“He sets his scapula, he sets his whole arm, rhomboids, the lats, all of them set into it,” he says. It’s easy to see how this can engage a player’s lower half, but Crabbe says this is when Pence is engaging the entire back half of his torso. “If you watch Barry Bonds - he didn’t do a leg kick, but he went…” - Crabbe morphs into Bonds and does the knee twist - “So Hunter lifts his leg to do it… it’s all coiling, resetting yourself.”
“Watch Babe Ruth,” Crabbe explains, while doing a second spot-on impersonation of the Great Bambino’s closed-stance coil. Meanwhile, what exactly is Pence doing here? One word you’re bound to hear from hitting and pitching coaches alike is “repeatability.” Pence’s mechanics, unorthodox as they are, have become much more consistent. Yes, his front leg now comes all the way back to his right knee, but more importantly it’s the same shape every time. Now, check out these three swings from 2019: And his kick always leaves space (and is sometimes hardly a kick at all). The bat angle is always similar but varies a bit. Sometimes his hands are further back sometimes, they’re not. I captured the moment when Pence’s foot was furthest toward the catcher in all three shots, then drew some lines to help illustrate what I was seeing. Check out these three swings with the Giants. I wasn’t able to ascertain any difference in, say, Pence’s abdominal muscles, but I did find something interesting. Thanks to my colleague Andrew Baggarly, I was able to get a collection of Pence’s swings from 20, and I got my hands on a selection of Pence’s 2019 swings courtesy of Jase Bandelow at Fox Sports Southwest. So what actually changed, if anything? Was it even a real change, or did an anthropomorphic crow just give him a magic feather to put in his nose? I tasked myself with finding out. Check out these percentiles on the Statcast leaderboards:
#HUNTR PENCE FULL#
Hunter Pence’s swing? It has always been the sound of seven cats fighting in a closet full of smoke alarms and one haunted banshee screaming in the language of ancients.Īnd yet, after being presumed dead, Hunter Pence is having a renaissance. Mike Trout’s is The Eagles, so perfectly and efficiently programmed it almost comes off as boring. Prince Fielder’s was a guitar riff from Swedish Metal band In Flames. Ken Griffey’s swing was a Vivaldi concerto. So imagine everyone’s surprise when he stepped into the box in his first spring training game and still looked… exactly like Hunter Pence. Next, he traveled to the Dominican Republic to test it out in game situations.īy the time he signed a minor-league deal with the Rangers, Pence was putting the finishing touches on a new swing. Pence began the offseason in Los Angeles working with Doug Latta, the swing coach who helped Justin Turner and others revitalize their careers. Everyone, that is, except for Pence himself.
Everyone assumed the 36-year-old’s career was over after a 2018 campaign where he lost his job and hit.
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