Flat-footed

As soon as I read what Adam Eaton said, I had to call my hitting guru for comment; she did not disappoint. “If I hit off my front foot all the time, I wouldn’t tell anyone about it,” Clare said yesterday when we talked over the phone. Indeed. The comment in question arose from Eaton telling reporters how his approach to hitting has changed since being traded from the White Sox to the Nationals in the 2016 offseason. Eaton said he “used to be very front foot, be athletic, barrel to the baseball, and now I kind of have to refine that,” by which he means being “more of a back-foot hitter. I want to stay on my back side longer, see the ball better and deeper.” OK, but about that front-foot thing. Nobody stays in the major hitting primarily off his front foot, at least not since the days of Vic Davalillo in the 1960s and ’70s. There’s a reason I mention Davalillo because he and Eaton were/are both left-handed hitters with speed; those are the only kind of players who can get away with hitting off their front foot…occasionally. Think about it. If a fast right-handed hitter like Adam Engel were to do that, he’d hit sad little grounders to short or third unless, like Davalillo and Eaton, he went to the opposite field. In which case, he’d hit sad little grounders to second and first. You can’t beat out balls like that. Be a speedy leftie, though, and you can as the ball travels in the opposite direction you’re running. But here’s the thing. If you did that all the time, pitchers and defenses would adjust accordingly. Pitchers would go inside, and the left-side defense would shade to the opposite field; left and center field would also shade over to get a step on fly balls. The result would be no more opposite-field hits, no more career in MLB. In his second and third years with the Sox, 2015-16, Eaton averaged fourteen homers a season, and I doubt many of them were opposite field. I think he was enough of a pull hitter to keep defenses honest so that when he did hit off his front foot, the ball had a chance of trickling through. But I’d like to know how many of Eaton’s 899 career hits were of the trickle/slap/lucky-liner-to-left variety. This is probably the result of reporters being reporters and Eaton being Eaton; stories have to be written, space filled, even in spring training. To his credit, Eaton is an accessible player. In this case, he said something that doesn’t really hold up and reporters didn’t bother to think about before quoting. Like my guru said, always hitting off your front foot isn’t something to tell the world.