Imagine, if you will, the most feared slugger in recent baseball history taking pointers from the most accomplished slugger in all of baseball history.
Well, you can turn off your imagination now. That’s something that’s about to happen in Miami in real life, and it could mean great things for one Giancarlo Stanton.
Last Friday, the Marlins named all-time home run leader Barry Bonds their new hitting coach. It’s the former Pittsburgh Pirate and San Francisco Giant’s first coaching gig, and it looks like a tough one. He’s now in charge of a young lineup that ranked 14th in the National League in runs in 2015.
But, hey, at least said offense has Stanton, otherwise known as “the most feared slugger in recent baseball history” that we were talking about earlier.
Though Bonds said, via Joe Frisaro of MLB.com, that he’s looking forward to getting “in the trenches” with all of Miami’s hitters, his partnership with Miami’s star right fielder is the one that has everyone excited. That includes Stanton himself, who called Bonds a “genius” in an interview with TMZ Sports.
That about says it. We can debate how many of Bonds’ 762 career home runs came from performance-enhancing drugs, but it’s impossible to be unimpressed by his career .444 OBP or career 1.051 OPS. And even with the PED cloud, the mind fairly boggles at what Bonds did between 2001 and 2004.
Of course, being great at hitting and being great at coaching hitting are not the same thing. In fact, Neil Paine of FiveThirtyEight.com found there’s no reason to believe that Bonds’ track record will make him an especially great hitting coach. This according to the math.
However, Bonds isn’t entirely green as a hitting coach. He worked one-on-one with Alex Rodriguez and Dexter Fowler last winter, and they both had strong seasons in 2015. Bonds also drew rave reviews from Giants players when he was a special instructor at their spring training in 2014. Brandon Crawford was especially complimentary, and he’s turned into a dangerous hitter in two seasons since.
So, no. The Marlins aren’t going out on a limb with their hiring of Bonds. He should be able to make a difference.
If he plays his cards right, that could include nudging Stanton into the next level of excellence.
If Bonds is going to help Stanton, the first thing he needs to understand is where his help isn’t needed.
Stanton definitely has power figured out. He’s a 6’6″ and 240-pound monster of a man, and he’s hit like one his entire career. Since 2010, he leads the National League in home runs despite significant time missed with injuries. He also leads his fellow NL’ers in isolated power and overall hard-hit rate.
Like any good slugger should, Stanton also takes his walks. He’s consistently posted above-average walk rates, and he’s been able to keep his chase rates reasonably low in each of the past three seasons.
But by now, everyone knows of Stanton’s fundamental flaw. He strikes out a ton, consistently posting strikeout rates around 30 percent. He owns a .270 career average and a .362 career OBP even despite that, but there’s no question that his whiff habit is the big thing in his way of being a truly great hitter. He’s pretty awesome, sure, but he’d be even awesomer if he put more balls in play.
Fortunately for him, this is an area where Bonds knows a thing or two.
Though Bonds is best known for his history-making power and laser-precise batting eye, he was also quite good at making contact. He wasn’t so much a great power hitter as he was a great hitter with lots (and lots and lots and lots, etc.) of power.
Mind you, Bonds did have one advantage that Stanton can’t possibly have. At 6’6″, Stanton has a naturally bigger strike zone to cover than the 6’1″ Bonds ever had to deal with. Unless Stanton can get Hank Pym to whip up some custom-made shrinking particles, there’s nothing to be done about that.
Also, there’s a matter of swings.
With consistently perfect mechanics and impossibly quick wrists, Bonds had a short and compact swing that confounded even physics experts. He could let the ball get deep into the hitting zone, giving him more time to read the path of each pitch. When you can do that, you’re not going to be swinging and missing all that often.
Stanton’s swing is different. It’s a stretch to call it a “long” swing, but one wouldn’t call it “short” or “compact” either.
For example, Bryan Cole of Beyond the Box Score used Zepp data to find that Stanton’s swing features inferior hand speed and overall bat speed than Mike Trout’s swing. Elsewhere, Ryan Parker of Baseball Prospectus has argued that Stanton’s swing is more a picture of athletic perfection than it is of mechanical perfection.
Despite that, Parker says he wouldn’t change Stanton’s swing. As it happens, Bonds also doesn’t seem to be in a rush to impose any drastic changes on Stanton.
“I don’t need to tell Stanton much. He’s a great hitter,” said Bonds last week, via Craig Davis of the Sun Sentinel. “All I need to do is tweak a couple little things here and there and keep him motivated to keep moving.”
So, then. No size, and no swing. That leaves just one thing that Bonds can impart on Stanton to help him cut down on his whiffs.
In a word: wisdom.
Bonds was more than a work of art, both physically and mechanically, when he was at the plate. If we take it from former Giants teammate F.P. Santangelo, he was also just plain smarter than most pitchers:
This is a difficult point to illustrate, but it should ring true to anyone who watched Bonds hit, particularly when he was nigh impossible to get out between 2001 and 2004. He never looked surprised by anything that came his way.
Of course, this sounds like a skill that would be difficult to pass on to others. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done, and Bonds has shown a willingness to at least try with his hitting pupils.
Take Fowler, for example. Hall of Fame journalist Peter Gammons wrote a feature at GammonsDaily.com on Fowler’s work with Bonds, which included conversations about pitchers and how to read them:
“It’s the thought process that is so helpful, but it has to be what I see in each pitcher,” Fowler said. “Barry talks to me about what to look for, but he always says, ‘Watch the games, study the pitchers for yourself.’” Which is similar to the help Greg Maddux always gave fellow pitchers, like Derek Lowe and Clayton Kershaw. Lowe, in fact, once said “my career took its best turn when Maddux taught me how to watch games.”
It’s a safe guess that Stanton already does plenty of his own studying. All hitters do to some degree or another. But it’s also a safe guess that Bonds could change how Stanton studies for the better, and that it could make him more than just an immense physical threat in the batter’s box.
And it’s not hard to see where this could benefit Stanton the most.
For his career, Stanton owns a 1.237 OPS when he’s ahead in the count. When he’s behind in the count, his OPS drops all the way to .589. That’s not a struggle that’s exclusive to him, to be sure, but David Schoenfield of ESPN.com noted that it has a specific root cause. Where Stanton remains a dangerous fastball hitter even when he’s behind in the count, he gets killed by anything off-speed.
If Bonds can teach Stanton how to anticipate when those pitches are coming, he could find himself becoming less of an automatic out against them. If that happens, the game’s most feared slugger will suddenly have another layer of danger.
That’s not a notion that the opposition wants to consider. With pretty good defense and baserunning talents to go with his thunderous bat and strong eye, a healthy Stanton is an elite player as is. If Bonds has the key to improving his contact habit, he’ll only become more elite.
Also, the Marlins will be owed some credit. They don’t have many bright ideas, but nobody should be surprised if hiring one of baseball’s most legendary hitters to teach hitting is an exception.
Stats courtesy of Baseball-Reference.com and FanGraphs unless otherwise noted/linked.
Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com