How a Move Away from the Up-Down Leg Lift Replenished Gary Sánchez
By: Esteban Rivera
Tags: Baseball, Gary Sanchez, Yankees

How a Move Away from the Up-Down Leg Lift Replenished Gary Sánchez Esteban Rivera Jul 6·5 min read

There’s been plenty said about Gary Sánchez’ rise back to stardom in the last month or so. It’s hard not to get excited about Gary when he is impaling baseballs. Andrew Krutz of Pitcher List provided thorough details on Gary’s changed outcomes just last week. His article describes the what. Next is the why and well, that is obvious. Sánchez was in urgent need of a change, making him extremely willing to play around with the mechanics. That’s where I want to contribute to conversation, the how. How is Gary suddenly able to have such wonderful success? Krutz mentioned he dropped the leg kick. That kick served as more of a lift for Gary, leaving him with narrow windows for barrel accuracy.

It feels like it’s always been about timing for El Kraken. After watching thousands of his swings over the years it is quite obvious that he guesses a lot. His knack for taking fastballs right down the middle and chasing breaking balls before he even recognizes the pitch type, makes me confident in saying that. As a guess hitter, you must put yourself in a position where your swing path and timing can match the planes of different pitch types in case you guess incorrectly. That leaves you with a bit of lee way to still make hard contact.

When you leg lift, opposed to some of the alternatives, it can be difficult to hold your balance for varying periods of times. Gary sometimes has that issue and is forced to make decisions earlier because his momentum is pulling him back to the ground. However, on top of that, I noticed something else about the lift earlier in the season that worried me. It was segmented. It had multiple hitches and he was not rotating his lead hip at the right time during the lift. Let’s take a look.

I tried slowing this down to try and make my words obviously match what you see in the video. Here’s the quick story:

· Leg lifts straight up perpendicular to the ground

· Leg descends on same path in which it was lifted

· Bottom of foot suddenly points slightly towards pitcher right before heel strike

I want to focus on that last point. In the initial stages of the lift that is exactly what it is, a lift. It does not help a hitter load up their hips. That slight hip loading is when the hitter has subtle internal rotation in the lead hip to match the reciprocal movement of the barrel comb. You can do this yourself right now. Stand up and get in an athletic position with your feet slightly outside the width of your shoulders. Lift your lead leg up straight up and try drift forward as if you are about to swing. I bet you struggle to maintain the balance as you drift.

Now, start in the same position and instead of lifting straight up, rotate your lead leg so that your knee points slightly more inward rather than pointing straight away, like it does in the lift. While maintaining that rotation, you should be able to drift forward with more control as if you were preparing to swing. That control allows you to have a quick or slow trigger depending on your recognition of the pitch speed.

Biomechanically speaking, the internal rotation of your lead hip puts your core in a better position to rotate out of your hips without losing lots of potential energy. The “pick up and put down” lift is an extremely inefficient version of the gather that can put hitters in trouble. And remember that hitch I pointed out in Gary’s lift when we suddenly see the base of his foot? That’s his body knowing that he needs to internally rotate first before he is able to powerfully externally rotate. It’s just very mistimed. Check it out again here and focus on the bottom of his foot suddenly showing itself.

But this is the old Gary! In the last month, he has displayed a quick gather that put the focus on his pitch recognition and took away the extra noise that the leg lift presented.

It’s so subtle. If Marcus Thames had not made it clear, then this might have flown under the radar. We’ve seen this from the Yankees catcher at glimpses throughout his career. Perhaps when protecting with the two strikes, but it was never his go to move. Earlier I pointed out that Gary’s body knows it needs to rotate before initiating the swing. Unfortunately for him, this rotation happened too late in the process. But in his new form, the slight rotation occurs early. It is actually the first move in the entire swing. You can pick up on it quite easily. The sole of his foot begins to show itself before anything else moves. It’s a slow gather but the important thing is he now has a quick, seamless trigger. That helps him hit high fastballs but more importantly, he can hang in his hips and have the ability to drive balls to the opposite field, like he did in that clip. His former teammate, CC Sabathia, has pointed out multiple times that this is a sign that Gary is fully back and I couldn’t agree any more.

By starting that rotation in the beginning of the swing, instead of halfway through, he has more time to make swing decisions. It also allows him to enter his swing plane earlier. The leg lift was a wasted movement. Some hitters like to use it for timing but when you’re struggling against high fastballs and low and away breaking balls, as Krutz pointed out, you can’t have wasted movement. The addition of Sanchez’ aggressive row/comb adds to the point that it may be best for him to have a quiet lower half, as many people like to put it.

There’s not much else to it other than that. To put it in the simplest of terms, he went from an up-down lift to an internal rotation to better line up the rest of his movements. Rotational athletes need to have reciprocal movements in place in order to produce power. The internal rotation of the lead hip allows an explosion in the same hip in the opposite direction. This simple fix does wonder for the kinetic chain. We’ve seen that in the form of a drastic turnaround for Gary Sánchez and I could not be more excited about it.