What goes into the art of hitting? St. Louis Cardinals players share their expertise

One of the most well-understood truths about sports is also one that requires frequent repetition: Hitting a baseball is very hard.

The St. Louis Cardinals have not broken from the offensive gate cleanly at the start of the 2022 season. Entering this weekend’s series in San Francisco, they were below the National League average in home runs, slugging percentage, and walks, and precisely league average in both batting average and on base percentage.

Manager Oliver Marmol attempted to counteract some of the early struggles by shuffling his lineup for Wednesday’s game in Kansas City, moving outfielder Tyler O’Neill from third to sixth and bumping up Nolan Arenado, fresh off being named April’s NL Player of the Month. Those two and debuting rookie Juan Yepez keyed the offense to 10 runs, tied for its largest output of the season, and providing some grist for the change mill.

A team that’s struggling to hit might fruitlessly search for reasons why that’s the case. Even the most trained eyes will search for reliable cues that help identify issues, and then work out from there, building on a knowledge base made of years of dissecting a swing on video, frame by frame.

“It’s just kind of my rhythm out there, the way I step into it, I guess,” O’Neill explained, searching for a description of what he needs to see in himself. “I’m honestly probably more of a feel guy.

“Obviously video helps me identify where I’m at, but when it comes to dissecting myself, I’ve got to do it through reps. I’ve gotta do it through hard work and feel.”

In contrast to O’Neill, centerfielder Harrison Bader described a reliable tell he’s able to spot on video nearly immediately.

“I just look at one thing in the video and see how little my head’s moving,” Bader explained. “A lot of people talk about different hips and this and that, and that’s fine, but I really try to keep it super simple. And the less my head moves, the more relaxed I am, the better I can see the baseball and just simply react and go out there and just play baseball.”

See the ball, hit the ball is about the simplest advice for a batter, and yet it’s a piece that seems to cut through countless hours of preparation and an endless wilderness landscape of swing coaches and hitting instructors. Major league teams invest millions in both coaching and technology that seek to parse the most minute pieces of data and develop reliable, repeatable results at the plate.

And yet, as Bader pointed out, “at the end of the day, it’s a guy 60 feet away chucking a baseball at you. It’s an athletic movement, a physical movement.

“Once it starts, and I watch those videos, I’ll zoom in on one thing, that’s my eyes.”

‘I’m the same way’

Arenado agreed with Bader that head positioning is a primary focal point, but rather than being exclusively about vision, Arenado described a trigger that sets the rest of his body in motion.

“I’m the same way,” he acknowledged. “If I don’t see myself, like, flying forward, it usually means I’m in a good spot, and I like to trust that.”

Arenado, like O’Neill also said that often he simply “feel(s) something” that lets him know he’s on the right track, without being able to precisely identify that something on playback. And for him, vision is something he feels all the way down to his knees.

“Sometimes the pitchers are just good,” Arenado said. “So it’s tough to see them. But there’s times where I feel like the pitcher’s buckling me or something. That’s probably because my posture is not good. Like, I’m diving in this way, so I can’t really pick up the offspeed.”

So Arenado needs to see what he’s seeing, because when he can see, he feels it, and that’s when he knows it feels good.

More remarks from Goldschmidt

Confusing though that may be, there’s a degree of intuitive sense to that explanation, especially as Arenado is lunging forward and dragging his hands through an imaginary strike zone in the clubhouse.

And while he attempted to put voice to his vision, Paul Goldschmidt acknowledged he knows precisely what he’s looking for in his swing on video — and he’s not telling.

When asked to name those tells, he said, “nope,” smiling in a wide and atypically evasive way, clearly considering the possibility that explaining to a reporter how he knows when his swing is off might also reveal to pitchers the proper time to attack.

“Everyone’s a little different,” Goldschmidt offered. “I think the tricky part is, if something’s off, we’re not robots. You can’t just say, well, keep your head still to kind of diagnose and work through it.

“It takes time, and even if you can figure out what’s wrong with your swing, it still takes time to create a new habit or break an old one.”

‘I felt horrible in there’

Time runs against the rhythms of a baseball season, which moves quickly even as it drags out across the months. Time works against a team like the Cardinals, who have concerns about wasting solid pitching and exceptional defense while they try to scrape together enough runs to compete. Time spent in the video room is valuable, but only if a player knows why the time is being spent.

“There’s a lot of times guys get hits, they’re like man, I felt horrible in there,” Goldschmidt admitted. “And maybe they don’t say to y’all, but I think that’s that’s important to remember.

“You don’t have to have a perfect swing to get a hit and it’s not very often that guys are really locked in. You think it’s all the time, and it’s really just not that.”

It only has to be often enough.