dan Szymbuttface.”

On Wednesday, with Semien at the plate against the Mariners, I saw him in a whole new light. Take a look at his pre-pitch ritual:

It’s a very easy thing to miss, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t catch it. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched Semien hit over the last 10 years, and I never noticed it until this week. Here’s the same video, but this time we’re zoomed in on his lower half. I don’t know how else to put this: Marcus Semien’s legs are extremely restless.

There are a lot of possible explanations for what’s going on here. The most likely one is that Semien is having a tiny little dance party and everybody’s invited. It’s also possible that this is just his way of staying loose, but that seems like a bit of a stretch.

By my count, Semien lifted one heel or another 12 times in the last three seconds before this pitch. To be clear, I didn’t cherry-pick a particularly antsy clip. This was the first one that came up when I ran a search. Josh Harrison is pitching in the eighth inning of a 10-run game, so the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower. This is just what Semien does while he’s waiting for the pitch.

If you’re wondering whether Semien has always done this, the answer is a resounding: Sort of. He’s always been twitchy in this particular way, but the tic has grown more pronounced over the years. The answer to a larger, more existential question is: Yes, I did spend entirely too much time grinding through tape so that I could document the arc that Semien’s heel-tapping journey has described.

That’s the earliest footage I could find of Semien’s batting stance. It’s from his junior year at Cal Berkeley, in 2011. The 20-year-old Semien ever so slightly lifts his back heel once or twice before the pitch. His front foot doesn’t move at all. That’s the beginning. It’s a far cry from his current pre-pitch routine, wherein it kind of looks like he’s trying to enter the Konami Code with his feet.

The next video I could find is from Semien’s appearance in the Arizona Fall League in 2013, right before his first cup of coffee with the White Sox. As you can see, his front foot is now involved too.

It’s not just that both feet have joined the party. He’s also increased the frequency enough that, were you inclined toward conspiracy theories, you might hypothesize that Semien was sending a message in Morse code. However, he’s still lifting his heels much less than he does today, and the effect isn’t finding its way up the kinetic chain just yet.

In 2014, Semien got his first regular playing time in the majors. He also took a big step back (in terms of taking small steps that go nowhere). His feet are much quieter as the pitch is coming:

This clip is pretty representative of 2014 Marcus Semien: He’d only lift his heel a few times, and sometimes only the right heel. He had jumped a lot of levels by this point. If I had to guess, I’d say a coach somewhere along the line told him to be quieter in the batter’s box. Cutting down on unnecessary movements is the blanket prescription for whatever’s ailing a young hitter. (I would also recommend this video, also from 2014, of an inside-the-park home run for the Charlotte Knights. It’s not germane, but Semien hits the ball so hard that the crack of the bat makes someone in the crowd scream in fright.)

And that’s pretty much how things stayed. Semien’s feet were nearly as quiet in 2015, though he went back to lifting his heels closer to four or five times before the pitch. In 2016, he occasionally included a bit of sway into his stance, but his feet stayed at their same, moderately-happy level. In 2018, he ditched the sway, and in 2019, as he became a breakout star, his feet were quieter than ever.

It feels like he’s trying so hard to hold it in, and he completely succeeds… until that last moment when the pitch is finally on its way and he just can’t help it anymore. It’s kind of like when you’re hanging out with friends and you think of a particularly terrible pun. You can lie to yourself all you want, but eventually the conversation will start to move on, and you know you’ll have to blurt it out before the moment passes.

Things got more interesting in 2020. The taps started coming faster and more frequently, until Semien was up to the 10-12 we see before most pitches today. Last season, he added the final piece: He started raising his heels more dramatically and turning his knee inward as he did so, which brought his hips into the process as well. Here’s the first pitch from the at-bat where I finally noticed his peripatetic stance.

I used to have this old desk lamp with a green glass shade, the kind lawyers always seem to have in their offices in movies. It was a great lamp. Then one day, nothing happened when I pulled the chain. It just didn’t turn on. But it did turn on after I pulled it a second time, so I didn’t really worry about it. From that day on, it took two pulls to turn on the lamp. I don’t know what was breaking inside the chain mechanism, but every once in a while the lamp would require one extra pull to turn on. This went on for a year or two, but the number of pulls increased so gradually that I never really noticed it. I just got used to pulling it really fast, however many times it took. Then one day, I went to turn on the lamp while a friend was visiting, and about 10 seconds into the process I realized that I looked completely insane, tugging on a lamp chain 50 times in a row.

The name for that phenomenon is normalization of deviance, and I suspect it’s what’s going on with Semien’s batting stance. What started as a tiny idiosyncrasy has now grown into something pretty noticeable. I would imagine that Semien knows he’s doing this, and maybe even that he’s doing it intentionally. It could just be nervous energy, or a way to stay loose or balanced. It could also be a concession to an inherent restlessness; the small movement he allows himself in order to stave off some larger, more disruptive movement. For the rest of us, it’s just another fun thing to watch when there’s a Rangers game on. It seems harmless enough, and it certainly hasn’t kept Semien from putting together a great career and an excellent start to the 2023 season. But now that I’ve seen it, I can’t unsee it.