Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past month, you are aware of Aaron Judge’s hot start to the season, where he is slashing (.337/.435/.815).
Judge is far exceeding his FanGraphs projections, already posting a 2.5 WAR, thanks in large part to all the success he is having at the plate.
Many people have already written great pieces on Judge, which you can check out here, here, and here. What I want to do is look at the how, not the what.
Real quick if you’re too lazy to check out the articles above, here are some numbers on Judge. Hint: his improved production at the plate is due to his improved plate discipline.
Below is a table of his FB%, GB%, PULL %, BB%, K%, Z-Swing %, Z-Contact %, and 0-Swing % from 2016 to 2017.
| Year | FB% | GB% | PULL% | BB% | K% | Z-Swing% | Z-Contact | O-Swing% |
| 2016 | 51.2% | 34.9% | 46.5% | 9.5% | 44.2% | 63.4% | 78.9% | 33.6% |
| 2017 | 38.6% | 42.1% | 54.4% | 15.2% | 26.3% | 64.2% | 86.7% | 23.6% |
You can see Judge is chasing way less pitches out of the zone while making much better contact with pitches in the zone. Mix those two together and you get a much better walk and strikeout rate and as we’ve seen the first month: more dingers.
You can also see in the table above Judge is pulling the ball more (sounds a lot like Turner– right?)
We know pulling more balls is good; we know hitting more balls in the air is good.
The one interesting thing I find is this: Judge’s fly ball rate has actually decreased.
A power hitter putting up much better numbers by hitting less balls in the air…?
This week we have a special treat for you, I’m going to pass the torch to a guy who has spent a lot of time around elite hitters and has studied many swings: Chez Angeloni, co-owner of Player Development Systems in Philadelphia, PA. The floor is yours Chez:
Key:
Lit = Special
AH = As Heck
BL = Before Lit
AL = After Lit
Aaron Judge is an epic case study for the current era of player development. As an athlete he is literally off the charts. His tools… are toolsy AH. When it comes to character and make-up, Judge is in the huddle with Tebow. He is so incredible as a human that we cannot help but wonder what he is capable of.
Judge is a great case study because for most of his career he exhibited pretty amateur technique. That isn’t to say that he wasn’t any good, or he was incapable of success. Like most prospects, he had a lot of room left to develop. The thing that is most intriguing is the speed in which Judge went from kind of wonky to kind of special.
He didn’t have good technique… He currently has very good technique. It happened fast… Plain and simple, his journey from amateur to professional was deliberate AH…
I don’t expect this to be exceedingly clear. Studying hitters at a high level is very difficult. Whenever I speak with an MLB organization I am reminded, the struggle to project and develop the hit tool is real. This is a pain point. This is a challenge, and an opportunity. The thing is though, at a high enough level, you reach a threshold where things tend to look good.
The athletes are so fast and powerful, even with slow motion video and all the #data you want, differentiating positive and negative attributes in the swing gets murky. Moreover, great technicians with the bat (guys with great swings) struggle and fail out of the game all the time and guys with wonky swings (Mookie Betts) can set the world on fire. Yes, Mookie’s swing is a little wonky.
Andddd that is absolutely okay. Everything works… Also, everything works until it doesn’t. This isn’t an article about the perfect swing. This is an article about what Aaron Judge is doing differently this year in order to be successful. Maybe I’ll hop on and write a lit Mookie Betts article to clarify the wonky, and further elaborate on the fact that there are things that can be extremely important and irrelevant at the same time. This is baseball. This game is epic.
I always tell our hitters at PDS (Player Development Systems aka BaseballPDS) some version of the following rant:
“IDGAF, just hit, it’s a mindset.. Have a crappy pushy swing and hit .360 in the league. No one cares about your mechanics (Not entirely true. Oops). At the same time, pursue mastery, be a hitting savant, attack weakness everyday and chase down potential like a madman. Today is your career. Your career is today. Do it better. Do it again.”
Did I mention that baseball is friggin’ epic!?
This is a great time to point out that there is more to hitting than swing mechanics. I might as well rattle off some more opinions to get all your juices flowing… All the old school cues play, you need to get into a good position to hit, and it is a tremendous idea to hit line drives the other way.
Ok, on with the Judgement.
Aaron Judge’s swing development throughout his career can be categorized in two parts. BL and AL (Before Lit and After Lit – See the Key at the top?). Lit, in this case, we’ll say is circa Spring Training 2017 based on video available to the public.
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Judge BL was an absolute man savage swinging the bat… Granted he was swinging the bat with his arms. His bat speed was slow developing… he didn’t create early bat speed. Therefore his direction was off. He couldn’t get the bat up to speed early, behind him. So he was generating all of his speed forward or out front. In the early stages of Judge’s career you can kind of see that Judge’s swing comes over his right shoulder, cuts down to the ball and heads left. (Cape, Milb & 2016 video). You see a big strong guy who looks a little out of sync. You see a swing that sort of fights to get the barrel there.
His margin for error was miniscule. It is difficult to be successful consistently when the bat speed you create is out front, even when that happens to be a shit ton of bat speed. It’s difficult to be patient and control the zone when you must swing forward… When the speed in your swing is all out front, the collision at contact happens relatively sooner in comparison to when you create speed in your swing rearward…
This is an important distinction. You must be able to scout this and communicate with a hitter in a way that is digestible. If a hitters’ speed is out front, and you desperately want him to be more selective… Just making him more patient might have some adverse effects… He has a small timing window. He’s not being patient for a reason… Swing mechanics enable approach. If you don’t increase a hitter’s’ timing window, you cannot communicate with him the same way you communicate with someone who is, let’s say, more lit. Someone who is more lit, has a bigger timing window, and can quickly digest advanced knowledge about approach.
The challenge today is how to (at scale) guide, develop, change or coerce hitters towards more positive swing characteristics… (Maybe check out PDS constraint circuits on twitter or ig).
Back to Judges milb video…
You can see how Judge started experimenting with some movement, rhythm and timing in the minor leagues… This makes a lot of sense. His bat speed remained out front, and so his feel for creating the swing remained the same. He was playing with ways to organize his body with momentum and angles, in order to better compete with his limited timing window (Mookie Alert: Betts is Lit at doing this).
If you look closely at his swing in the Cape and throughout the minor leagues, you can see and feel the forward and leftward of Judge’s swing. Generally, no bueno. It doesn’t really matter how you dress up creating speed forward in the swing, the brain knows what it takes to get the barrel to the ball and the brain is going to try to compete with that info. So…. all of Judge BL can be summed up with variations on how to compete while generate bat speed that is out front. This is a gross simplification, for the record.
Ok, dude. We get it. You like to talk. So what did he do? What is he doing differently? I’m assuming Lit Judge has swing speed that is early to develop and maybe not out front.. So he’s shorter… quicker… right?
Here is a great time to remind you that all the old school cues play and probably a million coaches saw Judge and said…. “Get shorter! Be quicker!” I mean that is the old school guy… choke and poke baby! He said that… he had to have said that…
So did he just swing quicker? Well, that’s always a great start. The answer… the details… in this case, are in the intent. That’s where the deliberate process comes in. Judge became lit on purpose. He was deliberate Ah.
Real quick on Intent:
The body will organize itself to accomplish the task at hand… that’s the Bernstein principle… feel free to use it to justify anything. Intent usually gets a wrap for being max effort these days. Thanks in large part to training facilities doing max effort throws and tracking exit velocity… Swing hard! Hit it in the air! Get off the island!
This horse is dead, people. Let me make this perfectly clear, the intent to swing hard is not the invisible guiding hand that will create Lit swing characteristics. Swinging hard must be constrained. It must have other parameters.
I’d like to take a second, and quickly point out that I like horses. All animals, really… So I’d like to clarify that nobody killed that horse. It’s unfortunate that Judge road into pro ball on the intent-to-swing-hard horse, and it’s important to note that he rode a different horse into spring training 2017.
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Intent and deliberate process: Judge is doing it on purpose
The body organizing itself to accomplish the task at hand is a very powerful principle. Choosing the task at hand is very important. We must make good choices about what we are doing deliberately on a consistent basis. Ever hear a Lit pro talk about figuring out what he’s doing in his routine everyday? They take this shit seriously. It matters. We want to choose one thing that accomplishes many things. Getting into our legs is very important… But it is not the whole story.
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The guiding force behind Aaron Judge’s Lit swing mechanics is the intent to rearwardly accelerate the barrel instantaneously.
The entire swing process is organized to accomplish the task of instantaneously translating force from the ground, up through the body and into the handle accelerating the barrel rearward. That is the sole task.
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It demands an athletic stance (a good position to hit) with a strong connection to the ground through the back foot, active control within the rear hip, as well as tension throughout the posterior chain to support a handset that is stable, with a wrist that has some freedom. (Read that 1000 times… it is lit).
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Dylan Tice is special, It’s a shame the Cardinals had predetermined to release him early in ST this year, because he is lit Ah
Judge AL is Lit as it gets. He needed to make adjustments. He needed to control the zone, refine his approach and be more selective… This simply wasn’t happening while creating speed forward and out front. He fundamentally changed the way he produced bat speed. He organizes his body to create and launch the swing, instantaneously…The arms are out of the swing, they are just a conduit between the ground and his hands.
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All the complex pieces that make up the swing process have melted away. Loading and swinging are become one move. The intent to instantaneously accelerate the barrel rearwardly is gobbling up ancillary tasks left and right. The entire process is disappearing. The body and the mind are getting quiet. The instincts are starting to breath with all the added room for activities inside his huge dome.
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If you watch this epic clip of his BP… you can see him clearly focused on loading and preparing to swing… he swings and almost immediately he’s done with the rep and onto the next loading process while the rest of the Muggles watch the ball fly nearly 500 feet in complete awe.
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Here is Tice, focusing on accelerating rearward. That bat on the ground represents the rearward direction for which he is organizing his body.” Again, Tice is special.
Judge rips it, rearward; underneath he catches the ball entering the zone and is done with it. His speed is deep. It’s early. It’s behind him: It’s from behind his shoulder and his body turns it through the field.
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Here is Tice swinging in a confined space, guiding him towards accelerating the barrel rearward and catching the ball underneath… Did I mention that Tice is special and The Cardinals mindlessly released him?”
Judge is now able to let the ball travel… to control the zone and let his instincts play up… he’s competing and having fun. This game is hard. It will continue to be hard. But Judge has confidence now. He has an approach, deliberate practice and a swing process that all marry up. He is the definition of a professional. And dear lord he is fun to watch.
At PDS one of our taglines is “where scouting meets player development.” It’s weird because scouting requires a very accurate assessment of what the player is capable of doing now… and the projection… the potential… So much of the equation, when it comes to scouting, hinges on how the player develops.
Teams are woefully unsuccessful at evaluating and predicting the hit tool. It’s hard for teams to determine if a player will consistently hit at the big league level… harder still, for teams to train and develop him to do so. This will not be the case for much longer. You can identify prospects and guide them towards Lit-ness. You can give everyone their best chance to succeed… And you can do all that while tempering it with the fact that many things work and everyone does not have to do the same thing to be successful. It’s about having scope and perspective. But, you must have the ability to execute…
Here’s an example for you… We can Lit-ify a player on demand… give him great swing characteristics through training over the course of a few weeks… (a few minutes really * ahem * cough – YNTG). We can still let the process happen naturally, and we can still give each athlete space to grow and develop. The point is, great swing mechanics really aren’t that complicated. The complication is managing the macro: The many logistics, timelines and personalities etc. that go into long-term baseball player development at scale.
The problem that still remains is that the baseball industry is not executing. Or… If we are executing, it is astoundingly inefficient. The fact that there isn’t consensus about great swing mechanics and how to develop them is childish. It’s not okay that Jason Heyward is clearly hungry and ready to be Lit… yet cannot FIO. It’s not that hard. So you need to allow for freedom and natural growth, as well as failure, but you must be able to step in and execute quickly when athletes are open and ready to learn. We are nearly there. Just not yet… We are, in fact… not that good. We need to #FIO.
Chez Angeloni co owns Player Development Systems with Dan Williams in Conshohocken, PA just outside of Philadelphia. Check them out on twitter, instagram and snapchat @BaseballPDS #YoureNotThatGood #FIO
