Visualizing Miguel Amaya's Swing Overhaul Makes Clear How It Raises His Ceiling

[Matthew Trueblood]

The Third Age of Sabermetrics has reached its apotheosis, with the release of data that tracks not only the swing speeds (and lengths) of batters, but their position in the batter's box and where they make contact with the ball, relative to home plate. It's especially revealing when you examine the Cubs' young, slugging catcher.

Image courtesy of © Darren Yamashita-Imagn Images

On Sunday night, Baseball Savant released their latest orgiastic set of detailed data on the game we all love. It details where batters set up in the batter's box, relative to the front of home plate and to the inside edge thereof. It also shows us how they move throughout their swings, with diagrams that mark the position of each foot and the hitter's center of mass in their initial stance; at the release of the pitch; and when the bat meets the ball.

That's extremely valuable data—to all of us, but even more so to teams, who receive unfettered access to all of the numbers associated with those diagrams, and will be able to diagnose and treat (for instance) a slight and unintentional pattern of pulling off the ball or overstriding. Even more helpful to those of us on the outside, though, is the data on where the bat and the ball meet, relative both to the front edge of home plate and the player's center of mass at the time of that impact. In other words, we know what players' strides look like (in numerical, manageable form; you no longer have to rely on my rough-hewn scouting eye and the unsatisfactory evidence of looks from the center-field camera), and we know who catches the ball out front, as well as who lets it travel deep into the hitting zone.

Fascinating case studies abound here, and aren't even limited to the Cubs, but let's start with one guy who also stood out when Savant released bat speed data early last season: Miguel Amaya. At the time, Amaya was showing flashes of something, but he wasn't connecting with the ball often enough to stay afloat, no matter how fast he was swinging. He had a big, aggressive leg kick and stride, and was trying to blast the ball out in front of home plate, but in practice, he was nearly flailing his way out of the league.

Here's a look at Amaya's setup and swing for August 2023. Note the length of this stride, and the average contact point 9.9 inches in front of home plate. 

In fact, just to help you visualize it, here's the video animation of that swing, where you can see his foot move (as part of his leg kick) from his set up to the release of the pitch, then where it goes.

That's a big move, and while it helped Amaya generate big bat speed, it also tended to result in big whiff rates. As late as the beginning of last July, he was still doing some version of that.

After his well-documented summer swing fix, though, Amaya looked completely different in the box. There's not enough to show you for a video to matter, this time. Just look at the different setup, lower-body movement, and contact point he showed in August 2024.

 

Watching from home, one could spot and articulate that Amaya was standing a bit closer to the plate, with a minimal stride. It would have been much harder, though, to confidently note that he's setting up much more spread-out—with his feet some nine inches farther apart than they were in his stance one year earlier. It also would have been almost impossible to confirm that he was making contact deeper in the hitting zone, letting the ball travel farther and squaring it up more, except by looking at his actual batted-ball data and making an educated guess. We do have that data, not just on how the ball left the bat but on how he sped his bat up again after it slowed down in the big process of his transformation. Now, though, we can marry it with hard evidence that he was generating that power deeper in the hitting zone.

Why does that matter? The deeper one can make solid contact, the more time one has to identify and lock in on the incoming pitch. When a hitter is right both physically and mentally, a deeper contact point should facilitate better swing decisions. Of course, Amaya mostly made bad swing decisions last September, but we'll give him a pass for that; he had never caught such a long season before. This swing is also much simpler. Not by coincidence did Amaya's contact rate soar after the change. In addition to having longer to process the pitch and deliver the barrel to it, he had a more stable base and could use his good hand-eye coordination better.

This spring, Amaya has quietly been the most consistently excellent Cubs hitter. He's batted .542 with four extra-base hits in 24 Cactus League at-bats, and he had an RBI double in his lone start against the Dodgers in Tokyo. He's scalding the ball, too. Everything is jumping off his bat. We knew about his bat speed, but if he's now capable of setting up deeper in the box, spreading out, seeing it a hair longer and mashing it to all fields, then the bat speed will finally become the genuine plus tool the team has long felt it should be.

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