Michael Conforto's Total Reinvention Through Timing

Image courtesy of Joe Nicholson-Imagn Images

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At some point in every baseball career, it's time to reckon with Father Time. You've been playing a child's game for a lavish living for years, now, and in so doing, you've racked up a heavy debt to the arbiter of aging and entropy. He'll let you run up a tab for a while, unremarked-upon, but you both know the bill must eventually be paid. If you try to escape him, he'll take out your knees. (Actually, he'll do that either way, but work with me.) If you ignore his collection calls, you're liable to embarrass yourself. It's best to set up a payment plan, so there are fewer surprises on both sides.

For a hitter, that means giving up a bit of the bat speed that made you an elite prospect in this game; a bit of the selectivity that made you an elite player once you reached the highest level of competition on Earth; or both. You give back when Time only loaned you, and you learn to live by your wits—to succeed using what talent remains with you and what you've learned over all these years doing the hardest thing to do in team sports.

It's Michael Conforto's time, already. Yes, it's too early. Yes, he's only 33 years old. Yes, I'm 37, so I feel hopelessly old writing this, and maybe you feel hopelessly old reading it. But that's the game now. Everyone throws 100 and everyone has a fourth pitch (a fourth! Like 10 minutes ago, they didn't all even have three!). Being 33 means it's time to start paying back Father Time for once having let you defy the laws of physics by, you know, hitting those pitches 400-plus feet, without major tradeoffs.

Really, of course, Conforto started his repayment last year, when he hit a measly .199/.305/.333 for the Dodgers and practically fell out of the league. He's always been a good and fairly balanced hitter, but last year—despite still having pretty darn good bat speed and showing excellent plate discipline, in terms of swinging at strikes but laying off non-strikes—he became a fairly one-dimensional one, and a bad one.

Try explaining this, then: Conforto has given up 1.3 MPH of bat speed this season, plunging from markedly above-average to barely so. He's swinging at more pitches outside the zone than he did last year, and whiffing more often than he did last year. But he's also hitting .232/.326/.473. He is, once again, a robust left-handed bat, and he's come up with a bunch of huge hits for the Cubs. That only works if you're very, very smart—very willing to adapt, and to change your plan to achieve what's required of you. Let's talk about how Conforto, specifically, has achieved it.

Changes like this are built from the ground up, at least metaphorically. They start when you dig in in the box, and they accelerate with every preparatory breath and movement and they really accelerate once you start your load and unleash your swing. So, first, we need to look into what Conforto's looking for. Even several months ago, that was impossible, but now, it's not. Earlier this season, Statcast released new swing timing data, which lends us insight into how a hitter is timing and aiming their swing. How Conforto is timing and aiming his has changed this year.

One way we can see what a hitter is planning at the plate is by seeing how often they're late on the fastball. Conforto has been late on heaters markedly less often this season than he was last year. That means he's sitting on that velocity band. Relatedly, he's also centering the ball on his barrel better, and specifically getting tied up less often. The ball doesn't run in onto the label of his bat as much as it did in the past.

Note, though, that Conforto has also been underneath fastballs more this year than last. That's the unmistakable evidence of Father Time getting his installments. You can time yourself to the heater and swing with conviction, but when you lose that little bit of bat speed, you end up underneath the ball even when you're ostensibly on time.

All of that is ok, because here's the thing: timing himself to pull the fastball isn't only about hitting the fastball. Conforto's been early more often against breaking stuff, which is just what you'd expect. But there are two mitigating factors that ameliorate the problems he should be experiencing because of that earliness. First, he's not always sitting on the fastball. As we just saw, he's never late on the heater. Occasionally, though, he knows to hunt a breaking pitch, so there's a bifurcation between the swings on which he's fooled on the breaking ball and the ones on which he guessed right. It's a more pronounced bifurcation than in the past, and it's allowed him to be more productive.

The second mitigating factor is that Conforto's swing is on plane with the breaking ball more consistently this year. He's actually whiffing more on those pitches than he did in 2025, but until you get to two strikes, a whiff is just a strike. Last season, Conforto was often rolling over breaking stuff and making contact with it, but only weakly, and on the ground. This year, as you can see in the right-hand image above, he's swinging over the top of breaking pitches much less often, and clipping the bottom half of the ball much more frequently. All of that is good news.

It's easy to see that Conforto is hitting the ball in the air more this year (65.9% of his batted balls, up from 58.0%) and that he's pulling it more (46.4%, up from 38.0%). From that information, you'd assume he's pulling it in the air more often, specifically, and you'd be very right (29.7% of his batted balls, nearly doubling last year's 16.0%). But to understand how he's achieved that, we have to know the above. We also have to know the below.

Conforto's swing hasn't dramatically changed this year. In fact, the movements are all virtually identical to what they were a year ago, except that he's that little bit less explosive and less aggressive in throwing his weight into the swing. Mostly, the changes in where the ball is going and on what trajectory all come from timing his swing differently. To understand that, check out the first moment at which his swing began to work uphill through the ball in each season. There's very, very little difference to observe—just that his toros stays back slightly better and his arms are slightly more extended this season.

Now, here's where his swing finished at contact in each season.

Despite the lower bat speed, as you can see, his arms are more extended this season; his bat is working slightly more steeply uphill; and his barrel is oriented toward the pull field. These are composite images across pitch types, so we know there's more nuance than meets the eye, but Conforto is going and getting the ball this season. Locking in more often for the fastball means catching that pitch out front more, and when he gets a breaking or offspeed pitch, he'll usually pull that, too. Compared to last season, his swing is a bit flatter, especially late in its arc, and that works in his favor; it keeps his barrel lined up with pitches that would have dipped underneath it last year.

Mechanically, not much is different. Even the alterations in body position at key points in the swing have to do mostly with timing. But timing, in hitting, is everything, and timing is a trick you can learn while borrowing those great gifts from Father Time, so that you can keep tinkering with it even as you're forced to pay him back. Conforto's contact point has moved more than four inches farther in front of his body, as a result of changes in what he's looking for and how he times his swing. Swinging slower but catching the ball farther out front constitutes a pretty complete reinvention for a hitter. It's a testament to Conforto's talent and to his work ethic that he's made this one work, using almost nothing but experience and an understanding of timing honed by an entire lifetime in the batter's box. The Cubs, who would be far worse off without his fits-and-starts heroics, have to be delighted with the way he's repaid their investment, too.