The Players on Choking Up
Round bat, round ball, traveling in different directions: the eight-word story of hitting really captures some of the difficulty of that practice. When you get into the art of choking up — moving the hands up the barrel and shortening the bat — you uncover a whole world of players attempting to address that difficulty. David Kagan examined the physics of choking up today at The Hardball Times. Here, we ask the practitioners what they think. It turns out, the players serve up some conventional wisdom, but also some insight into the reasoning behind the practice.
For Rajai Davis, the story is the one you might have heard before. “It’s just about getting hits and controlling the bat,” the Oakland outfielder said. “It used to be a two-strike thing before. Now I just want to control the bat and hit hard line drives.”
Surprisingly maybe, for a guy who has shown his level of power over his career, Hunter Pence has the same story. “I’ve done it since I was a kid,” said the Giants outfielder. “I was a leadoff hitter and they said choke up on the bat, put the ball in play, get more barrel control. Which is what I feel, that I get more control.” It becomes less surprising when you think of the patron saint of choking up. “I model it after Barry Bonds. The all-time leader in home runs choked up, so…” Pence said before trailing off.
Paul Goldschmidt also referenced Bonds, but told a common story of gradually choking up more often over time. “I did it in college, and then in the minor leagues it wasn’t required, and so I bounced back and forth with it,” the D-backs first baseman said of the practice. “The year before I went to Double-A, Kirk Gibson was our big-league manager, and in spring training he said, ‘Let’s talk about your two-strike approach,’ and he was the guy who got me to do it regularly.”
The idea is that there’s a trade-off between power and contact, though how it actually works is hard to tell. As Kagan notes, it’s possible that choking up increases the speed of the tip of the bat, but not “the average speed of the entire bat.” That might help a player get the bat to the zone quicker, but not have the same oomph behind the contact when contact is made.
Maybe it’s a question of degree. The batter still has good power, but needs to prioritize contact in two-strike situations, so he takes a little step back in bat speed, but not one that ends up mattering as much given his need at that moment. “You only have to go into the first row, you don’t have to go 20 rows deep,” points out Goldschmidt. “I still hit two-strike homers and extra-base hits. If you hit it on the barrel, it’s going to go regardless, and just to have the little bit extra bat control is more beneficial. I think you can be a little shorter and quicker to the ball which allows you to wait a little longer to start your swing with two strikes so that you can recognize the offspeed.”
Goldschmidt has seen some benefit. Once you adjust his two-strike numbers to the league’s numbers, you can see that it looks like he trades some power for contact there. Particularly on fastballs, he goes from excellent exit velocity to league average on two-strike counts, but makes much more contact relative to the league with two strikes.
| Situation | Fastball swSTR% | Fastball EV | Non-Fastball swSTR% | Non-Fastball EV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Not Two Strikes | 146 | 105 | 74 | 102 |
| Two Strikes | 95 | 100 | 83 | 103 |
Or maybe it’s that some players have such excellent power that the step back doesn’t matter so much. “If you get it, and it doesn’t go quite as far, but for most guys they have enough power to get it out of there, or at least get it out of the infield,” points out Goldschmidt himself.
“I don’t know. I don’t know if I care,” said Joey Votto carefully. “I don’t think about choking up as a sacrifice of power, I think of it as controlling the bat more, and feeling more comfortable. It’s not about power, I don’t think I’ve thought about power for a while.”
Votto has taken to the practice gradually. “I’d been doing it sporadically for the first few years and it’s become constant the last six or seven years. Since 2011, I’ve done it pretty consistently, and for the last three or four years it’s been constant to the extreme, where I’m moving up the bat, choking up to a real massive level, almost where it’s almost like pepper.”
It certainly looks like you gain contact with the practice. What about the fact that you’re shortening the bat? That inch or two is no longer at the end of your bat, and that must be lost plate coverage, right?
Maybe, maybe not. “I’ve got long arms so it doesn’t really matter to me,” joked Davis. “You kind of want to spit at the outside pitch anyway,” pointed out A’s teammate Stephen Vogt. “But if you actually look at where we stand in the box, even if I just put my bat into my bellybutton, I’m covering the outside corner.” Bonds himself said he choked up to avoid getting jammed, so he wasn’t so concerned with plate coverage either:
Davis’ comment gives us a clue that a lot of things are different with two strikes. Votto was explicit: “I take a step at times towards the outside part of the plate, which gets me closer to the ball, it’s like a crossover move if I’m looking to go the other way or looking to hit the pitch on the outside part of the plate.” There are ways to compensate for less plate coverage, in other words.
If there’s a trade-off between power and contact here — and there’s some evidence of that, though on a case-by-case basis — there’s also the question of the role of aging. “It used to be a two-strike thing before,” said Davis. “Now I just want to control the bat and hit hard line drives.” Goldschmidt is doing it more as he’s gotten older.
Votto, who often thinks about how he will age in the game, was unsurprisingly the most explicit about the role of choking up in the aging process. “As you get older, you don’t feel quite as strong, quite as powerful,” the Reds’ first baseman said. “To use the same bat, I don’t feel like I can grip it on the end and whip it through the zone with the same power.” Hence the more extreme choking up in recent years.
There’s also mindset that comes with choking up. “It maybe gives you more of a defensive mindset,” says Goldschmidt. “To me, it’s a mental reminder to stay short,” says Vogt. “It’s a feel thing, it’s a loose thing, it’s a fast thing, it’s an explosive thing, it’s not a robot thing,” says Pence of choking up, but also about baseball.
Let’s also not forget that “feel” is important to a player. “It’s almost a completely different game if you’re swinging with the end of your bat. Your swing is almost completely different,” says Pence, perhaps explaining some of his style vs the league’s sluggers. “It feels better,” says Votto. “I’ve never liked the knob.” Given the injury rate on knob-grabbers, maybe the decision has kept him healthy.
In the end, there’s a bit of mystery about choking up. Yes, it looks like you gain in contact, and perhaps defensive mindset and feel, and you give something up in power and bat speed. How exactly that happens physically, and why more players don’t make this decision, is where some of the gray lines come in.
But gray lines can be beautiful. “I don’t think you can science baseball, as much as you want to, because that’s what the human brain wants to do, to control and rationalize,” said Pence. “Have fun doing it, of course.”
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Not often you see the term “knob-grabber” but… I love hearing players talk about hitting.
Always a good time to talk about tip speed.
Great article! When I was young—back in the ’60s and ’70s—just about every major league hitter used to choke up on the bat with two strikes, especially with runners on the bases. That’s where you really want to be able to make contact.
Now, I only see the occasional hitter take that approach. I’ve often wondered why that is so. It’s good to see that some of the best hitters in the game still take that approach, even if costs them some power.
Heck, all of my friends used to do that too, even though we were only playing sandlot ball.
It’s simple. Strikeouts aren’t frowned upon as much as they were in the past, so hitters are more comfortable with swinging hard with two strikes instead of feeling like they have to put the ball in play.
I think it is pretty simple. The bat turns around a point somewhere between the hands and if you choke up that pivot point gets closer to the COG of the bat and thus the inertia to turn is lower.
That causes the angular displacement to get higher, the bat turns faster around the hands to around perpendicular to the pitch flight (contact position). But the downside is that you lose leverage, the angular velo gets higher but the linear displacement of the sweetspot gets smaller. The displacement of the sweetspot is dependent on both angular velo and the radius it moves. The larger the radius (longer bat or grip at the end) the less angular velo is needed to achieve the same tip speed but also the more innertia needs to be used to get the bat turning.
The swing basically consists of two pivot points, one is the spine (the hands travel pretty much in an arc around the spine
https://youtu.be/Huda3vQUPN4
And the other one is the hands, with the bat circling around the hands.
Shorter levers mean less innertia but also less leverage. What is ideal might not be the same for every athlete. Very twitchy and fast turning athletes might benefit from less inertia because they turn so fast they don’t need that much leverage while slower but bigger guys might benefit from a longer more leveraged swing because they can’t turn as fast but are strong enough to overcome more inertia. This of course does not only go for the hand pivot point (choke up or shorter bat) but also the other pivot point (tighter vs wider hand arc).
That is basically like a runner, some guys like usain bolt use a lower cadence and longer strides while shorter athletes run with a higher stride fregency but shorter strides.
So, you just felt like restating the linked physics article?
Fine with me.
I actually didn’t read the article (probably should have then I would have saved the writing:) until now but I had some physics course at college and that is pretty basic stuff.
Great article, but not sure about this Kagan quote:
“As Kagan notes, it’s possible that choking up increases the speed of the tip of the bat, but not “the average speed of the entire bat.” ”
Not sure how that is possible unless somehow the tip of the bat is bending forward while the rest of the bat lags behind.
See my comment above: angular velocity gets higher but the tip moves slower because the radius is smaller. One is degrees per second and the other is imches per second.
Imagine sitting on a carousel, the farther outside you sit the faster you move even though the angular displacement is the same at both points.
But unlike the carousel the human does not have a motor with unlimited power, if the radius gets longer the inertia is higher.
For contact angular displacement is more important (get the bat perpendicular to the pitch line as quick as possible) while for power the linear speed of the tip is more important even if it means a wider radius and longer swing time.
My point is that it would be impossible to speed up the tip without speeding up the “average” speed of the bat – whatever he really means by that. Think of a carousel like you describe. If we have two carousels, one with 5ft radious (chocked up carousel?) and the other on a 10 ft (knob grabbing carousel? – keeping my kids off that one)- if my linear speed on the end of the 5ft carousel is faster than the speed on the edge of the 10ft one, the “average” speed on the 5ft is way faster.
Changing the pivot point also changes the bats center of mass (sweet spot), moving it more towards the end of the barrel and at the same time closer to your hands, giving it a larger, but not as potent, sweet spot. This, I would assume, would provide a bit more pop on off center hits – similar to how game improvement irons with off center hits in golf.
For contact you want faster acceleration and a longer time over the plate. For power you want more mass and more acceleration through the ball (F=ma).
Well, Kagan’s comments about average bat speed were based on a mistaken premise, which he has acknowledged.
His article does describe how a higher tip speed could conceivably result in a lower translational velocity at the center of mass, but his simple example only holds for an object of constant linear mass distribution. I suspect that the same math which takes into account the actual bat geometry would lead to much different results.
Other points:
Changing the pivot point does not change the bat’s center of mass. You are simply moving your hands closer to it by choking up. Also, the sweet spot is a function of the bat’s resonant frequencies in bending, which is only tangentially related to it’s CM location. Changing the grip location will slightly change the location of the bat’s sweet spot, but probably not to an extent that can be accurately measured.
The 2010 study that Dr. Kagan referenced points to the fact that both stride time and bat acceleration improved with a choked up grip, which indicates that there is something more going on than hand location on the bat.
I love this article, even if I mostly just came for the Votto quotes, I loved all of it. I’ve always appreciated hitters who are willing to do it.
Frodo, I remember there was a whole article about knob grabbers a few years back. IIRC it focused mainly on David Ortiz. It was called something like, “Knob Grabbing and the MLB players who do it.”
Oh and great article Eno, your interviews/interactions with the players are always great reads. I’ve always wondered why it wasn’t more of a thing considering Bonds’ success with the practice. The clip of Bonds talking about not like getting jammed makes a ton of sense to me.
Really, though, like someone mentioned in the chat… you need to get Votto to do a book and let you ghost write it.
What a great article ( both this and the one linked).
The Bonds video about him not getting jammed raises another aspect of this conversation. What is the higher percentage of thicker bat you are now swinging with if you choked up?
Higher overall bat speed, but now a higher proportion of the bat is the thin side that will jam you or break.
Maybe an equation would be something like: average speed * (squarable length/total length from top hand to end)
Votto is baseball’s embodiment of the Delphic maxim: “Know Thyself”