Stand and deliver

With Baseball Savant unleashing new data on batting stances, a look at how three Royals take different approaches to how they set up in the box.

Just in time for Opening Day, the geniuses behind the Baseball Savant website have come up with a way to visualize batting stances and intercept points. It’s an interesting way to gauge how players adjust and tinker with their batting stance. I spent some time clicking on various hitters and let me just say that 2005 me never imagined falling down a batting stance rabbit hole, but there I was.

Focusing on Royals hitters, I found a few things that were interesting enough to share. A few things we can collectively watch as the season progresses. Or just things that, if you go to Opening Day on Thursday with your pals, you can share to sound like a truly knowledgeable Royals fan.

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When it comes to a batting stance, I would assume that someone like Bobby Witt Jr., who performed well above the league average at the plate over the entire season, would’ve been relatively unchanged at the plate as the 2024 season progressed. Yet he made an extremely subtle adjustment through the first half of the season, closing the distance between his feet. Here are his monthly batting stance averages from Savant.

Witt is generally consistent about how deep he stands in the box. He’s a little less consistent in how far off the plate he positions himself. I was struck by the fact he began the year with his feet 32 and a half inches apart on average. (All numbers above from Savant are in inches.) He slowly closed his stance to the point where he brought his feet three inches closer together by June.

I get that this can be very in the baseball weeds. I hope you find this interesting.

What is notable about Witt and the first three months can be found in his splits in relation to how he was positioned in the box.

March/April - .315/.363/.548
May - .315/.373/.550
June - .306/.353/.500

It’s a fun visualization.

As he closed his stance, his production slightly decreased. Slightly. However, I would surmise that while the results weren’t entirely there like we saw in April and May, Witt was getting comfortable with his adjustment he was making in relation to the position of his feet. He stuck with it into July and…BAM!

July - .489/.520/.833

That is as hot as I can ever remember a baseball player not named George Brett. Witt remained relatively unchanged at the plate in August, and…

August - .310/.378/.673

I’m not going to say that where he positioned his feet unlocked this kind of all-world performance because there’s so much more to hitting than just one aspect of a batting stance, but I think we can all agree that the tumblers fell into place for Witt—especially in July and August. This visualization at Baseball Savant allows us to connect some of the dots that might go otherwise unnoticed.

Of course, Witt really began raking in the second half of the 2023 season. The batting stance tool at Savant only goes back to July of ‘23. Aaaargh. It would be amazing to look at Witt’s evolution in the box from his rookie season in 2022 and through the entirety of his sophomore campaign. Maybe they’ll have that for us someday.

If you think Baseball Savant is going to unleash a batting stance visualizer and I’m not going to call up MJ Melendez’s data, you must be new to this newsletter.

On average, Melendez’s feet were open at an angle of 36 degrees. That was tied for the eighth-widest stance in the majors last year. Rafael Devers in Boston had his feet opened up at 67 degrees, which is just kind of bonkers. One of the things that is refreshing about this data is that it reinforces that there can never be a cookie-cutter approach to something as complex as hitting a baseball. What works for a hitter like Devers (a 139 OPS+ in 2024) doesn’t necessarily work for a hitter like Melendez (an 87 OPS+).

Savant doesn’t have data for spring training plate appearances, so it will be interesting to see how Melendez’s data from all of 2024 will compare to his first month of action in 2025.

Ok…one final look at some of this fascinating data. (I hope you’re still with me.) Let’s look at Professional Hitter™ Vinnie Pasquantino. At Savant, you can break down the position of a hitter with two strikes and fewer than two strikes. When Pasquantino has fewer than two strikes against him, his stance generally looks like this:

Pasquantino stands, on average, with his feet 36.6 inches apart, with a stance that is open at 25 degrees when he’s not in danger of striking out on the next pitch.

Here is Pasquantino’s average stance when he has two strikes against him:

He moves up in the box a touch. He stands slightly closer to the plate. He shifts his feet to an average of 40.8 inches apart, and he closes his stance to around 21 degrees. That’s a fairly large adjustment. It’s something that hitters will look to do with two strikes; a wider stance brings better balance and the potential for better contact. Yet most Royals spread their two-strike stance by just under an inch. Not Pasquantino, who may be selling out any power potential for putting the bat on the ball. You know what? It works.

When Pasquantino had two strikes against him last year, he still hit .217/.268/.346. It may not look like much, but it’s far better than the league-average hitter who posted .168/.244/.264 when batting with two strikes. Pasquantino was 41 percent better than the league average when hitting with two strikes. I’d gamble that his shift in batting stance—standing a little closer to the plate with his feet much wider—had plenty to do with that.

We can look at other Baseball Savant data, namely the bat tracking metrics to confirm the change in Pasquantino’s approach. His average swing last year registered 71.7 mph. With two strikes, he cut down on the aggression a bit to where his average swing was 70.4 mph. With two strikes against him, this change in approach allows Pasquantino to be a much better hitter than the league average.

With Opening Day two sleeps away, the Royals top concern at the moment is the health of Pasquantino who suffered a grade one hamstring strain on Saturday. The first baseman insists he will be ready to go, but how he responds to treatment over the next 48 hours will go a long way to determining whether he will play.

With Mark Canha in the fold and officially on the 40-man roster, he could be the temporary solution at first base if the Royals decide to meet Pasquantino halfway and have him in the lineup as the designated hitter.

The last thing the Royals and Pasquantino want to do is make the injury worse, so at this point, all options are on the table, including a stint on the injured list.

From Anne Rogers:

Pasquantino won’t play in the two exhibition games this week, but he hit in the cages on Monday, telling Quatraro afterwards that he had a good day and took full-effort swings in the cage “without feeling the hamstring at all," Quatraro said postgame. The next step is for Pasquantino to increase the intensity and hit on the field Tuesday.

The Royals Opening Day roster is presumably down to the 26th spot, with the team considering Cavan Biggio, Harold Castro and Nick Loftin. All three are infield utility players, so should Pasquantino need some time on the IL, that would open up two roster spots among the three. And if it’s a trip to the IL, the Royals could back-date it to March 24, which means Pasquantino would miss six games at a minimum.

In other Royals injury news, the team placed pitchers Alec Marsh, James McArthur and Kyle Wright on the 15-day IL. Marsh and Wright will remain in Arizona, going through an extended spring training of sorts as they prepare for their seasons. Marsh reported to camp with a sore shoulder. Wright is still recovering from shoulder surgery that caused him to miss all of the 2024 season.

McArthur had surgery this winter, placing two screws in his elbow. He’s not expected to return until mid-season. He’s a candidate for the 60-day IL, should the Royals need a 40-man roster spot sometime in the first half of the year.