Stance Changers: What Can We Learn

Last Monday, I discussed Fernando Tatis Jr.’s odd season and the possibility that his missing power output is related to a stance change that hasn’t had the intended effect. I noted the natural next question at the end: what other players have made stance changes and what are we seeing from them? We’ll dig into that today.

The reason this is so interesting to me is because so little of what we see in the statistical record can be tied to intention, especially for hitters. Is a hitter pulling the ball more because he set out to pull the ball more, or is it just a thing that is happening (or small sample noise)? Is the increase in fly ball rate deliberate or not?

Stance, however, is entirely in the hitter’s control. You don’t suddenly stand closer to the plate accidentally. Tatis didn’t dramatically close off his stance without some reason behind it. So when we see a hitter has made a change to his stance, there is a reason. It’s a bit like a change in a pitcher’s repertoire. If a pitcher added a new pitch or started using a pitch more (or less) than they used to, we can infer some intentionality behind that. Stance feels like the hitter analog.

For the Tatis article, I acknowledged that the leap from more closed to stance to less pulled contact isn’t a leap I can make confidently. Instead, I leaned on the fact that Tatis made an intentional change and we are seeing a result that doesn’t seem ideal. But maybe there are patterns with other hitters that can help us interpret the impact of stance changes. I am going to continue down that path today – we’ll identify hitters who have made the most extreme stance changes so far this year, look into what changed and see if there are any changes in results.

This is all based on batting stance data from 2025 and 2026 pulled from Baseball Savant’s Batting Stance Leaderboard. I am working off a list of 230 player/handedness combos who had 50+ swings last year and are qualified on that leaderboard this year. By “player/handedness combo” I mean a player and what side of the plate they are swinging from. This matters because a switch hitter has both right-handed and left-handed stance data.

I then looked at the biggest changes in:

• How far the batter stands from the plate
• How deep the batter stands in the box
• How open the batter’s stance is

We are actually only going to talk about the first two today. Not because the third isn’t interesting, but because the biggest changes in how open or closed a stance is belong to Tatis, who I covered last week, and Cole Young, who appears in another category, as well.

Distance from Plate

On the surface, Corbin Carroll is picking up right where he left off, entering play Sunday with a .378 wOBA after posting a .371 last year. But he has shifted his stance 3 inches further from the plate, the largest such change since last year. He is also slightly more closed (3º open rather than 7º), though that is a relatively small change. Under the hood, Carroll is hitting fewer fly balls and more grounders. He is making less hard contact, though he is pulling the ball more. He is being more patient, but he is also making less contact, so both his walk and strikeout rates are up a bit.

The sum of all of that is that Carroll has a very similar wOBA as he did in 2025, but his xwOBA is down from .372 to .349. Obviously .349 is not bad, but it is lower. Basically, his ISO is down from .282 to .242 and his BABIP is up from .299 to .330 and that is balancing out.

So if Carroll’s performance looks different and if the xwOBA gives us some cause to believe the performance is a bit worse, is that related to the stance change? The gif below has a lot going on, but it shows his swing, contact and ISO per pitch heat maps for last year and this year, and I do think it shows something that might be related to the stance.

In all three heat maps, you can see the bright red shift from the middle of the zone towards the inside corner to the left-handed Carroll. It certainly looks like he is getting less plate coverage as a result of moving a bit further off the plate. That said, it looks like Carroll might already be adjusting. In the first half of April, he was another half inch further off the plate vs. where he is today. That may not seem like a lot (ok, that isn’t a lot) but it does seem positive.

From a fantasy perspective, my big takeaway is that Carroll’s change was probably not a positive one, but it hasn’t hurt him too badly yet, and he seems to be adjusting closer to where he was last year. That might just mean that his xwOBA moves closer to his wOBA, but if you were looking at that decreasing xwOBA and wondering where this was headed, I don’t think you have anything to worry about.

At the other end of the spectrum, Cole Young made the biggest shift towards the plate, at 2.8 inches.

Young’s change was actually pretty dramatic. He already stood relatively close to the plate last year. This year he moved his back foot almost right to the edge of the box and opened his stance quite a bit, from 8º open to 37º open. As noted back in the intro, that is also the single largest opening of a stance so far this year. With that significant stance change, he’s seeing much better results. He has increased his fast swing rate and his hard-hit rate, though both are still very much middling. His strike out rate has also jumped, as he is making less contact and chasing more often.

He seems to be making a concerted effort to get into his fastest swing more often while getting out in front of the ball – his pull rate is up, his attack direction (the horizontal angle of the bat at the time of contact) is up (so he is making contact with the bat more angled towards the pull side), and his intercept point is nearly 8 inches further in front of his body (and nearly 3 inches further in front of the plate). And the results for Young have been great. After posting an 80 wRC+ last year, he is up to 114 this year. Tack on a couple of stolen bases and a weak crop of second basemen around him, and you have a nearly $10 player on our player rater.

You could quibble that Young’s gains aren’t from hitting the ball harder (his average EV is barely up, his max EV is down) but his increase in hard-hit rate and EV 90 (from 102.7 to 104.2 mph) show that, even if he isn’t getting harder contact, he is getting more hard contact. He has also significantly increased his Sweet Spot rate, which is showing up in a 25.7% line drive rate.

The real problem for fantasy managers is that the good version of Young we are getting right now is likely a high average (.260-.270), low power (10-12 HR) bat without many steals. Interestingly, 12 HR, 8 SB, .265 average in 2025 was his teammate, J.P. Crawford, who was worth $4 on the player rater. All of which is to say, I think Young has made legitimate changes, I think we are seeing legitimate results, and he still might be a sell high.

Depth in Box

The player who has moved back the furthest in the box is Cam Smith, who is now 6.6 inches deeper in the box than he was last year. It actually doesn’t look like Smith has moved his feet back quite that far – though he has moved his feet back – he appears to be further back in his stance. This may be related to another change in his stance. He did the opposite of what Young did and closed off his stance, going from 10º open to 1º closed.

Despite this adjustment, Smith isn’t seeing any real gains. His wOBA is down to .293 (from .298 last year) and all of his average, on base and slugging are down, as well. He is swinging and missing more often, as well.

But when you dig a little deeper, there are some positive signs. His bat speed is up from 74.5 mph to 77.5 mph and his fast-swing rate is now 76%, fourth highest in MLB. He has become an elite hard-swinger and while that comes with some additional swing and miss, the increase is small (12.6% to 13.7% swinging strike rate) and plenty of hitters have been successful with swinging strike rates in that range. All that hard swinging is leading to loud contact – including a 14.7% barrel rate – which is driving a .350 xwOBA.

The next step for Smith is going to be pulling the ball more. His 30.9% pull rate is 164th out of 178 qualified hitters. Maybe being a little deeper is giving him a little more time to make swing decisions (he is being more selective) and now he needs to find opportunities to be more aggressive and go get the ball a bit earlier. That may not be an easy adjustment to make, which might be a challenge for redraft leagues. But I think Smith is a definite buy low in keeper/dynasty formats like Ottoneu. In redraft, I think you can buy low, but I also understand if you feel the need to move on. You could be waiting a while for everything to click and that may leave you with too short a payoff.

Sal Stewart is another young player in his second taste of MLB and he has moved up in the box, starting out more than 7 inches closer to the pitcher. He’s an interesting case because he is now letting the ball travel more relative to his body, making contact about an inch further back, but his intercept point vs. home plate is almost 8 inches further forward because of where he is in the box.

Jay Jaffe wrote about Stewart over a month ago and what he wrote then is still true. Jaffe did note, “I wouldn’t expect Stewart to maintain such a lofty perch on the Statcast leaderboards,” and that is true, as well. But while Stewart isn’t quite the monster he was in the opening week of the season, he is still doing a lot of the same things well.

One thing to keep in mind is that because Stewart is letting the ball travel more (relative to his body), he is using all fields well, but isn’t pulling the ball much. Stewart hit 7 HR in his first 76 PA this year, and has hit just three more in his last 101. The former is a 50+ HR pace; the latter is an 18 HR pace. The truth may lie somewhere in between, but I’ll take the under on Stewart reaching 30 HR this year. That’s a small nit to pick, but – barring another adjustment to get to more pull power – I would bet on Stewart being more of a 20-25 HR hitter moving forward (so another 14-17 this year).