My Experience With Andres Torres

I am frequently asked about my experience working with higher-level hitters and, more recently, my experience working with Andres Torres. As a result, I recently put this essay together to explain our history.

Getting to Know Andres

I have known and worked with Andres Torres since the Spring of 2008. He has called me to talk hitting 30 or so times since we first met. Most recently, we talked in person in August 2010 when the Giants were in St. Louis.[1]
     Andres first called me in late May of 2008, a few weeks into his AAA season with the Cubs. I'm not sure exactly when or why the lightbulb went off, but at some point prior to then he realized that what he was doing at the plate -- which was trying to be another Ichiro and slapping the ball into the ground and trying to beat out the throw -- wasn't working at the major league level.
     He had to try something different.
     In four seasons, Andres struggled to hit better than .210 at the major league level. He knew that he was going to be out of baseball if he didn't figure out how to improve his hitting. As a result, he started to learn everything he could about hitting and began studying the swings of the best players in the game.
     As part of that process, Andres decided that one thing he needed to understand was what Albert Pujols did and why. That was logical, since Pujols is one of the best all-around hitters in baseball. While doing that research, Andres came across my photos of Albert Pujols and, in particular, one of my flipbook analyses of the swing of Albert Pujols.
     After studying my Pujols flipbook in depth, Andres called me to discuss some of the things I said in it. He was a bit confused because while he could see that my observations about what Pujols was doing seemed to be correct -- all he had to do was look at the pictures -- they contradicted pretty much everything he had been taught about hitting up to that point.[2]
     We started talking about how Albert Pujols actually swings the bat -- and how that is different than what most people teach -- and, more importantly, what Pujols does when, why, and how. Andres then started working to incorporate those rotational hitting concepts -- and especially the concept of connection -- into his swing early on during his 2008 season with the Cubs' AAA affiliate.[3]
     By the time Andres got into winter ball in 2008, he had largely transformed both his approach and his swing. He wasn't trying to slap or throw his hands at the ball any more. Instead, he was trying to stay connected, drive the ball, and hit it hard. That is because the harder you hit the ball, the harder it is to make a play on it and the farther it will go if it happens to find a hole. Andres was then able to burn that swing into his muscle memory during his winter ball season in Puerto Rico.

Andres Torres - January 2009

I happened to be passing through Puerto Rico in January 2009 and took a day out of my vacation to meet up with Andres at the municipal stadium in his home town of Aguada. I spent the day videotaping him and then discussing in person a few concepts, like timing and loading, that can be hard to explain over the phone.
     After getting back to St. Louis and reviewing the video I had shot, I suggested a few minor tweaks to his posture. I also sent Andres a copy of my Rotational Hitting 101 DVD and gave him access to my client-only web site and flipbooks.

Andres the Giant

 By the end of January 2009, Andres was probably 90 percent of the way toward having The Swing. He figured the rest out during spring training. In particular, he stopped doing the Alfonso Soriano leg kick that you see in the video clip above and instead changed to a simpler, quieter double tap like Chipper Jones or Carlos Beltran. As a result, Andres hit better than .400 in Spring Training and made the Giants' 2009 squad as a Non-Roster Invite.
    During the 2009 season, Andres and I talked a few times and even met in person when the Giants were in St. Louis. However, based on the video I had seen of his swing earlier on during the season, I saw that his swing was where it needed to be. What's worse, he only got himself thinking if he spent too much time thinking about his mechanics. As a result, my only mechanical suggestion to him was that he try to quiet down his hands a bit at set-up. In fact, and much to to my surprise, I found myself reverting to adages -- that I used to think were worthless -- like, "See the ball. Hit the ball," in an effort to help Andres keep from thinking too much at the plate.[4]

Get a Good Pitch to Hit

Andres and I talked just before Christmas 2009 when he was in between the winter ball seasons on Venezuela and Puerto Rico. I knew that Andres' swing and hitting mechanics were solid by that time and my main message for him had to do with bat speed and selectivity.[5]
     While some people preach bat speed as an end in and of itself, I don't think it's a coincidence that Albert Pujols' bat speed is only 87MPH (versus to 100+ MPH batspeed numbers that some major leaguers put up and that some people say you should strive for). Instead, I think his only average bat speed is part of Albert Pujols' secret to being able to hit for both power and average.
     I also mentioned to Andres that, in all my clips of Albert Pujols, I have very few clips of him swinging at bad pitches.[6] I also reminded Andres that getting a good pitch to hit (e.g. a mistake and/or a strike) was one of Ted Williams' key messages in his book The Science of Hitting.[7]

Looking for More Power

Andres and I last talked in person in August 2010 when the Giants were in St. Louis.
     He's obviously hitting quite well, but wants to get even better. In particular, he wants to hit with more power. While he's happy to be at the top of the NL leader board for doubles, he'd like to see if he can convert some of those doubles into home runs.
     I explained The Move to him and the importance of the back foot to the swing. I also talked about the idea of the Running Start and how that can help you get the bat head moving sooner.
     However, Andres has to be careful with how he tries to work these idea into his swing because he could very well break his swing if he tries to do too much too soon. As with everything in life, you have to strike a balance between constantly trying to get better and not breaking things that aren't broken (or at least working on them at the right time, which is the off-season).

Andres Torres' Swing

Andres Torres is a completely different hitter now than when he first came up.
     When Andres first came up, people saw his speed and his ability to hit from the left side and tried to turn him into Ichiro Suzuki. That meant that from the left side of the plate he would basically slap everything and try to beat out the throw with his speed.

Andres Torres with the Rangers

Even when he went from the right side, Andres still had a very disconnected, push-y, throw the hands at the ball, linear swing that worked in the minor leagues but didn't work against major league pitching.

Andres Torres with the Rangers

Another big part of the problem was that, unlike Ichiro, Andres couldn't pull the inside pitch for power. This was due in large part to his trying to throw his hands at the ball and a resulting problem with disconnection. As a result, pitchers were able to bust him inside and he was unable to handle that pitch well.

Andres Torres - January 2009

Now Andres has developed a swing that is much more compact and connected and that lets him drive the ball and in some cases absolutely destroy it.

Andres Torres - October 2009

Notes

[1] It's kind of pathetic, but one of my would-be competitors is trying to damage my relationship with Andres by telling him and others that I am trying to take complete credit for his success ("So Chris O'Leary is going around telling people that he taught you everything you know. What do you think about that?"). That is both wrong and ridiculous. What I did was help Andres understand...

• What a good swing actually looks like.
• How and why what he was taught was wrong.
• How his swing differed from Albert Pujols'.

Andres then made it happen.

[2] Based on how Andres was able to turn his career around after (finally) learning what good hitters actually do, you have to wonder if poor hitting instruction has something to do with the phenomenon of the AAAA player. 

[3] I knew that Andres actually was moving his swing in the right direction with the Cubs when he went down with an injury to one of his obliques. That was a conditioning and fitness problem that indicated that he was starting to get more power from his core, but that his core wasn't properly conditioned. It made me aware of the need to make sure that people conditioned their cores as they moved to a rotational hitting based swing.

[4] I wasn't at all surprised when I heard that Hensley Meulens and Bruce Bochy of the Giants had banned Andres and a few other Giants from taking extra BP before games because they were concerned that they were getting obsessive about it. I also wasn't surprised when Andres' batting average experienced a significant upward surge (I believe as a result).

[5] You can see some good evidence that he took this lesson to heart on Andres Torres' Fangraphs page. His O-Swing%, which is the percent of the time that he swings at pitches outside of the strike zone, is 24.1%. That is down 5 points, or 20 percent, from the 29.0% number he posted in 2009. Similarly, Andres' Z-Swing% is up and his Swing% is down, two more things that suggest greater selectivity. Andres does indeed seem to be doing a better job of getting a good pitch to hit.

[6] I also mentioned to Andres that, in all of my clips of Pablo Sandoval, I don't have a single clip of Sandoval where he's hitting a strike. Sandoval's willingness to chase pitches out of the strike zone may have something to do with his fall off this year. In fact, if you look at Pablo Sandoval's Fangraphs page, you can see a deterioration in his selectivity numbers. His O-Swing% is up and his Z-Swing% is down significantly.

[7] On one of the days when the Giants were in town, Andres and I were talking hitting when he called Pablo Sandoval over. The three of us then started talking about Albert Pujols' swing and how it's consistent with what Ted Williams talks about in his book The Science of Hitting. What was funny about the conversation was that Sandoval doesn't speak much English and I speak about 10 words of Spanish, but all of us had read Ted Williams' book multiple times and knew all the diagrams in it by heart. With lots of hand-waving and some translating by Andres, the three of us had a half hour conversation about the book and how much good stuff there is in it.