What's Broken in Pete Crow-Armstrong's Swing, and How to Fix It

When Pete Crow-Armstrong struggles, it's tempting to assume that swinging too much is to blame. Swinging too much is the fundamental vulnerability in his game—his biggest weakness. It's why he runs lowish on-base percentages even when relatively hot and why he's been a scar in the middle of the lineup card for the last 10 days (.091/.118/.121 in August) and a low-key problem for much longer than that (two walks in the last 30 days, .285 OBP since June 1).

Here's the thing: during his current slump, Crow-Armstrong is actually swinging less than he has at any time since he first unlocked his talent in full this spring.

It sure looks like Crow-Armstrong is aware of the need to swing a bit less, and like he's trying. A bit of newfound patience (relatively speaking) worked like a charm back in April; it launched him on the torrid stretch that had so many talking seriously about his MVP candidacy. This time, though, he's just plunging to new lows in terms of production, just as he reduces his swing rate.

One reading of that data set might be: Crow-Armstrong has to get back to being himself at the plate. Maybe he just needs to cut it loose and swing at everything, after all. Is it just time to show the donkey the snake?

In a word: no. Crow-Armstrong's problem isn't confidence or approach, except in the same way that it has always been (somewhat) the latter. He's in trouble because of a mechanical flaw that he can't seem to shake.

Back in the first half of July, I spoke to Crow-Armstrong about his superb season and the unexpected power binge he'd been on for (by then) almost three months. However, we also talked about an unfortunate bit of grit in the well-built machine of his swing: a creeping tendency to overstride. That created two main problems for him:

1. He was too often late on the fastball, trying but failing to work around a longer front side.
2. Because he could sense that timing problem, he was more prone to chasing spin and offspeed stuff—mostly subconsciously, he was trying to hit what he could be on time for, which wasn't often the thing he really wanted to hit.

It probably won't shock you, then, to read that as Crow-Armstrong sinks into a slump, he's overstriding again (or still; he only very briefly corrected the problem in the middle of last month). Here's what his stance and stride looked like in May, when he was at the peak of his powers.

Lately, though, he's less spread-out in the box. That change might have been a conscious one, trying to stay balanced and athletic even as the grind of a long season starts to leaden his legs. Unfortunately, he's not managing that more upright, compact starting point well; he's striding too far.

Perhaps finding that the stride length is difficult to correct, Crow-Armstrong is getting even more aggressive with his swing. His solution to the problem of a longer swing (not as Statcast measures it, but in the way hitters actually feel and must plan the movement) is to use the extra energy his stride creates to swing faster, and (since a flatter bat path was also a symptom he mentioned last month, when the stride is too long) to exaggerate the tilt in his stroke right from the beginning.

That's not an entirely unreasonable attempt at problem-solving. No less a luminary than Branch Rickey believed "the overstriding hitter cannot be corrected," and while that's an outdated notion 80 years after Rickey first said it, there's a kernel of truth to it. Fixing this particular mechanical issue within a season, absent a prolonged reset (think a full series on the bench, as the team has done with Miguel Amaya, Seiya Suzuki and Matt Shaw at various points over the last two years, or a sojourn to Iowa, as the team has done with both Shaw and Crow-Armstrong himself), is hard to do. Crow-Armstrong put lots of early work into trying, but it doesn't seem to have worked. Finding an alternative—using his freakish athleticism to generate his best bat speed ever, since the start of July—is creative, and even admirable.

Alas, it comes with its own problems, and it doesn't quite solve the basic ones it's meant to address. It ameliorates them, a bit, but it doesn't eliminate them. For instance, no amount of bat speed can make up for not feeling like you can get to that heater, and the problem with the overstrider is that they feel that extra length and can't always get started on time. Here are the rates at which Crow-Armstrong has swung at fastballs (four-seamers, sinkers and cutters); his whiff rate on those swings; and his average contact point, relative to his own body on those swings, by month.

When Crow-Armstrong is swinging at fewer than half of the fastballs he sees, something is wrong. Yes, he's actually making more contact, and the idea that he's late on those swings is belied by the fact that he's catching the ball farther out in front. But the real message of these data is: Crow-Armstrong is mostly on time for the fastball, but only when he gets started early enough to swing at all. He's not doing that often enough, given who he is and how his game works.

That's the problem a faster bat can't solve. It can get you to the ball, even the heater, and do it out in front, but it can't give you the quicker trigger you lost when you fell into the habit of the overstride. Now, here's the problem the faster bat actually introduces, against heaters: Crow-Armstrong is hitting the top of the fastball a lot.

This often shows up looking like nothing more than bad luck. Here's a line drive, caught by the second baseman, where you can tell yourself a story about Crow-Armstrong simply being snakebitten.

There is a bit of luck in this mix, of course. But that out is also a factor of Crow-Armstrong's change in mechanics and timing. Notice, early in that swing, that exaggerated tilt he's putting on the bat path, trying to make up for the way the longer stride tends to flatten him out. Against fastballs, though, to get there on time, he has to accelerate the barrel late in his swing, which means flattening out, anyway. His top hand takes over and he rolls over, the way you're probably more accustomed to seeing hitters do on soft stuff. Here's another example, from this weekend.

That's another hard-hit ball, but it's also another playable ball for the second baseman on a heater in the middle of the zone. When Crow-Armstrong was right, he crushed that pitch in the air. Right now, his attempts to work around a mechanical problem have him hitting it low and right at the defense.

Breaking balls and offspeed offerings are a different story, but within the same anthology. Here's the same chart I gave above, but for his approach against those softer pitches by month. I've added one extra column.

Aha! Ok, several things. First of all, you won't find many good hitters who swing more on soft stuff than on fastballs, and you won't find many hitters of any kind who whiff less on soft stuff than on heaters, but that's how Crow-Armstrong usually works. This month, though, while his whiff rate on fastballs has come down, he's missing much more often against everything else. There's no clear contact point problem here, but there's an interesting question afoot. Look at that new column at the far right. Crow-Armstrong's bat has been faster even against fastballs the last two months, but the magnitude of his increase is much larger against breaking stuff. That, itself, is interesting. That he's swinging much faster but making contact deeper this month is even more so. 

Crow-Armstrong is actually making later swing decisions against breaking balls and offspeed stuff, lately. He's just not making materially better ones, because he's more than a small adjustment away from chaining together enough good takes to cash them in for walks, and he's not in a position to profit much from getting ahead in counts while he's so off, mechanically. He's waiting longer, then swinging faster, and when his eyes and hands see spin, he's doing the opposite of what he's been doing on fastballs. Here's an example.

That's the kind of pitch he often hammered earlier this year; he'd put a cousin of that same low, swooping swing on the ball and yank it on a high arc into the right-field seats. Right now, though, there are a couple of problems. First, that longer stride puts him a bit off-balance. It's harder for him to get down through that ball while maintaining barrel control. He's swinging faster, which only exacerbates the trouble, because more speed means less accuracy—at least when your arms are this extended and your legs are locked into place by the length of that stride.

Second, instead of that top-hand takeover we see on fastballs, Crow-Armstrong keeps the bottom hand in control and retains that exaggerated tilt throughout his swing on soft stuff lately. That's the right way to get the timing right on those pitches, but it's putting him below the ball a lot. His launch angle against fastballs is substantially down from his season average since the All-Star break; his launch angle against everything else is substantially up. That's why he's producing more low-value contact, in addition to swinging and missing more often on non-heaters.

How Crow-Armstrong fixes any of this is, of course, the important question. The answer likely lies in getting rid of that early, exaggerated bat tilt, and giving in to a bit more flatness. He could try widening his stance anew, to force his body to cut down the stride that is causing all of these downstream problems, but since he was aware of that stride issue five weeks ago, we can safely assume that he's already considered that. It's more likely that he and the team will continue to try anything that incrementally reduces that stride length and gets his swing started earlier with more consistency. Mainly, he needs to feel good about his ability to attack the fastball again. Everything else flows from there. His first half might have set an unreasonable standard for his second, but he can still be a much more dangerous hitter over the final seven weeks—if he has the physical and mental stamina to keep making good adjustments and keep solving problems.