The most impactful thing I learned in 2020 is that watching baseball, when you know what to look for, tells you far more about players and the game than you could ever hope to learn from a stat sheet. You can see the “why” and “how” rather than just the “what”.
That seems obvious, but there were many, many times prior to this past fall where I thought I could tell you a player’s entire baseball story by combining his FanGraphs, Baseball-Reference, and Baseball Savant profiles. Seems plausible, right? Just about everything a player does or doesn’t do will be captured by one or more of those incredible, invaluable, and indispensable sites. Well, I’m here to tell you that I was wrong. Very wrong, even. There is just so much that happens on the field that we cannot capture (at least, not yet) in a metric. At the end of the day, if you want to have a true understanding of what’s happening on the field, you have to watch the games... So, when it came to evaluating Keston Hiura, that’s what I did.
2020 Struggles
Hiura’s woes at the plate have been a fairly hot topic this winter after a substantive sophomore slump. Despite a torrid rookie season where he hit .303 with 19 home runs and a 140 wRC+, Hiura fell flat in the pandemic-shortened cluster of a season that was 2020. His average fell off a cliff, dropping nearly 100 points and while he left the yard at nearly an identical pace to 2019 (PA/HR), his wRC+ deflated by more than 50 points to a definitively below-average 87.
There has been a myriad of articles recounting his fall from grace. Almost all of them attribute his poor season to an inability to hit the high fastball. And while that may be true to an extent, I don’t feel that it tells the whole story.
Was It The Fastballs?
2019 Fastballs
In a nutshell, it’s not that Hiura was done in by whiffing on high fastballs, it’s that he struggled with fastballs in general in 2020. That is, he struggled with them until he didn’t - he was actually feast or famine when it came to fastballs last summer. We saw his whiff rate on fastballs skyrocket from 30.9% in 2019 to 41.5% in 2020 yet at the same time, he was tied for 17th in MLB for barrels on fastballs in 2020 with 14 )eight of which went for home runs) — two fewer than the 16 he had in 2019, but in 102 fewer PAs.
2020 Fastballs
Somehow, he was both better and worse at the same time. How is that possible? Was he pitched differently? Not demonstrably, no. In fact, he saw a lesser percentage of fastballs in 2020 (63.2% in 2019, 60.9% in 2020). Well, did he just see more high fastballs which made him whiff more? Also no. Using Savant’s search tool, I isolated fastballs by location ( zones 1-3, 11, & 12) and he saw fewer high fastballs in 2020 than in 2019 (25.8% and 28.2%, respectively). While he certainly whiffed on more of those fastballs, he was actually seeing fewer of them in 2020. In the words of the great Vince Lombardi, what the hell’s going on out here?
Was it the Approach?
If he’s not seeing more fastballs in zones he struggles with, maybe his approach regressed in 2020. That would make sense, right? He did strike out and swing and miss more and he walked less -- that must be it! Well, I disagree. While those things are true, I actually think his plate discipline and approach improved in 2020. Blasphemous, right? Am I off my rocker? Probably, but not for this particular train of thought.
I watched 50+ at-bats of Hiura’s across 2019 and 2020 from both Triple-A and the majors and what I noticed is that he was actually refining his approach as he gained experience at the premier level. He’s always been an aggressive swinger who often attacks the first pitch he sees, but I noticed he started to do so less in 2020 and it’s supported by the numbers: 31.6% first-pitch swing in 2019, 26.8% in 2020. That’s a pretty significant improvement in just one season. While he does chase a decent amount, Savant shows that his Chase % actually dipped a little in 2020, down 1.4% along with his swing percent in general dropping a tick (1.2%). Lastly, he saw (very slightly) more pitches per plate appearance in 2020, 4.06, up from 3.97. Ultimately, while it’s not like he turned into Joey Votto or Mike Trout overnight, it looks like he was a touch more disciplined in his approach in 2020 than in 2019. You may feel that those changes are so small that they don’t hold weight or could simply be random variance, but I think we can all agree that at the very least, his discipline was not worse.
Timing, Timing, Timing
Okay, so if his discipline wasn’t any worse and he didn’t see more fastballs or even more fastballs in his weak zones, then why in the world was he swinging and missing on them so much more? In a word: timing.
Before diving into Hiura specifically, first, let’s talk about how hitters in general find their timing at the plate. All hitters use some sort of timing mechanism (leg lift, leg kick, trigger, load, etc.) to start their swing. Some use a toe tap, some use a leg kick and all have varying degrees of length and intricacy. This move is used to start the swing and load the body for the swing. It helps produce power in the swing by activating the legs and coiling the hips and torso. Now, the more exaggerated and/or intricate the load, the more room there is for something to go wrong. Getting back to Hiura specifically, what makes him a bit unique is that he uses a toe tap followed by a big leg kick before moving into the stride phase (forward move) of his swing.
That’s a long process to work through before starting to move forward. The other funky part of this is the speed at which he goes through it seems to vary based on the pitcher he’s facing. Sometimes he moves through the whole thing at warp speed, other times he’s plodding along. I believe that’s because his load is so long that he has to try and sync it up with the pitcher’s delivery - from full windup to slide step. With so many moving parts, you can see how easy it would be for him to get out of sync, which brings us back to watching him in 2020. Time and time again, there were instances where he got a fastball over the plate that I thought he would hammer, but he either whiffed or made poor contact with it, failing to end the at-bat when he should have. We’re not just talking high fastballs, I mean fastballs all over the zone. Instead of getting his foot down early and into position to handle velocity, his lead foot was hovering a bit too long and his bat was left in the dust. I would watch him get ahead in 2-0 and 3-1 counts only to be blown away by back-to-back heaters in the strike zone. That shouldn’t happen to a hitter like Hiura who has excellent bat speed and good bat-to-ball skills.
To bring this all to a head, I don’t think it was poor plate discipline or a hole in his swing that led to his poor 2020 performance. I believe it was because he lost the rhythm and timing of his load and wasn’t able to get back on track during the season. His loss of timing led to him frequently being late, which led to a lot more swing and miss in the zone, more strikeouts and, worse overall quality of contact (average exit velocity dropped 4 mph, barrel consistency [Avg EV divided by Max EV] dropped from 81.3% to 79.2% or 37th among qualified hitters in 2019 and 110th in 2020).
Now, because Hiura’s approach is to swing hard and drive the ball in the air, there will always be some swing and miss to his game. It’s just the price you pay when prioritizing power. That said, as we saw in 2019, he has the ability to whiff less and put the ball in play with pretty good regularity. I don’t think this is a permanent problem. It’s something he can potentially fix fairly easily and I’m going to show you how I would go about coaching him to do so.
We Can Rebuild Him, We Have the Technology
Okay, now that we (think) we know what may have spoiled Keston Hiura’s sophomore campaign, let’s talk about how it can be fixed. So there are a couple of ways we can go about this: First, we’ll cover what his options are if he is steadfast in keeping his extended load (meaning both tap and leg kick), and then we’ll discuss his options if he wants to start working with a quicker load.
If Hiura is adamant about keeping his long load, then I believe the main focus should be getting his foot down sooner so that he can be in position to handle any velocity in any location. This is important because, as we saw in 2020 if you’re late on the ball, there really isn’t much you can do with it. If you’re early, your swing may not be ideal, but there’s a good chance you can still get a decent swing off and put the ball in play. The reason that Hiura has been able to find success despite consistently toeing the line of being late is his tremendous bat speed. Getting the bat through the zone so quickly allows him to start his swing later than those with average bat speed and still make good contact with the ball. So, if keeping his full load is necessary, I would suggest he get his foot down a touch quicker so he can start his stride phase and swing sooner.
Our other option would be to adjust his current load to something slightly more simple. What I would suggest here is either ditching the toe tap and going right to the big leg kick, or vice versa, ditching the leg kick and sticking with an exaggerated toe-tap load. I think the important thing here is to keep the load as similar to his previous movement as possible while still making it easy for him to move through the process quicker. We want to maintain his comfort with the movement and his ability to generate power with his coil. For that reason, I don’t think it would be wise to ditch the big movements altogether in favor of a short/small load. He’s a good mover with electric hands, he doesn’t need an overhaul, just a tweak.
Now that we’ve covered his options with the load, it’s time to tackle how we’d work on his timing if he’s going with option A and not altering his load at all. The most important thing we’ll focus on here is randomness within the training. We want him to work on his ability to adapt to any pitch with any timing variable from a 100+ MPH fastball from a slide step to Zack Greinke’s 65 mph eephus from a deliberate full windup. To do that, there are two drills that I picked up from Driveline that I would use. First is batting practice with varied tempo. This is batting practice that mimics a game by varying the pitches (fastball, breaking ball, offspeed) as well as the BP thrower’s time to the plate. It sounds pretty intuitive when you think about it, this will help the hitter work when to start the load and at what time he needs to be at certain points of his load in order to be on time with most pitches. The second drill is called the 2 Plate Drill. Here you set up 2 plates (home plate, not dinner plate), one in front of the other, and have the hitter take swings off a machine. The hitter will randomly switch back and forth between the two plates, moving further away from or closer to the machine, in order to change the timing of the pitches and force the hitter to adapt.
Once again, keeping these drills as random as possible is the key. We want the hitter to be forced to adapt to changing looks and speeds just like in a game. Finding success in these drills (squaring up the ball consistently) requires the hitter to self-organize and find a rhythm and pace at which they can put a good swing on just about any pitch. Mastering these drills should help Hiura hone his adaptability find his timing again and get back to punishing fastballs with regularity.
One Final Note: Why I don’t think Hiura’s struggles with the high fastball are a problem
2019-20 Swing & Miss
2019-20 Swing & Miss
As mentioned above, Hiura has a “hole” in his swing at the top of the zone. Essentially, that means he struggles to make contact in that area. What I’d like to point out though is that is not nearly as big a problem as it has been made out to be. Many players have “holes” in their swing, including the one and only Mike Trout. If you take a look at his swing and miss heat map, you’ll see that he and Hiura swing and miss at similar pitches (obviously not as often). The point is, a supposed hole in the swing is not a death sentence and in fact, no hitter, not even Trout, can cover the entire zone on every pitch. It’s impossible to be ready for a high fastball and a low changeup at the same time.
A better approach is to sit on something you can drive until you have two strikes and then work with what the pitcher gives you. Hiura has shown that he can do damage on the high pitch from time to time; he has a flatter swing he uses to spoil these pitches and can put the ball in play. It worked fine for him in 2019 and it will work just fine in the future if he gets his timing down.