In 2014, Turner hit .340/.404/.493. He made only 322 plate appearances, but among all hitters with at least 300 trips to the plate, his 158 weighted runs created plus (wRC+), a comprehensive rate stat, ranked ninth (100 is league average). The Dodgers were curious enough to retain the arbitration-eligible Turner on a one-year, $2.5 million deal. In 2015, he made 439 plate appearances and hit nearly as well as he had the year before, slashing .294/.370/.491 with a 141 wRC+. Between 2013 and 2015, he cut his ground-ball rate by 12.5 percentage points, the fourth-greatest decline in the game. In 2016, Turner earned a full-time role. He hit twenty-seven homers. After that season, he signed a four-year, $64 million contract with the Dodgers.
In the summer of 2018 at the Ball Yard, Latta pulls up another evolution-of-Turner video from January 2017. By now Turner is much narrower in his stance. There is no rocking back on his back leg to move forward. As his left leg lifts to initiate his swing, his hands fall to create the proper slot for an uppercut swing.
“What’s J.T. trying to create? Balance and drive,” Latta says.
Latta plays it again in slow motion. Turner’s back leg and shoulder remain perfectly in line. There is no backward weight transfer or movement. He’s balanced.
He lands with his front (left) leg well in front of his body. His hands are lowered and ready to fire. “Body is moving in concert,” Latta says. “From this position he fires right underneath. He picks up his backside, and all that energy drives through the ball. He gets what we call a lot of extension.” In slow motion, the swing finishes. Latta outlines the path of the upswing with marker on the plastic sheet covering the television screen. He notes that all of Turner’s energy is transferred to a contact area in front of the plate.
Latta has a HitTrax radar unit to measure launch angle and exit velocity, but he rarely employs the latest technological advances. If a hitter doesn’t have timing and balance and movement, he has no shot, Latta believes. He’s troubled by the teaching he sees on social media, where video clips focus on creating exit velocity at the expense of balance and adaptable swings. Latta rarely uses the words swing or swing plane when talking about hitters. He tries to organize the body in such a way that the swing takes care of itself. He believes that some in the independent-player-development business are more worried about selling products than helping athletes.
Ground zero of the fly-ball revolution was arguably the Ball Yard, where other teachers and advocates of the movement met and discussed ideas. Byrd spread the knowledge to Turner and Murphy in New York. (Murphy hit sixty-two homers in more than 3,300 at-bats through age thirty, and then hit sixty more in fewer than 1,400 at-bats from ages thirty-one to thirty-three.) Turner now proselytizes in the Los Angeles clubhouse, teaching or reinforcing the beliefs of talented young hitters like Cody Bellinger and Corey Seager, and even influencing some hitting instructors like Hyers. When Bellinger was having trouble with sliders as a rookie in 2017, he wondered if his swing was too uppercut-oriented. Turner had him play a game late that summer. They went into the team’s indoor batting cage at Dodger Stadium. Turner turned on the slider machine and told Bellinger to try to swing and miss below the sliders. Bellinger couldn’t do it; he couldn’t miss. Bellinger produced a .418 weighted on-base average (wOBA) versus sliders in 2017 and a .341 mark in 2018, easily eclipsing the league averages of .271 and .263, respectively. His upswing worked.
The fly-ball revolution also spread thanks to Statcast, which in 2015 began to measure the launch angle and exit velocity of almost every ball hit in every MLB game. Teams started to outfit their batting cages at all levels with swing- and ball-tracking technology. The data confirmed that air balls were better than grounders: with every 10 degree increment from minus 30 degrees to 30 degrees (where zero is a level line drive), the league-wide wOBA on contact in 2018 increased, easily surpassing the all-angles average of .315. (The average home run left the bat at a vertical angle of 28.2 degrees.)
–30 to –20: .050
–20 to –10: .188
–10 to 0: .245
0 to 10: .462
10 to 20: .712
20 to 30: .731
Between growing awareness of that relationship and a still-unexplained change in the composition of the official MLB ball in 2015, which caused balls in the air to carry farther, hitters had more incentive to swing up. The average launch angle of a batted ball has increased in every year of Statcast: from 10.5 degrees in 2015, to 10.8 in 2016, 11.1 in 2017, and 11.7 in 2018. Over the same span, the rate of balls hit at a 10 degree angle or higher has increased by 3.3 percentage points. According to data from Baseball Prospectus, the league-wide ground-ball rate in 2018 was the lowest on record, going back to 1950.
In 2017, MLB hitters launched 6,105 home runs, breaking the previous record (set in 2000) by 412. That year, 2018, and 2016, respectively, featured the three highest rates of home runs per fair batted ball in history, surpassing the so-called steroid era.
“Elevate and celebrate” and “Ground balls suck” became batting-cage cries. In 2018, Red Sox skipper Alex Cora said, “We don’t like hitting ground balls. We like hitting the ball in the air.” His statement mirrored a Cubs catchphrase—“There’s no slug on the ground”—as well as Pirates manager Clint Hurdle’s advice to his team: “Your OPS is in the air.” An outsider philosophy had spawned insider slogans.
Latta didn’t set out to change baseball. He simply loved the game. He grew up in what he describes as “tough” financial circumstances and didn’t play organized baseball until he reached high school. Instead he played in a sandlot down the street in his childhood Koreatown neighborhood, where he and his friends used the back of an accommodating neighbor’s garage as a backstop. He went on to play at Los Angeles City College, a public community college, and later Cal Lutheran. After college he joined the Pasadena Redbirds, an adult hardball league.
“The challenge was always there to be able to build myself, to get better, and to realize that you could beat the odds,” Latta says. “We were playing major-league-caliber pitchers—like Ed Farmer, Jerry Reuss, Craig Chamberlain—so we were getting challenged.”
Latta turned down a chance to play in the Mexican League. He already had a better-paying job: at nineteen, Latta had begun his own business, cleaning private swimming pools. He continued to play baseball for the Redbirds until 1995. During his time with the team, he met a professional scout named Craig Wallenbrock. They developed a friendship. Latta describes Wallenbrock as “a thinking man.” Wallenbrock was a devoted reader, and he applied his studies to baseball, giving private hitting lessons beginning in the late 1980s.
While his playing days were over by the late ’90s, Latta thought he had information to share. He also had space to share. He owned part of a large industrial building in Los Angeles, where he stored pool chemicals for what was then a state-of-the-art chlorine-injection system. When he had an opportunity to buy the other half of the industrial structure, Latta had an idea: he would build an indoor batting cage in the other half of the building. He could give lessons and rent out the cages. He named the facility the Ball Yard.
“We didn’t even have any indoor batting cages in the area,” Latta says. “They just did not exist.”
Latta spent four months personally doing the demolition of what had been office space. He installed AstroTurf and batting cages. Wallenbrock asked if he could hold some of his hitting sessions there. Another instructor was interested in using the space, but that instructor wanted to use “flat-bat stuff,” Latta recalls. “I told myself, hell no.” Wallenbrock was more aligned with Latta’s philosophy, so they reached an agreement for Wallenbrock to train hitters in his space. No hitter was ever taught to chop wood, swing down on the ball, or hit grounders at the Ball Yard, Latta says. Wallenbrock brought in a great number of hitters, including some major leaguers.
The Ball Yard began to host regular meetings with other hitting coaches inside and outside professional baseball, which Latta labels a think tank. Latta kept about
thirty folding chairs on hand for the sessions, which grew in size and frequency. The attendees talked about hitting philosophies, some of them out of favor or forgotten like those of the great Ted Williams, who was hitting fly balls before they were cool. “If you get the ball into the air with power, you have the gift to produce the most important hit in baseball: the home run.… For those purposes, I advocate a slight upswing,” wrote Williams in his 1970 book The Science of Hitting. Former major leaguer turned instructor Don Slaught was a frequent visitor, as was Greg Walker, who had served as a hitting coach with the White Sox and Braves. The group met for years.
“I like to say that was my graduate work,” Latta says, “working side by side with Craig for fourteen years seeing what [pro hitters] were going through. How do you buy that experience?”
Eventually, Wallenbrock and Latta had a falling-out, and Wallenbrock took his higher-profile clients elsewhere. Latta eventually moved into a new facility, the present-day Ball Yard. Years went by. Latta continued to teach his unusual, uppercut-swing philosophy to players, mostly local college and high-school kids. And one day in the fall of 2012, Marlon Byrd walked through Latta’s door looking for a place to hit in the off-season. Byrd became his first major-league client.
On February 6, 2017, Travis published an article at FanGraphs entitled “Can More Hitters Get Off the Ground?” Fly-ball and line-drive rates had remained stable from 2012 to 2016, through the depths of baseball’s offensive depression, when a pair of low-power teams in the Kansas City Royals and San Francisco Giants accounted for three World Series titles in five years. In 2014, before the altered ball took flight, teams averaged only 4.07 runs scored per game, the lowest total in a nonstrike season since 1976, and both MLB insiders and fans fretted about how offense could be boosted in a high-velocity era. A few minutes after the story, which quoted Latta, was published online, Latta received a call from Hyers.
“At 7:32 a.m. Tim called me and said, ‘Andrew Friedman just called me about that article,’” Latta says. “The president of the Dodgers. Wow. Cool. I had told [Hyers] it was coming out. ‘Friedman got in the office and read it,’ [Hyers said]. I was like, wow, Friedman reads FanGraphs. He had no heads-up. For him to get in and read it in two minutes, you never actually know who is paying attention.”
The article created debate within the Dodgers’ hitting circles, which included both more traditionally minded voices like the club’s head hitting coach, Turner Ward, and others like Wallenbrock, who had worked with the club as a consultant, and his understudy Robert Van Scoyoc, who was named as the Dodgers’ hitting coach after the 2018 season. The fly-ball revolution, and the rethinking of development as a whole, had first spread from player to player via word of mouth. Now teams wanted to disseminate it throughout their entire organizations.
For decades, coaches—always ex-professional players—had enjoyed a privileged place in the vertical hierarchy of teaching and decision-making. But more and more coaches were being questioned and challenged. Many were soon to be replaced. Ideas that had begun outside the game were trickling up into the professional ranks. Latta was just one garage startup disrupting the industry.
At the end of 2017, Hyers joined the Red Sox as their head hitting coach. He and the Sox sought to revamp their hitting philosophy. Another new face, J.D. Martinez, was told by the Red Sox coaching staff to make Mookie his “project.” As Martinez watched Betts hit for the first time in the spring with his 2017 stroke, he said, “I don’t know that that’s going to work.” Betts was not offended. He wanted information.
Martinez signed a five-year $110 million deal with the Red Sox over the winter of 2017–2018, several years after reinventing his own swing and saving his career. Through 2013, Martinez had been a replacement-level big leaguer. In his first three years in the majors, he posted an 87 wRC+. He was a below-average hitter and a poor defender. He career was in jeopardy.
“You still talk to coaches, ‘Oh, you want a line drive right up the middle. Right off the back of the L-screen,’” Martinez told Travis in 2017. “OK, well that’s a fucking single.”
Martinez began to question why his best swing would result in a “fucking single.” The same winter as Turner, he sought a new swing. He found it in a facility in suburban Los Angeles with assistance from Wallenbrock and his protégé Van Scoyoc.
“I have this little theory,” Martinez says. “When I think about the best players, I think what makes people so good is when they have that insecurity about themselves… because they don’t want to fall off. It keeps them working. I feel like [Betts] had that little doubt.… Other guys have good years and they won’t make the change. He was like, ‘Dude, I have to figure this out. I don’t have it figured out.’”
Betts’ overhaul worked from the bottom up, too. Hyers and Martinez first stressed how his feet interacted with the ground. That was where the kinetic chain of the swing began. “I had to fix the ground before I fixed my hands,” Martinez says. “The engine is down there.” The Red Sox now travel with force plates that measure ground-interaction forces. The portable devices are set up in the tunnels of MLB stadiums so that hitters can measure their force and balance. They look something like large digital scales and, like TrackMan, were first popularized in golf. Betts had never thought about using the ground.
“He’d just been hitting away his whole life and didn’t think much of it,” Hyers says.
Like Turner in Los Angeles, Martinez is something of a Johnny Appleswing, a willing teacher and a clubhouse peer who reinforces Hyers’s philosophy. Among the 260 MLB hitters with at least 150 batted balls in both 2017 and 2018, Betts, center fielder Jackie Bradley Jr., and shortstop Xander Bogaerts ranked fourth, eighth, and eleventh in year-to-year increase in hard-hit rate (the percentage of balls hit 95 mph or faster). Betts, Bogaerts, and Bradley also ranked first, second, and thirtieth, respectively, in year-to-year increase in barrels (a Statcast term for “balls someone hit the snot out of”) per batted ball.
“I have to give a big credit to J.D. Martinez,” Hyers says. “When you have a superstar and you have a guy who’s already proven it, to come in and back what you’re saying and have those conversations one-on-one with players.… J.D. was huge on saying, ‘Hey Mookie, you can do this part.’ And they had their own private conversations that helped a ton also.”
Now Betts has become a hitting tastemaker, too, inspiring rivals to reject the round knob at a time when some bat companies, like golf-club designers, have begun to use swing sensors to determine the perfect fit for each player in length, weight, and grip. “You start seeing that [Betts] has an influence within the league,” says Axe Bat’s Trevor Stocking. “[George] Springer asked him for a bat, and now all of a sudden Springer’s swinging Mookie’s bat, so now Springer is giving the bat to another player, and [it’s] kind of this wheel… where they’re passing on the equipment.”
They’re also passing on the swing, and hitters are getting off the ground younger. Byrd bought into fly balls at the tail end of his career. Turner saw the light just prior to turning thirty. Martinez and Betts made the change in their primes. Now they’re modeling good batter behavior for impressionable minor leaguers, including one of Boston’s top prospects. Third baseman Bobby Dalbec, a twenty-three-year-old fourth-rounder from 2016 who ascended to Double-A in 2018, tied for the lead among all minor leaguers with 67 combined home runs (32) and doubles (35). For years, players talked about “selling out for power,” sacrificing contact to take big swings. Dalbec turns that expression around. “I think it’s a waste of an at-bat for me to sell out for contact, hit a ground ball early in the count,” he says.
Dalbec wants to hit the ball hard and far, but he also wants to be smart about it. “Being on the right attack angle [and] trying to match the plane to the pitch is something I really want to get better at,” he says. “It’s definitely nice to be able to watch guys in my organization at the major-league level do that.” Although he notes that he’s nowhere near Martinez’s level, he’d li
ke to learn from hitters like him and Betts. “If they’d be willing to or if they had time, I’d pick their brains all day about it,” he says. Fortunately for him, Martinez always has time to talk hitting.
6
THE 10,000-PITCH RULE
Deliberate practice takes place out of one’s comfort zone and requires a student to constantly try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities. Thus it demands near-maximal effort, which is generally not enjoyable.
—ANDERS ERICSSON, Peak1
In 2000, University College of London neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to examine the brains of sixteen taxi drivers and compare them to the brains of fifty non–taxi drivers. London is a difficult city to navigate. The ancient metropolis is a weaving, curving mess of thoroughfares further forked by the Thames River, winding through the center of the city. According to a New York Times Magazine article, to be licensed as an “All London” taxi driver, prospective operators must know nearly every street and structure—every hotel, park, hospital, government office, place of worship, or other object of interest—within a six-mile radius of Charing Cross, an area containing some twenty-five thousand streets and 113 square miles.
Maguire found that the posterior part of the hippocampus, a region of the brain associated with spatial recognition and recall, was larger in the taxi drivers than the other subjects. Five years later, she compared the brains of taxi drivers, whose jobs took them to unpredictable destinations, to the brains of bus drivers who drove predetermined routes. Again, the taxi drivers had the hippocampus advantage.
In 2007, Maguire recruited seventy-nine prospective taxi drivers and thirty-one non–taxi drivers as controls. She scanned their brains before the study, finding no difference between the two groups in posterior hippocampus size. Four years later, she revisited the same applicants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the MRI results showed that the remaining taxi drivers had enlarged hippocampi compared to applicants who had dropped out and the non-driver control group. Only the active taxi drivers were challenged daily to reach random destinations across London, and their brains literally grew into the job.
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