Recovering Ballplayer Vo. 7: Neil Walker, Switch Hitting, and Multiple Personalities

Recovering Ballplayer is a recurring baseball column written by Fernando Perez, 2008 ALCS Champion with the Rays, and an ambassador and instructor for MLB International. Follow him on Twitter.

Outside of the sport of baseball, the most natural context for a baseball bat is as a weapon. You grab that bat from under your bed to investigate a strange sound in the night. If you had to take a swing or threaten to swing at someone breaking into your home in the middle of the night, how would you swing it? Which hand would be on top?

Even switch hitters have a natural side. Usually, it's the right. That is, they start their swing with the barrel closer to their right ear—right hand above the left hand on the grip. Due to the random nature of nature, there are far more right handed hitters and pitchers than left handed ones.

I asked Mets second baseman Neil Walker, the hottest switch-hitter in the league, that question earlier this week before his Mets faced the Reds at Citi Field. Walker told me he would swing at his theoretical attacker from the right side—the same side he would be batting from that night against Reds lefty Brandon Finnegan. The question was part of an extensive conversation Walker and I had about switch-hitting, a subject that has baffled me since I took up the practice as a minor leaguer in the Rays system.

When I was a switch-hitter, I felt like a different human when I stood in each batter's box. That's easy to explain. I hit right handed since I was two and I picked up hitting left handed at 24, but even after I became more comfortable, there were two distinct identities. I felt like a delicate artist as a left handed hitter, and I felt like an arrogant bully on the right side. I always wondered whether right-brained and left-brained stuff was in play.

Walker looks roughly the same in his set up on each side of the plate, though there's one key difference—on the left side, he prepares for the pitch with what hitters call a toe-tap, which is a more nuanced leg kick, a timing mechanism that primes the leg to lift at just the right time. On the right side, Walker's swing is more simplistic: a classic leg kick. He simply lifts his front leg to engage his weight transfer.

I asked him if there was anything he could point to that is specifically difficult for him to do. In the middle of the question, I realized I was essentially asking him to explain how to pitch to him. A hitter would rather share his browser history. I pivoted to, "is there anything that specifically made things click for you?"

"I always wanted both sides to be exactly the same…but visually, you see the ball differently, you just don't approach things the same way. When I stopped trying to force myself to be the same on both sides, and just tried to be myself from each side, It really opened doors for me. It really is interesting. You look at the 30 teams now, 25 guys on a team, 13 hitters on a team, there may be one switch hitter, maybe…there are some teams that are vehemently against it. I was in Pittsburgh and we never had switch hitters, they loved to platoon guys, there's a philosophy behind it I guess."

One of the reasons curveballs and sliders from same-handed pitchers are knee-buckling is because they look like they're going to hit you in the face before they curve back over the plate. In the millisecond interim of deciphering the pitch, the professional hitter learns to have faith that the pitch will indeed curve and not hit him. Craig KImbrel's knuckle curve—which I've had the rare privilege to be dizzied by—is an optical illusion; the pitch's sharp left turn is counterintuitive to the brain. Also, when pitchers miss with their fastballs, they tend to miss arm-side—that is, closer to the batter.

Once, in the Arizona Fall league, I watched Danny Richar take a Jeff Ridgeway 94 MPH fastball off the forehead. Danny's body language before being knocked out was consistent with essentially expecting that pitch to turn into a curveball. That hitting is terrifying, even death defying, is perhaps the only thing that fans actually understand better than players. Most former hitters pushed out of the game associate their departure as a result of facing velocities that become too uncomfortable, piquing the autonomic system's flight response.

Hitting opposite-handed pitchers is far more comfortable for hitters. The "uncomfortable at bat" (the preferred baseball term for an at-bat that is not only difficult but scary) is typically attributed to right on right and left on left matchups. This reality bears out statistically with the existence of platoon splits. Since pitchers facing opposite handed hitters don't have the advantage of piquing the hitters' flight response, they typically get hitters out by changing speeds, throwing more changeups, and using breaking pitches out of the strike zone.

This idea was also corroborated by Walker. Though Neil was 0-4 that night against the Reds, the impact of handedness on matchups was visible throughout the game. Right-handed hitting Yoenis Cespedes, who had been nursing a leg injury, pinch hit against the lefty Finnegan. In a moment that would go loudly criticized by many of the writers in the press booth, the Reds allowed their burgeoning young starter to face the righty Cespedes in the 7th inning. Perhaps the Reds did this because Cespedes isn't particularly great against left-handed pitching: .254 career average and a higher strikeout rate. He hit the first pitch he saw about 110 miles per hour to left-field for a three-run home run to tie the game.

Finnegan was lifted for another lefty, Tony Cingrani, brought on to dispatch Curtis Granderson, who is a .224 career hitter against lefties. Good move, right? Granderson promptly hit a triple. To this point, the Reds had made fairly good decisions by the numbers. But then they allowed Cingrani to face the veteran lefty-killer, David Wright. Though Cingrani got ahead 0-2, Wright got just enough barrel on a fastball up and in to line it into left field, just over the reach of third baseman Eugenio Suarez, which brought home the game-winning.

Walker, the son of a major leaguer, started switch hitting at age of 11, though he didn't really commit to the practice until he was in high-school. This is common: it's difficult for young players to sacrifice the short term results and subsequent joy in performing well on their dominant side, to invest in long-term results by taking awkward at-bats from the opposite. Cage drills are great, but when it comes to hitting, all training methods fall spectacularly short of the real thing, which is why those at-bats are so precious to development.

"Being a natural right-handed hitter, I've become a better left-thanded hitter, which is kind of interesting, but then again, not so much—when you look at it you realize, 75% of your at bats are on the left side," Walker said.

Which is to say that it's not really weird that you'd become a better hitter opposite your natural side.

"I remember asking Lance Berkman stuff when we used to play against the Astros. 'How do you balance this whole thing?' And he always used to tell me, 'I look at it like a bonus if I'm getting hits from the right side'— and I'm like, wow, he's got probably 150 homers from the right side and he's telling me this? That kind of eased my nerves. There aren't that many of us whose numbers are in between—it seems like you've got a lot of faster guys who slap the ball around, and then you have your Beltrans and Teixeiras, but there aren't that many switch hitters who are gap to gap type guys."

"I've learned to try to simplify things as I've gotten older…it never seems to get easier, but mentally, you just try not to put much pressure on the performance side, particularly from the right side, numbers-wise, because your at bats are so few.

The fastest player in the league, Reds center fielder Billy Hamilton, is a switch hitter too. He reached base that night on an infield single. After the game, Hamilton told me he started hitting left-handed in extended spring after turning pro, another "project", like me. Halfway through our interview, I realized he might have been associating my questions with his slow start so I gave him a break and left. He's hitting .174 with an OBP of .255.

Since fast players can frequently reach base with a litany of poorly-hit ball the threshold that fast, OBP-centric hitters must meet in order to be an asset to their teams as switch hitters is considerably lower than it is for power hitting switch hitters, who are less likely to reach base or otherwise help their teams without hard contact.

As a relative speedster, I was encouraged to gather information from other successful switch hitters. I was still in the star struck phase of my career, rubbing elbows with men whose faces I had only seen projected through cathode ray televisions. My bench coach Davey Martinez introduced me to Carlos Guillen after he finished a round of pre-game batting practice in Detroit, and asked him to give me some advice.

"Two sides, twice the problems," he said with a laugh. It's difficult enough to maintain one swing, it's more physical and intellectual work to maintain two. I found Guillen's answer to be particularly poignant since neither myself nor my team had fully decided whether or not I should be a switch hitter. The jury of my teammates and coaches were split. Many of them were certain one way or another, prompted by my performance, often in the same games.

I hit .310 with almost equal splits my first year switch hitting, though that was in the California League, where all offensive statistics are wildly inflated by the dry, thin air and fast infields. My second year switch-hitting in AA was also impressive. Even major leaguers like myself who are lamented for our relative mediocrity or shittiness, who are only picked in fantasy as a show of loyalty by their friends who are not so serious about fantasy baseball, were extraordinarily compelling in the minor leagues—it is somewhat of a prerequisite for making it.

That year, in 2007 as a Montgomery Biscuit, I hit home runs to the opposite field from the left side and the splits were again, respectable, fairly regular, though the scouting report was that I had difficulty making contact. Evan Longoria, the best hitter I can call a personal friend, whose baseball advice I respect, suggested I stay on the right side after I had hit a long home run through the thick air in Jackson, Mississippi. "You should just be a power hitter." In the moment, I thought he was right. In hindsight, I should have heeded his advice. But I didn't. I was getting better at hitting left-handed, I thought. And hitting from the left side was certainly more valuable to the folks who look at prospects and try to project out future MLB performance. Mind over matter. If I was going to keep doing this, I had to think positive, and believe that I was going to get better at it.

But I wasn't getting better. In AAA, I struck out at an alarming rate from the left side. I was an easy out from that side, but at the end of the year the Rays called me up the majors, mostly on account of my speed, to aid in the pennant race. I was simply at the right place at the right time. Was it that AAA pitchers were better? Was it simply a down year? You never really know. Once, after playing the visiting Yankees in September, I was driving Joba Chamberlain back to his hotel after a game. A few hours earlier, he had struck me out. "That lefty swing is booty," he said.

The next year I'd have my first surgery, the next season I'd have another. The next year I'd drop switch hitting and try hitting right handed only—an attempt to get back to my roots—though that seemed to only put more stress on my surgically reconstructed left arm. The next year, I'd go see a hitting guru named Wilmer Aaron in Compton who believed wholeheartedly that I could hit left-handed, his zeal was infectious, but I was still on the fence about it myself. By the middle of that season I went back to my natural side and proceeded to hit .300 for a month before I was released for the first time. Too little too late.

***

On Wednesday, Walker hit his ninth home run of the season, not only tying Bryce Harper for the league lead but tying the Mets record for home runs in a month. It was his sixth from the left side. What he told me earlier about how his left side was his stronger side was right: Throughout his career, against right handed pitching, Walker has hit like a superstar. And against lefties, well, he's hit a little bit like Billy Hamilton, with just nine home runs in 691 at bats.

Like myself, Walker is two different hitters with two different personalities.

"From the right side, I have to just get in the box and look for fastballs and try to adjust," Walker explained. "From the left side, i'm a little more inclined to look for certain pitches in certain counts. My mind doesn't work the same way from the right side, I have to look for fastballs and hope that my mind adjusts to something else, whereas, from the left side i can say, 'Okay, 1-1 count, this guy has been throwing me a lot of changeups, I'm going to sit on one.' I have a much harder time doing that from the right side."