Remembering Rougned Odor’s Big Adjustment

After the scrum was gone, after he’d answered all the difficult questions about his punch heard around the baseball world, after he’d deflected and postponed and shrugged, after he slumped into his seat and sighed, Rougned Odor looked up and saw me coming. To his credit, he raised his eyebrows for the coming question, ready for another round.

He was relieved when I asked him about being sent down in 2015, and what he learned when he was down there. Relieved, even though I was asking him about one of the more difficult times of his baseball life. Well, difficult in a different way than the difficult time he’s experiencing right now.

“When I first came up, I was in a slump, and I didn’t feel right at the plate,” he admitted. “I was swinging at everything.”

Odor had a 24.3% strikeout rate then, but that didn’t tell the whole picture. His .144/.252/.233 line was a bit more descriptive. Or maybe, considering what he said, the 33.8% reach rate was what he was talking about.

Maybe it was about confidence. “When I went down, I had the feeling again and tried to find my pitch,” he said. That speaks of both confidence and actual changes in approach. Take a look at his overall swing rates before and after the demotion, and it looks like he really started to show more discernment when it came to pitches low and in off the plate.

The second baseman agreed that down off the plate was an important part of the change, but also emphasized that the adjustment was about “swinging at just [his] pitch.” That sounded more specific, and even though he didn’t want to tell me what exactly his pitch is — why would he? — we can guess once we take a look at his fastball swing heat maps.

Ah. Look at the lower right-hand corner of the heat map on the left. Now, on the right. There’s a lot less red present in the latter. Odor learned to lay off the front-door sinker. Not bad. Especially since he came back swinging at more pitches and reaching at 35.2% of pitches outside the zone after his demotion. So it wasn’t just not swinging at balls, it was not swinging at balls with which he couldn’t do much.

He made another change while he was down there, but the results are less clearly connected to the adjustment in this case. “I used to swing with one hand, and I went down, and I started swinging with two hands,” he remembered.

The confounding thing here is not seeing the change. That’s obvious.

Here’s a 2014 swing.

Here’s a late 2015 swing.

The confounding thing is that there’s no consensus that this sort of thing matters a ton. If you look at the swings, they don’t seem all that different. Former FanGraphs prospect writer Dan Farnsworth said “you can swing with a one- or two-handed finish and have the exact same swing. Miguel Cabrera does it all the time.”

Hitting coach Ryan Parker thought that it could maybe lead to “a bit better top-hand use if his right hand was flying off real early,” but that, in this case, it’s mostly about feel. “It does ‘feel’ quicker, and feeling fast can manifest on the field. Mechanically might change a bit, but could be big in terms of feel and regaining confidence.”

That last bit seems most important in this case. Because now Odor is swinging harder than ever, reaching more than ever, and still having good success. He’s still laying off the front-door sinker, but everything else is fair game. One small approach change, one small mechanical change, and the confidence is back. “I always swing hard, and now I feel good at the plate,” was the way the player concluded.