MLB Hitters Get Stuck On Their Backside Too
A lot of my thoughts on hitting are rooted in my own experiences playing, for better or for worse. When I was in school playing ball, I was constantly working through a particular mechanical issue. Traditionally, it is called “getting stuck on the back side,” but I always said I got stuck on a pedestal. When I got to the highest point of my leg kick (which was moderately high), I sometimes transferred too much of my weight over my back foot – it was a swing path killer. Because of my extensive experience with it, I’ve always been keen on identifying hitters who have a similar issue.
Rotational movements like hitting and pitching have linear components, but hitters need to do more than just move on the coronal plane (from left to right or right to left) in order to have a deep entry into the hitting zone. A hitter has to rotate with his hips and/or spine while moving along that linear plane to create rotational power and an ideal bat path. In the case of pedestal hitters, they reach their peak leg lift while sometimes neglecting those other aspects of movement.
Take Will Smith, for example. He uses a high leg kick to create space in his swing and fell into the pedestal hitting habit during the second half of last season:
October 9th
September 22nd
September 7th
A few hittable pitches in the heart of the zone with no barrels to show for it. On the middle-middle heaters, his path was cut off and he only skimmed the bottom of the ball, rather than hitting it flush. That led to can-of-corn fly balls to right field instead of barreled line drives. This was a persistent issue for Smith throughout 2023 – the worst offensive season of his five-year career and the first with an ISO below .200.
When you transfer too much weight over your back foot, you either get stuck and create a path which leads to lazy fly balls to the opposite field or you fall too heavy on your front side and hit grounders like Smith did against Manaea. You lose depth in your bat path and can’t cover as much of the zone with your barrel. For Smith, that negatively impacted his wOBA on outer third pitches. For the bulk of his career, he has been able to cover those pitches, so this should be something he can fix. To do that, he’ll have to get back to his early 2023 swings where he was balanced and creating space for his bat to work through the zone.
April 30th
Smith is a good enough hitter that he still posted a 119 wRC+ last year despite his mechanical flaw. Not everyone has that much room for error, though. Enrique Hernández has had a wRC+ below 75 in consecutive seasons after running a 109 mark in 2021. Like Smith, he typically relies on a big leg kick to create space, rhythm, and timing in his swing. And while the size of his leg kick fluctuates more than Smith’s, it’s still a key driver in his process. Here are a few swings from 2023 before he was traded to the Dodgers:
April 11th
June 25th
July 2nd
Even if you want to cut Hernández some slack on the high quality changeup from Shane McClanahan, that swing is still a good example of how his lack of balance causes him to land heavily on his lead leg. The heavy landing is even more obvious in his swing against Jesse Scholtens in the second clip. With that swing in particular, his leg kick works straight up and down, which causes him to force a lead hip external rotation.
What do I mean by that? If you’re trying to explode your lead leg open, you would create the counter movement (internal hip rotation) first. That way, you’re creating a reciprocal pattern that leads to smooth external rotation. Staying neutral at the beginning of the swing creates an imbalance, causing the hitter to stand on the pedestal instead of rotating into and then out of it as he swings. Hernández has hyper mobile external rotation, which is seen by his tendency to stride open. To control it, he needs to create sufficient counter rotation with his hips. Unsurprisingly, when he went to Los Angeles, he made a clear change in his leg lift that allowed him to stack his center of mass over his midpoint instead of his back leg. Pay attention to the direction he works his leg kick:
August 19th
September 9th
His leg lift started working on an angle towards his back leg, which allowed him to have a controlled explosion and balanced swing. With the Dodgers, he had a 96 wRC+ – much more in line with his career 94 mark. Yes, it was over a sample of 185 plate appearances, but the movement quality improvement is undeniable.
The last example I’ll use to portray pedestal hitters is Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan. His case is a bit more complicated. In his rookie season, he splashed onto the scene with a 126 wRC+. However, his peripherals suggested there would likely be a regression – his .341 wOBA was considerably higher than his .312 xwOBA. In 2023, those numbers almost completely converged. He had a .313 wOBA and .318 xwOBA. From a mechanical point of view, this wasn’t completely surprising.
His big leg kick is a crucial component of his swing. It keeps him stable, which plays a key role in his great plate discipline. However, the movement also makes him heavily reliant on his hands to do most of the work to get on plane. Given his elite bat-to-ball skills, he can successfully do that more than other players, but he doesn’t have much room for error. If he gets stuck on his back side, his hands can only do so much. If he identifies a pitch too late, even just slightly, then he puts himself in a tough position to make flush contact. Here are a few swings showing that:
July 9th
August 30th
September 22nd
Each of these fastballs were thrown between 96 and 97 mph, but were right down the middle. Kwan couldn’t get his hands on plane despite the hittable locations. This was a trend for him all year. In 2023, he saw 190 four-seamers with a velocity of at least 96 mph and had a .155 wOBA against them. This is another example of why rotational hitters like Kwan, Hernández and Smith need to be on top of their mechanics at all times. Pedestal hitting gives batters even less margin for error than other hitters against high velocity.
Every hitter has his weakness, and for this trio of players, theirs is directly related to how they load with their leg kick. As I watch each of them in 2024, I’ll be looking for any potential adjustments they might have made over the offseason, or might make as the season progresses.
Esteban is a contributing writer at FanGraphs. One of his main hobbies is taking dry hacks every time he sees a bat.
No thanks on this article
Agreed bro. I am not here to read about baseball. I want sortable statistics!
I literally created an account just to dislike this post. I understand (and love!) that Fangraphs is about analytics and statistics for baseball, but I also love this guy’s content because it connects to the actual part of PLAYING baseball. it’s great content
I tried pretty hard but I don’t understand a word of this and can’t see the differences in the videos. Maybe some side by side slow mo or something?
I didn’t understand all of the mechanical vernacular either but I think I get the point. I’ll give a go at giving a simple summary. These players hitting mechanics were out wack because one or all their strides, hand movement, weight distribution (front and back leg remaining balanced) didn’t match with the rotation of their hips during the swing. Thus leading to inefficient bat paths that didn’t square up the ball.
That little tidbit about the external and internal hip movement is talking about which direction your hips are rotating as the bat is making its path through the zone. Internal means that the hips are rotating to opposite field (weak fly balls or ground balls if the bat angle is thrown off). You want your the external rotation of your hips to be more square to optimize a right bat path.
That could totally be off but in my own personal experience with hitting mechanics I had a similar revelation
Great article. I had to be methodical in figuring out my (try not to laugh) slow-pitch softball swing and syncing mechanics, timing and rotation were a big part of improving my swing.
No laughing here. I still have some muscle memory of what it felt like to hit lazy flies to right hitting off a locked back side with no weight transfer (at least until I transferred my anger into slamming the bat into the ground).
I think it would help to show how Bregman, Trout, and Altuve move in comparison to these three. Altuve in particular because he utilizes a leg kick but moves reciprocally and efficiently
Am I the only one who thought this headline said “struck on their backside” and wasn’t sure if it was going to be a piece about league leaders in HBP or a treatise on the culture of butt-slapping in baseball.
This is great! I love getting new little things to look for going into the season. The Will Smith and Enrique Hernandez examples were particularly good – you can really see the disconnect when they’re not going well.
I’d love to see an example of a good swing from Kwan – all three of these involve this weird hitch in his leg kick and I’d like to see if he does that when he’s seeing the ball better.
I enjoyed the article. Better title could have been Weight Distribution but his title implied that. Danger with that high leg kick is if too excited/anxious at the plate you get out in front especially with off speed pitches, leading to lazy flyballs and low velocity ground outs. You could use a couple of Jim Rice clips to show the opposite, just straight plane hitting. Use to hit rockets because his weight distribution was so on, but also led to a lot of hard hit grounders to 3rd and short leading to double plays.
Thanks Esteban.
This as simple as not getting your foot down early enough. Little league stuff.
A leg kick serves no purpose other than as a timing mechanism. Many of the best hitters of all-time do a toe tap as evidence. The only thing a leg kick does is introduce one more way to be off on your timing. Nobody gains stability from a leg kick – stability is that thing you have when you have two feet on the ground.You can load without a leg kick. The only thing that a leg kick does ensure is that for a moment 100% of your weight is on your back foot. You can get your weight there any way you want.Nobody gets stuck on their back foot. They might not get their front foot down soon enough to initiate weight transfer though. Its not actually that complicated but some people make it more complicated than it needs to be.
There’s truth to this but I’d also throw static stances into mechanical complications as well. Imo the more athletic stances are more likely to optimize hip rotations. If you’re a smaller player (Altuve, Bregman, etc) a static stance will not effectively optimize hip rotation. I’d think that in order to get more juice behind their barreled balls, more athletic mechanics are necessary. Timing could be thrown off (think Madrigal) but in order to make more impact you need a more athletic stance
FWIW it was revealed after the season that Smith was dealing with a broken rib and oblique strain the second half of the year which might’ve contributed to difficulty with the rotational parts of his swing.
Esteban, if you could teach us to see what you see in those swings, it’d be extremely compelling. I think I get the concept of getting stuck on your backside, but for the life of me I can’t see it in the clips. Tbh I kind of feel like listening to a sommelier talk about wine flavors–I want to believe it’s there but I can’t help but suspect that it only exists in the mind of the beholder