Stance Shifters

Over the course of a 162-game season, many casual fans may be surprised by how much a hitter might adjust their stance and setup. Often, the assumption is that once any athlete reaches the pinnacle of their sport, there is resistance to change, particularly mid-season, and any major mechanical changes are reserved for the off-season. But it turns out hitters are constantly tinkering with parts of their stance, particularly when looking to find some form.

Now with Statcast’s batting stance visual, we can track how often hitters change over the course of the season. For those unfamiliar with the leaderboard, it tracks ‘Depth in Box’, ‘Distance off Plate’, ‘Distance between Feet’, and ‘Stance Angle’. For example, two extremes for comparison would be Ozzie Albies and Randy Arozarena. Albies, from the left side, is the deepest in the box league-wide, has the second most open stance angle, and one of the widest in terms of feet distance. Arozarena, by contrast, is one of the furthest up in the box, with a very closed stance and feet close together.

In terms of use from a fantasy perspective, I wanted to see if there is any correlation between constant tinkering with a stance and improved performance, or maybe the opposite, and whether there are negative implications. Are shifts in one of these metrics in particular more common and more likely to indicate improvement?

I took the stances from each month of the season and the standard deviation of each metric over their monthly values, giving four variance scores per player. Because inches and degrees aren’t directly comparable, I standardized each one into a z-score, where 0 is the league-average amount of movement for that metric and 1 is one standard deviation above. The composite tinkering score is the average of those four z-scores. Jazz Chisholm at 2.06 moved roughly two standard deviations more than average across the board. Freddie Freeman at -0.92 below average effectively didn’t shift his stance at all all year.

In the chart below, I measured the y-axis off of the difference between first-half xwOBA and second-half xwOBA, with improvers across the year being above zero and decliners below zero. The x-axis is the tinkering composite score, with the average being zero. So the further right on the chart, the more the hitter shifted their setup across the season. The tinkering score is the standard deviation of the raw monthly values, not the month-to-month deltas. It captures how spread out a category was over the full season.

Of course, most of these hitters change multiple aspects of their positioning across the season, but I added tabs to track the primary stance metric that was tinkered with across the season. The dots are colored by how this movement occurred; a directional tinkerer moved the same way every month. Manny Machado closed his stance angle a few more degrees each month from April through September. An oscillator bounced back and forth, widening one month, narrowing the next, for example. More to come on those two movement categories later.

When looking at the top 10 who changed their stance the most, the results are split almost down the middle: five improved in the second half, four declined, and Giménez was essentially flat. The two names at the top stand out in terms of regression in output.

Pete Crow-Armstrong’s narrowed setup is a continuation of last year’s approach that he has held all season that is skewing the results. This, along with his hand placement, has been well-documented as a mechanical shift driving success. His season-average foot separation dropped from 28.7 inches in 2025 to 23.4 in 2026, and this year pushed it from 33.2 inches in April down to 18.0 by June. All the while, his OPS went from .768 to .945 across the same window, and he looks set to win the NL MVP as a result.

The other notable name who has regressed not only from 2025 but throughout 2026 is Chisholm, despite tinkering more than any other bat this season, and two times more than the average.

Across 292 qualified hitters, 72% primarily adjusted their angle across the year, with closing the stance most common. Foot separation was a distant second. Depth was rare. Plate distance almost nobody touched. There is no correlation between which of the four measures changed and increased offensive output. But what does drive improvement, and could be a potential indicator for future success, is the direction of their movement.

Directional Movers

The dots in the chart are colored to differentiate between directional, one-way movers and oscillators, who move around inconsistently, not conforming to one direction. This is important because the data indicates that those committing to a shift and moving in one consistent direction have much more staying power than those who are perhaps trying to do too much going back and forth between options.

So oscillators declined more than twice as much, or put the other way, directional movers declined 55% less. The raw xwOBA gap is 11 points.

Again, the top two, Chisholm and Crow-Armstrong, were the biggest shifters. PCA, while he has dropped off, perhaps expectedly considering his start, has fully committed to his narrower stance. Chisholm has not been so lucky and, in a contract year, has not been able to find the answer, despite moving nearly 12 inches shallower in the box from the beginning of the season. As you can see from his stance in April on the left and in August on the right.

However, the rest of the group shows how committing to a change can pay dividends. The rest of the top directional movers were all able to improve the xwOBA in the second half, including some pretty notable names that had a lot of noise surrounding them in the fantasy community. I will write a second piece going into some specific names in more detail. The remaining eight all improved in the second half. But some were not as persistent in how they shifted their stance.

Oscillators

Those who were not able to stick to one stance shift and were inclined to move back and forth between changing an aspect of their positioning are the oscillator group. Generally, this group was much less likely to improve their performance, and if they did, gains were often marginal or below the average to even be considered a stance shifter. Among oscillators, 73% declined in the second half compared to 53% of directional movers. Perhaps the most high-profile example would be the struggling Vladimir Guerrero Jr.; he was opening and closing his stance month to month. Guerrero Jr.’s angle went -13.4° in April, opened to -8.2° in May, -7.2° in June, then reversed back to -8.7°, -10.4°, -13.5° by September, landing within a tenth of a degree of where he started. His xwOBA dropped .045 across the same window. And that pattern held across the group: 40% of oscillators posted moderate second-half declines, nearly double the 22% rate for directional movers.

The trend seems to be that if you are going to adjust your plate setup in order to find some form, pick a direction and stay with it. While success is never guaranteed, you seem to place yourself in a better position. From a fantasy angle, tracking these shifts could be useful: do hitters have a plan or vision at the plate for how to improve, and are they committed to that plan?