About two years ago I wrote a piece about Bryson Stott and how he had become the ultimate pest. He was more comfortable with getting into two-strike counts than almost any hitter, almost daring pitchers to get to that point in an at-bat before upping his aggression and wearing them out. He wasn’t quite as good the rest of 2023 but he was solid, and he finished with a .280/.329/.419 line. Stott was a critical piece of the Phillies lineup; not a star, but a reason they were difficult to face.
The 2024 season was a different story. He stumbled to a .245/.315/.356 line, struggling against high-end velocity and flirting with how poor of a hitter one can be while still remaining an everyday player. In fact, he played himself into a soft platoon with Edmundo Sosa. Over the winter it was revealed that he was dealing with an undisclosed arm injury, which wasn’t enough to sideline him, but was enough to impact his game. With a clean bill of health he entered 2025 primed to resume his role as a chippy cog who could at least put a dent in a pitcher’s pitch count, if not get on base.
It looked like it would go that way after he posted a strong April. But May was a nightmare and June was somehow worse. DRC+ thought he was still who he’s been even when he was clicking, tabbing him as slightly below-average with the bat through a league-wide lens. However, two years ago it did the same thing but couldn’t quite capture the full value he was adding to the Phillies lineup. Now it was saying a hitter like him should add up to solid production again, but couldn’t square how flimsy the results had been. By the time the All-Star break rolled around, he was one of the worst hitters in the league by OPS.
He’s never pulled the ball much—he’s done it almost exactly 33% of the time in each of the last three years, compared to the league average of 41%—but it looks different in the scope of his fly balls. He had 106 coming into play on Monday. Just 21 of them were to his pull side, compared to 41 to center and 44 to the opposite field.
He knows his game is about contact but was also aware that he had played himself into a problematic approach. “I think the biggest problem was trying to force the ball in certain places,” he told me. “[I’d] get a ball down the middle and want to hit it on a line drive to left or left-center or something like that. [I was] just kind of manipulating [the bat] in a bad way instead of just kind of hitting [the ball] where it’s pitched.”
Stott had slipped into an approach over time that was unhelpful. There was one clear way to see it: He was raising his hands too much. Talked up on team broadcasts after bringing them down and eventually written about, he was asked whether the move actually solved anything. He had his doubts. “Beats me,” he told Matt Gelb of The Athletic. You can see the change for yourself below.
On the left is Stott earlier this season, before the change. On the right is from a series against the Braves last week. Stott might be skeptical of a fix because of any long-term implication it carries, but the results speak for themselves. He’s slashing .288/.370/.468 since coming out of the break. The tweak seems remarkably simple and easy; so simple that any struggling hitter should try it.
While the game is never going to be that prescriptive, we know enough about how bodies work to understand what a move like this can do. Hands held high like that will lead to muscles that are more tense. You can hold your arms up and feel it yourself. Tense muscles fire less efficiently. By lowering his hands, he’s creating a more efficient use of energy into his swing load. He’s getting to the ball with more ease.
There’s at least one other difference you can spot, in addition to two you probably can’t catch from still frames at this angle (or general angle—these are both from his home park, but also clearly and annoyingly different). He’s a bit more open now. And according to Statcast’s newer batter metrics, he’s also a little more squat and standing a couple inches further back in the box. What these changes have done is change the path of his barrel to the ball, similar to how a pitcher can change the path of a pitch by moving on the rubber.
Even through his struggles, Stott remained one of the more passive hitters in the league before two strikes, and then became extremely aggressive once he got to that point. However, since the break and his adjustments in the box, no hitter has a bigger gap in their swing rate before and after arriving at two strikes. That accounts for all 178 hitters who have seen at least 1,500 pitches this year. You can see them all here.
Stott was up front about retaining that part of his identity. “I don’t like to strike out…I’m big on exit hits,” he admitted, harkening back to teammate Bryce Harper’s comment from a few years ago. He also spoke about how bat speed can be deceptive because it doesn’t account for context, like whether a player is trying to get to their ‘A’ swing or their ‘B’ swing. But ultimately, he’s getting out in front more now. That tends to make for longer swings, which can register higher bat speed measurements. Part of what went into the changes he’s made was looking at the numbers and seeing where his power comes from, noting he’s “pretty much trying to pull everything. If it goes left, it goes left, but [I’m] not really trying to force the ball.”
Two years ago he was growing by leaning into who he was. This time, he’s also making room to embrace the power he has. He’s never going to be a masher. He’s still looking to corner pitchers and wear them down. But now he’s prepared to make it sting more than ever.
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