How Luis Robert and Andrew Vaughn stopped worrying about homers, and started hitting them

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Luis Robert, many argue, is very funny.

“He comes to me and says, ‘Missed a cookie, swing too hard,'” said hitting coach Frank Menechino, smiling as he recalls Robert bluntly assessing a flyout. “‘Man, cookie, right there. I tried to kill it. I’ve got to swing easy.'”

For Menechino, this little quip demonstrates a number of concepts. The one that obviously jumps off the page is the rapid maturation of Robert’s English, which essentially started at zero when he was a 19-year-old signed in the middle of 2017, an age when most Latin American signings — the very fluent Eloy Jiménez, for example — are getting regular English classes at team facilities three years sooner. Menechino always noticed Robert listening intently to him, dating back to when they were together at Triple-A Charlotte in 2019. But as recently as last season, Menechino would find out that Robert had relayed something he said to José Abreu for further clarification and translation before asking a follow-up question days later.

Now the follow-up questions come immediately, and Menechino knows how much Robert was listening in 2019 because things he said back in Charlotte are getting referenced back to him. Namely, the parts about over-swinging. It dovetails back to a line about how hitters with plus raw power do not need to gear up to hit for power consistently in games. You might remember it.

“I caught a lot of slack for saying ‘fuck the home run,’ right?” Menechino said. “People make fun of me now like, oh, I like groundballs and stuff.”

He does not seem to like groundballs, but since the White Sox lead baseball in home runs since June 30, Menechino has seen fewer and fewer of them.

The other part of Menechino’s quote was “Let’s hit .300,” and while it was about Andrew Vaughn, the same principle applied. They both have enough pop that if they closed off their vulnerabilities in the strike zone, the contact gains they would see would be sufficiently loud. Robert was achieving the “let’s hit .300” part in the first month of the season before his injury (.316/.359/.463), but Menechino worried his young prodigy was growing impatient with the “fuck the home run” portion of things. Robert has hit .349/.364/.558 in 10 games since returning, with two homers and five of his 15 hits going for extra bases. His first-inning strikeout on Sunday was his first since the first game of the A’s series last Monday, and he finds the mechanical changes installed to be barely noticeable.

“I think my stance is pretty much similar,” Robert said through team interpreter Billy Russo. “I didn’t make any big changes. Maybe my front foot is a little open to the left, but just barely. The only thing I changed is my approach with two strikes. I’ve been starting earlier, but that’s honestly the biggest and only change I made in my stance.”

This is a good thing. Menechino cares more about Robert’s stress levels than his mechanics, and wants him to think more about swinging easily than his more open and widened batting stance. Also, Menechino feels the slight tilt and widening in Robert’s stance makes his changes look bigger than they are. Menechino said Robert has always had his current leg lift, but opening him up makes it more prominently visible on television. Often, players who open their stance are like James McCann, in that they had trouble staying closed through their swing when they started in a closed stance. But when they started open and consciously stepped their way into being closed, it worked. Menechino’s goal with tilting Robert slightly open is more specifically targeted.

“He’s a little wider and a little open, and what that does, that gets him stacked up on his backside,” Menechino said, miming lifting his front foot and balancing his weight on a flexed back leg. “Because he’s stacked on his back (leg), he’s able to control his leg for his timing and not go forward. So he’s seeing the ball better and he can cover the strike zone. He can stay behind the ball better.”

Essentially, expanding Robert’s ability to ride on his back leg builds in a mechanical base for him to recognize pitches and location, and stop himself as he continues to make better plate decisions, while keeping himself loaded. And the more it feels like an incremental, almost non-existent change, the more comfortably he can adapt it. Because he’s pushing himself hard enough as it is without having more tweaks to think about.

“He is hard on himself, he expects the best for himself,” Menechino said. “He wants two hits every day. Hey, man, that ain’t gonna happen, and I mess with him all the time. But it’s a great quality to have.”

If you have not read the FanGraphs article on Vaughn’s mechanical change, then this is going to seem a lot more novel than it should, but also, you should read it. At large, the White Sox sort of expected the scenario where about 400 plate appearances into his major league career, Vaughn would be hitting .260/.332/.451 (116 wRC+). The combination of his preternatural talent and maturity has met the colossal challenge of skipping two levels of the minor leagues, and it’s shaken out to a good but not completely dominant debut season for possibly the best hitter of his prospect class. But Vaughn’s journey to this point is not a gradual ascent, but a path with certain inflection points where very real work and adjustments were put in.

“I was pressing too much, I was trying to create a result instead of going out and having fun playing the game I love,” said Vaughn. ” I needed to quiet (my swing) down a little bit, it was getting a little too much, and it was creating some swing and miss, and I shouldn’t have been missing pitches.”

In the FanGraphs piece, Luke Hooper identified June 29 as when Vaughn removed a larger hand load with a prominent loop in his hand path from his swing. Instead he had a lower (and farther back) hand placement, and a much shorter and direct path. Vaughn’s pre-swing hand movement suddenly went from looking like someone cranking it up to just gliding their hands back on a track. The results are unambiguous. Vaughn has hit .309/.374/.533 since the switch, with a minuscule (especially for a power hitter) 14.6 percent strikeout rate and nine of his 15 home runs this season over the last 45 games. He, too, had not struck out since the first game of the A’s series before the whole team whiffed on Sunday.

“That little loading action that he has now synced in with his feet, and now he was on time,” said Menechino. “Now we had a lot of time, and a shorter path. And it just clicked for him. And he understood what I was talking about, because the kid’s really smart. And he knows his body, and he knows what’s supposed to be happening.”

The emphasis on having a lot of time is vital, as Menechino wanted Vaughn’s actions to be small to give him as many moments as possible to react to what he’s seeing on a pitch, and stop entirely or make an adjustment to his swing. He described Vaughn’s previous swing load as “fast and long,” or a sizable series of movements he was racing through very quickly to get himself ready, making it hard to stop when he recognized a slider headed toward the dirt.

“There’s definitely times when it can just feel out of whack,” Vaughn said. “Because there’s a lot of moving parts, so I have to really work on it. Stay on my craft and make sure my timing and my rhythm are right.”

Hooper mentions in his piece that there’s no real precedent for Vaughn’s larger hand load before professional ball. Which is why Menechino found himself searching through video of Vaughn dominating back at Cal-Berkeley to ascertain what he wanted to install — and it’s why the hitting coach directed so much ire toward the mentality of trying to hit home runs. Never had he seen any trace of this inefficiency in Vaughn’s movements before he reached the majors and felt the pressure to produce middle-of-the-order numbers.

“Where’s the kid with these great body breaks and this great loading action that was small and simple, that impressed me so much? Because now it was long,” Menechino said of how he conducted his research. “I basically had to take him in the cage and trick his body a little bit, and put him in a position to take away all that timing (mechanisms) that he thought he needed. So I moved his hands back, as far back as they could go, where he was uncomfortable. I made them bring his hands back to where they’re uncomfortably back and say, ‘OK, start from there.’ And after about five swings, he goes, ‘I know what you’re trying to do.’ And I said, ‘OK, then let’s do it.'”

A 20-home run rookie season is now within view for Vaughn, which was a realistic outcome for him at the start of 2021, but now is coming from a version of him that seems geared for much more going forward. And it came as a byproduct of shortening himself for more contact rather than vice versa. Just like Ethan Katz has a pitching staff that has thrown the most pitches 95 mph or harder in the game, but has largely been shortening arm paths whenever he makes changes, Menechino is seeing a power surge after a tongue-in-cheek suggestion that home runs were the enemy. It’s really about the players who were always capable, and keeping them from getting in their own way.

“Look at all the guys on our team,” Menechino said. “I don’t want any of them over-swinging, really, because they can all go deep. You start trying to, and that’s when bad things happen.”

(Photo of Luis Robert: Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)