I could have entitled this post Thoughts on Matty and The Hat. We've been hearing and reading a lot about the "Launch Angle Revolution" in baseball with many teams teaching their players to use more of an uppercut swing in order to hit more flyballs and give themselves a chance for more HR's through the magic of HR/FB. I am old enough to remember when a pretty famous player and manager went the other direction with a lot of success.
This was 1966 around the time I started listening to a lot of Giants games on the radio. The Giants and Dodgers of course had their rivalry and were about to finish 1-2 on the NL for the second year in a row with the Giants coming up just short both times. The 3'rd best team in the league was the Pirates whose manager was a hitting guru named Harry "The Hat" Walker. Harry Walker had won a batting title as a player and was a perennial .300 hitter and was very vocal about his hitting ideas. Harry's success as a left-handed hitter came from hitting line drives and groundballs up the middle and to the opposite field. He thought he could help other hitters find success by following that game plan.
I don't know if Harry Walker knew anything about HR/FB, but he clearly did not believe this was a number that normalized the same for every hitter. Here's a quote I found in a SI article from 1983, "The greatest hitter I ever knew was Ted Williams. He had arm strength and the quickest hips I ever saw. But in my career of 40-odd years, God didn't give us but one man like him, so you can't say everybody should hit like Williams. You take a guy like Harry Walker, who's below average, and you try to get the average out of him."
Mateo "Matty" Alou was a small left-handed hitter who played with his 2 brothers, Felipe and Jesus, for the Giants. Matty was just 5'9" and was listed at 160 lbs. He might not have been that big. With the Giants, he swung a light bat with an uppercut swing and did not have a lot of success after his rookie season of 1961. That season he hit .310 with 6 HR's in 217 PA which projects to about 18 HR's over 600 PA's. From there his BA's declined to .292, .145, .264 and .232. He was traded to the Pirates before the 1966 season which coincided with Harry Walker's first full season as Manager.
Walker thought Matty Alou would be a perfect player for implementing his hitting ideas and convinced Matty to swing a heavier bat, chop down on the ball and try to hit it up the middle and to the left side. The results were astounding. Matty hit .342 and won a batting title. He was not just a 1 year wonder either. For the next 3 seasons with the Pirates, Matty did not hit less than .331. You may scoff about empty batting averages but Matty put up fWAR's of 2.8, 3.4, 4.4 and 4.4 during that run. OK that's not exactly MVP range but his highest fWAR with the Giants was 0.9.
Matty Alou was not the only player who Harry "The Hat" helped turn around. Miguel Dilone, another small but fast player saw his BA jump from .220 in 1979 to .341 after working with Harry. Omar Moreno never hit in the .300's, but with Harry's help was able to lift his BA from Mendoza Line territory into the mid .200's which got him on base enough to steal up to 96 bases in a season. Moreno's career had more ups and downs than Matty Alou's which Moreno attributed to his own recidivism away from Harry Walker's approach. Again from the 1983 SI article, he got away from punching the ball up the middle and to the opposite field and tried to pull the ball, with disastrous results. Walker was no longer the Pirates Manager and Moreno made a pilgrimage to Walker's home in Birmingham, AL: "The last 2 years I haven't hit that well because the Pirates tried to change me, so right now I'm trying to remind myself of everything I did in 1979. Walker added, "Instructing a hitter is not so much changing him, but finding a guy's natural style of hitting and, when he gets out of it, trying to get him back into it. Omar needs a few days to get in the groove." Here's another Walker quote: "I'm tired of hearing about pulling the ball. That's misleading young hitters. Every Scout tells them to jerk the ball out. That's asking a kid to do something he can't. If you can't jerk it out, take it to centerfield. Make adjustments." Other hitters Harry Walker worked with who found success included Mookie Wilson, Phil Garner and Terry Puhl.
Harry Walker's approach clearly does not work for everybody. You would not want Willie Mays or Willie McCovey trying to put the ball on the ground and slap it the other way. Walker's approach probably works best for players like Matty Alou and Omar Moreno, lefty hitters with little power but who can run fast enough to beat out groundballs for singles. You also would not want a lineup full of hitters like that, but having 2 or even 3 Matty Alou's or Omar Moreno's in the lineup would make a nice fit for the Giants in AT&T Park which severely suppresses HR's.
The early word on Farhan Zaidi is that he will look in the opposite direction to try to find hitters who will follow the Launch Angle Revolution and get the ball in the air. After years of watching hard hit flyballs die on the warning track and in Triples Alley I wonder how successful that approach will be.
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Great article. But missing from your discussion is the elephant in the room: the shift. Would Matty and Omar have achieved higher averages with today’s data driven fielder positioning?
ReplyDeleteIf I recall correctly, I think opposing teams were finally able to blunt Matty's effectiveness by rotating their infield to the left and stationing the LF shallow and close to the 3B line. Nowadays he would have to be able to hit the ball hard to the right side often enough to prevent teams from doing that.
DeleteDuring post-mortems on 2018 there were lots of calls to build an SF Giants team to fit the park, i.e. fast running contact hitters that play lights out defense, and ground ball pitchers. And with the shift it seems there'd be even more reason to slap the ball the other way. I always wonder why Brandon Belt doesn't bunt or slap down the third base line EVERY TIME until the defenses decide they'd better cover that side (and open up the right side). I know they pitch him hard inside - but can he see the slightly outside pitch and slap or bunt it at 3B instead of taking a ball? How'd that be for a 'revolution' - a lineup of high contact-rate precision spray hitters. That can run. But hey, LA has had obvious success with the launch angle homer team - so let's see if SF can as well.
ReplyDeleteThanks for jogging the memory, DrB! I still remember all 3 Alou brothers, even though they were each such different hitters that I always wondered if they were actually brothers. Felipe seemed like the overall best hitter of the three, so the Giants traded him to the Braves. Mateo "Matty" was mostly a speed guy until the Pirates turned him into a hitter (as you explain here).
ReplyDeleteAnd of course Jesus was the least talented of the three, so the Giants hung on to him for years of disappointing mediocrity...
LOL Jesus. I remember the first time I heard his name on a Giants broadcast. Russ Hodges pronounced his name Haysoosaloo! Like, it came out as one word. I thought that was the greatest name in all of baseball history. Still do.
Deletehehe, yeah, now that you mentioned it, I remember that call. If only haysoosaloo could have hit a little better. Or not make so many failed stolen bases (my memory includes many times haysoos was 'caught stealing'). Back when my Father was first teaching me how to keep a scorecard, I learned how to notate 'CS' because of 'Haysoosalou'.
DeleteHarry’s older brother Fred “Dixie” Walker apparently followed the same principles. Despite being a corner outfielder, he averaged fewer than 10 HRs a year, repeatedly hit .300 and was an All-Star, and struck out at a rate hardly believable nowadays, numbers like 4% and 5%, considerably lower than his walk rate. Yes, we could use a couple of those.
ReplyDeleteIt’s tough. For every approach here there is a counter-approac. But I often wonder if there shouldn’t be 2 big schools of hitting in the organization. One for guys without raw power that focuses on spraying the ball and getting on base (a la Tony Gwynn, Matty Alou, Brett Butler) above driving the ball. And the other approach for power guys focused on getting the ball in the air and doing damage on pitches where that’s possible (a la JDM, Kris Davis, Bonds, Stretch.)
ReplyDeleteI completely agree.
DeleteI kinda remember the Kansas City hitting coach from the 70's/80's (Charlie Lau) advocating this type of approach. It came a bit into fashion back then with the success of George Brett. I remember his advocating hitting with a downward angle to the pitch.
ReplyDeleteThese things go in cycles. Pitchers are already learning to combat the uppercut swing. As strikeout rates soar above 40% and BABIP's tank, we'll see a swing back to more level and downstroking swings and combatting shifts with better hit placement.
DeletePitchers seem throw up in the zone a lot more than they did 20 years ago. That probably does a bit to mitigate uppercut swings.
DeleteIt definitely does. Uppercut swings are designed to elevate sinkers and other pitches down in the zone.
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