Anthony Rizzo’s Swing Adjustments

It’s not exactly breaking news that Anthony Rizzo is one of the most watchable players in baseball. Between his mix of power and plate discipline and a defensive reel that looks like a Spider Man reboot (“Spidey Faces His Most Dastardly Foe of All: Corporate Season Ticket Holders!”), the Cubs’ first baseman draws our eyes to him in every game he plays.

Which is a good thing. Because the more you watch Rizzo, the more you learn about what a truly intelligent hitter he is. There is no other player in the game who makes it easier for you to catch a glimpse of his thought processes than the Cubs’ first baseman. And he does this by making many of his adjustments visible to anyone who cares to observe him closely.

The most obvious example is in his batting stance itself. We all know the story of Rizzo’s earliest adjustment that turned changed his profile from “Ryan Howard with a better twerking game” to one of the most well rounded offensive threats in baseball.

In the bad old days of 2013, Rizzo put up an alarming split against left handed pitching, amassing a feeble .189/.282/.342 slash line against it. During that season, whenever he faced a southpaw, it looked like a good idea for the Cubs Marketing Department to trademark the phrase “Therizzot Souvenir Company.”

But as has been chronicled in several places (such as this 2015 piece by Zack Moser), Rizzo figured out how to solve this dilemma. As the 2014 season progressed, we watched Rizzo begin to crowd the plate in an almost comical exaggeration so that he could get the good part of his bat on the outside pitches that had bedeviled him previously.

The results were immediate and long lasting with Rizzo’s performance against lefties since he made the change ranging from very good (2016’s .261/.366/.466) to All Star caliber (2014’s .300/.421/.507). Indeed, this visible adjustment marked the turning point in Rizzo’s career, enabling him to ascend from a prospect with a good ceiling to a focal point of the Cubs offense.

Beyond changing his career trajectory, this particular adjustment also produced a few other positive side effects. In 2015, Rizzo’s .387 OBP was helped a good deal by the 30 times he was hit by pitch. This was the result of opposing hurlers trying to adjust back by pushing him off the plate with numerous inside fastballs. Because as the Cincinnati Reds’ bench of a few years ago can verify, if there’s one characteristic that distinguishes Anthony Rizzo, it’s that he always backs down from a challenge.

In addition, as last year’s walk off walk against the Cardinals demonstrated, Rizzo’s crowding of the plate can sometimes influence umpires to take the inside corner away from a pitcher. It turned out that a very pleasant side effect of his adjustment is that Rizzo might have invented the concept of “batter framing.”

That’s just one example of Rizzo enabling us to watch his thought process work and observe the benefits he reaped from making a change. Last year’s playoffs showed us another. Rizzo began the 2016 postseason in a massive funk, going 2-for-his-first-30 into the middle of NLCS Game Four. Considering what happens when the Cubs endure a postseason slump in Los Angeles, Dodger Stadium’s Operations Supervisor already had a team of plumbers on speed dial.

At that point, Rizzo famously borrowed Matt Szczur’s bat and crushed a fifth inning home run off of Pedro Baez, setting him off on a tear that would last through the rest of the series. Rizzo would continue using Szczur’s lumber for the rest of the postseason and Fox passed it off as a quirky superstition, implying that what had held Rizzo back until that point was that his bat had too many vowels.

It turned out, of course, that there was much more than pretend mystical forces involved. As Rizzo secretly confessed to Tom Verducci before the World Series, he made the switch in an attempt to generate more speed in his swing with a significantly lighter bat–Szczur’s model being “one inch shorter and two ounces lighter” (Verducci, 322).

Rizzo’s explanation for the switch was also revelatory:

“It allowed me to free up my hands and not have to use my body. Because at the end of the year, I was so beat, I guess. At the beginning of the playoffs, I was missing fastballs. I kept asking myself, ‘Why am I missing these fastballs?’ My swing is good. It could be psychological, but I think not. But I think taking the extra inch off and lightening my bat, I started to get those pitches again” (Verducci, 323).

That kind of self analysis demonstrated the level of thinking Rizzo put into his hitting. He knew as well as any scout that the book on him during the first part of the playoffs was that he could be beaten on fastballs. And he was also aware that there was no physical adjustment he could make at that point that would solve the problem without ruining his swing.

So the solution became readily apparent: keep the same swing but concede to his exhaustion by trying a lighter bat. And with that simple change, he was able to start squaring up the fastball once again and resume hitting at his accustomed pace.

What was initially passed off as a simple human interest story and a good way to get a non-roster Cub some TV time turned out to be Rizzo showing anyone who paid attention how he made a necessary adjustment to maintain his elite level of play. As in the previous example, the best way to determine whether or not Rizzo made an adjustment was simply to compare two pictures of him at bat and spot the differences.

Which makes this the first article that can simultaneously be printed in Baseball Prospectus and Highlights for Children.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about Rizzo’s adjustments at bat is that there are times when you can see what’s different about his approach within the context a single game. This was especially apparent with his Banner Night walk off single against the Dodgers.

With the winning run on third and two out, Rizzo faced one of the toughest assignments in baseball with Kenley Jansen on the mound. The last time the Cubs had seen Jansen, he spent three innings mowing down a lineup that had just knocked out Clayton Kershaw.

Knowing that he was going to be facing a mid-90s cutter from hell, Rizzo decided that the best chance he had was to concede to Jansen right away. So from the very first pitch of the at bat, he choked up and went to his B hack to give himself a better chance of making good contact on such a late breaking offering.

ESPN’s broadcast crew immediately noticed his different approach and commented on it. And perhaps nothing underscores how easy Rizzo makes it to follow along with his thought process than this: he actually got ESPN to talk baseball strategy instead of the goat.

In some denominations, that qualifies him for sainthood.

And on a 1-1 pitch, the change in approach paid off as Rizzo put a short swing on a high cutter and served the game winning line drive into left field. His adjustment did not go unheralded by his manager as Joe Maddon was effusive in his praise:

“Anthony really worked a veteran, mature at-bat against Jansen. If you just try to attempt to do what you normally do against that fellow, he’s going to eat you alive. He stayed inside the ball, hit the ball the other way, didn’t try to pull it, got the fatter part of the bat on the ball.”

The reason why Anthony Rizzo has such a veteran and mature approach is because he knows when he has to alter it in order to keep playing at a superstar level. Fortunately for us as fans, it’s often easy to spot when he’s making that alteration which gives us an appreciation for the effort he puts into his game. If something isn’t working, he’s not afraid to make the changes necessary to get it back on track.

Which is why the Bryzzo Souvenir Company intern is aware that he’s on notice.

Work Cited:

Verducci, Tom. The Cubs Way: The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse. Crown Archetype, 2017.

Lead photo courtesy David Kohl—USA Today Sports