How baseball teams are rethinking batting practice

Go back a decade, maybe a decade-and-a-half, and pick a game. Any will do, whether it’s the World Series, a Division I college contest or a minor league doubleheader in some far-flung town, the yellowing field sandwiched between a highway and endless farmland. Baseball is baseball because of certain things, among them the ritual of most hitters taking coach-thrown batting practice before first pitch.

You have watched it. You have heard the thwacks on repeat, spaced out in perfect intervals. Perhaps you have shuffled through the bleachers and caught a ball.

But in recent years, in the majors, minors and college, coaches and front offices are giving traditional batting practice a hard look. The sport’s technology boom — radar systems in every ballpark, cameras that track a curveball’s revolutions, sensors that measure bat speed — has yielded machines that spit out high-spin, high-velocity fastballs or your favorite pitcher’s favorite breaking pitch. On the field and in the batting cage, many players seek individualized preparation, matching their strengths and weaknesses to whomever they are facing that night. There are new ways to bridge the gap between practice and the harebrained task of hitting a 98-mph fastball that moves like a Wiffle ball. This is how rituals die.

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To be clear, most teams at all levels still have coaches throw batting practice from behind an L screen on the field. Hitters like to see pitches against the batter’s eye, the action of a human’s arm and the flight of the ball to assess their timing. By moving the batting practice pitcher in front of the mound, they manipulate time and space, trying to better mimic game speed. Yet take how the St. Louis Cardinals readied for a matchup with the Washington Nationals and starter Josiah Gray in mid-June.

After their infielders took groundballs, they wheeled a pitching machine to the mound and plugged in the characteristics of Gray’s slider, a plus pitch he throws about 28 percent of the time. For close to an hour, the Cardinals cycled through the batter’s box, spraying sliders around Nationals Park or watching how one looked when it bounced in the dirt. A coach never threw a ball.

“You’re seeing less and less guys actually hit regular coach BP on the field,” Cardinals Manager Oliver Marmol said, noting his team’s batting practice methods depend on the opponent. “Just because the game is very different than hitting a 50-mile-an-hour fastball from a middle-aged man.”

As he walked into the University of Maryland’s stadium, taking one look and then a double take at the home team’s batting practice, a Nebraska player asked a question on behalf of everyone: “What the f--- are they doing?”

Matt Swope, then the Terrapins’ hitting coach, now their head coach as of last month, has heard this before. He considers himself a disrupter when it comes to training and hitting. He is unapologetic about it. So for the past few seasons, he has created an on-field batting practice that tests his players mentally and drills their swing decisions. That’s what Nebraska’s players and staff saw when they arrived in College Park in late May.

The crux of Swope’s BP is a V-Flex screen he puts in front of an L screen and throws each pitch through. The circular screen has two tabs near the top that start to form the V. But because the letter is not fully formed, the hitters have to complete it with their imaginations while choosing whether to swing. If the pitch is traveling in the imagined V, it is almost certainly a strike. (Swope has measured this out with excruciating care.) And if the pitch is outside the imagined V, it will be a ball that the hitter should lay off.

The L screen that Swope throws behind, placed in front of the mound, has its bottom half covered with a black tarp. That’s to focus the hitter’s attention on the pitcher’s release point instead of anything happening below his waist.

“With the V-Flex, I am adding in an extra constraint to the brain, so I’m trying to keep them engaged and excited,” Swope explained. “If they have to work harder to complete the V in their head and assess if the pitch is a ball or strike, they are seeing space better and everything will feel a bit easier in the game. We do skill acquisition on the side, bunting and whatnot. And inside I use little foam balls for them to hit and see high-spin breaking pitches over and over. But this is how we maximize time on the field, at home and on the road. It’s mental reps.”

Swope’s thoughts on traditional batting practice, then?

“I think for years, it’s largely been coaches checking a box,” he said, speaking a month before the Terrapins finished their season with one of the best offenses in the country (third in OPS, fourth in home runs and fourth in walks). “Maybe to feel like they are doing something. But when it comes to preparation, from a mental standpoint, BP is probably more eyewash than anything.”

Tanner Stokey is the director of hitting at Driveline, a performance facility in Kent, Wash., that trains players with a focus on data and technology. And like Swope, he sees batting practice as a chance for innovation. His pie-in-the-sky idea: for a team to employ a whole staff of independent league pitchers and minor league dropouts, lefties and righties, to throw against hitters based on who most resembles that night’s starter. He knows most players would refuse to step in against live pitching before games. He knows most teams wouldn’t spend the money necessary to make this happen.

And he knows there would be significant risks, such as a no-name pitcher losing a fastball that nails a star hitter in the hand.

“I would have to hide from the [general manager] for a week,” Stokey said with a laugh. “But in all seriousness, one of the hardest things about baseball is that the training generally isn’t game like. It’s a really hard gap to bridge. We and teams do so much in the cage so hitters can see pitches that look even close to what they might see at 7:05. That BP time before the game, though, that’s when you’re looking into the batter’s eye, when you want to hone your timing on the field.

“Facing actual pitchers, a guy sequencing pitches, surprising you a little, would be the best prep a hitter could get. I’d just love to see a veteran’s reaction to me trying to convince him.”

Eyewash, in baseball terms, is code for fake hustle, for doing something for the sake of being seen doing it, not because it’s conducive to winning or actually improving. And while not everyone agrees with Swope — something he is used to by now — he and Stokey are not alone in how they view on-field, pregame batting practice in its basic sense, thrown by coaches without any wrinkles.

This whole discussion makes a somewhat arbitrary distinction among batting practice (typically within four hours of first pitch), early work (more individualized on-field training) and cage sessions (self-explanatory). The Nationals, for example, sometimes will use a machine on the field during early work, especially with their younger hitters. But when it comes time for pregame batting practice, an assortment of coaches serve up pitches from behind an L screen, same as it ever was.

The Detroit Tigers, by contrast, regularly use a machine during on-field batting practice. The Cardinals do every once in a while. The Harrisburg Senators, the Nationals’ Class AA affiliate, recently took pregame BP with a machine. The Texas Rangers are experimenting with their minor league affiliates, too, having each team travel with a pair of pitching machines. In mid-April, the Hickory Crawdads, Texas’s high Class A affiliate, set up two machines on the road in Wilmington, Del. They switched between the two during batting practice, trying to simulate the arm angles they would see from a left-handed starter. Their manager, Chad Comer, reported that his arm is not nearly as sore as it was in past years.

“It’s just the evolution of the game,” Comer said. “There are still so many things that have been part of this game and held true for a long time. But there are some things that have come along and taken it to another level. And one of them is more creative and concerted hitting preparation.”

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As for the players, the ones who have to actually step in the box each night, here’s a sampling of perspectives from around the majors:

Marcus Semien, 32, infielder for the Rangers: “There’s a lot more machines being used. We were just talking about the high velocity in the game. Batting practice is not that. Batting practice is kind of a comfortable setting: Get your swings, get your confidence. For me, I like to hit on the first day of the series, just to get the backdrop. We play everywhere now. We don’t just play in the AL and maybe one other division in the NL. We play everywhere, so you want to make sure you get used to your sights. But the other two days or three days of the series, make sure your body is right, get your work in the cage.”

Corey Dickerson, 34, outfielder for the Nationals: “A lot of people feel obligated to do it on the field, but it can really just turn into a home run-hitting contest. You try to muscle this meatball pitch out of the stadium, and you develop this uppercut swing that really isn’t good when 98 [mph] is coming at you in the game a couple hours later. I’ve been around a few recent MVPs — Shohei Ohtani, Mike Trout, Bryce [Harper] and Paul Goldschmidt — and they rarely hit BP on the field. They had much more specific routines. What’s that say?”

Luis Arraez, 26, second baseman for the Miami Marlins: “I like hitting BP on the field. It helps with my rhythm and lets me see where the ball lands.”

Arraez, an all-star, was hitting .383 at the break. A couple of weeks earlier, his average had spiked to .402. He is better than any player on the planet at making contact — and, as a result, collecting hits. His routine begins well before he heads to the ballpark, with a tee at home or in his hotel room on the road. Arraez moves the tee all over — up, down, inside, outside — then takes dry cuts as if an imaginary ball is sitting atop it. He visualizes which pitches he wants to line to specific parts of the outfield grass. The routine amounts to hundreds of swings.

Once he’s at the stadium, Arraez’s work is more traditional. In the cage, he takes front flips from coaches, though he said he prefers his tee because he can be super particular about the location of each pitch. Then Arraez takes coach-pitch batting practice in the stadium, liking the arm action, feeling as if this ritual will never go away.

“We play in the ballpark, we hit in the ballpark against real people, so we take batting practice against real people in the ballpark, too,” he said. “You have to practice like you play where you play.”

Chelsea Janes in Seattle contributed to this report.