Eric Hosmer, fashion and fixing a swing
Allow me to go full Drag Race on Eric Hosmer’s fashion choices. The dude looks fly on the reg. He’s in style. Check the round shades, the green suit, the windy ankles and the moccasins. Very 2021:
If 1997 is hot, he’s wearing 1997, even if he wouldn’t have a year ago. And he looks good doing it:
But unlike some of his teammates, his fashion choices don’t usually extend to trying new things or leaving his comfort zone:
Until it’s, you know, important people in his life are into it:
Okay, so why do I care? What do the clothes have to do with anything? Am I the villain?
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What if your attitude about fashion parallels your attitude toward your profession? And what if your profession is the passion of thousands and thousands of people, people starved for success? And what if the reason you can afford all that swag is because your profession has brought you enormous wealth—enormous wealth that those fans are paying for?
And what if your attitude toward your profession prevents you from getting better at it?
It is, it seems, the Eric Hosmer way: get the paycheck. Buy the latest digs. Make it flashy—but safe. Wear it to the ballpark. Change into the uniform. Look good—but safe, of course. Pants to the shoes, a bit baggy, when that’s in:
On the Pads? Paddack’s got the stirrups and the infield’s hiking up the trousers? Long socks it is. But not the stirrups. That’s too far.
There’ll be another paycheck and another fashion statement in ‘22. He’s locked in for four more years. The cycle continues.
I think, in general, Eric Hosmer’s a happy dude. He’s rich. He’s engaged. He’s enjoying himself. And that’s what makes Padres fans so angry when he sucks, I think. Don’t you know you’re terrible, Eric?! Palling around the clubhouse when he’s slumping, smiling and laughing and cool handshaking while wildly underperforming, that’s always going to rub a fanbase the wrong way, even if it’s unfair and stupid to deny a man happiness at all times. Search for ‘Hosmer’ on Twitter. It’s brutal.
But even Jayce Tingler agrees a little, and he’s started to bench him with increasing regularity. Is Hos happy now?
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One of the things that makes fans grumpy is that Hosmer hits too many ground balls, and it’s true. He does. Here are some stats since 2015:
Three things about this:
1) See the launch angles there? 2.9 is not good, but it’s better than 2.1, and it’s a hell of a lot better than -1.5, -1.5 is abysmal. That means in 2018, Hosmer was, on average, hitting the ball downward more often than upward. Which makes it hard to hit doubles and home runs and even singles, if there’s infielders in the way.
2) But see the exit velocities there? 91 mph is a very hard hit ball on average, and while his maximum EV his gone down slightly the last two years, 112.5 is still a very hard hit ball, and even when he’s chopping everything into the ground, he often hits it that hard.
2) See where his launch angle was 8.7 last year? That’s pretty good. It was a short season, and Eric almost always starts the year hot, but the improvement was no accident.
Here’s a UT article from spring training this year about how Hos had worked to change his swing in 2020:
Slowing down allowed him to stay back, see the ball longer and had the side effect of keeping his back side more grounded as he struck the ball.
“He wasn’t rushed,” Padres hitting coach Damion Easley said simply…
Study video of him hacking any one of dozens of balls into the ground in 2019 and then look at video of the many balls he put in the air in ’20, and it is evident.
He was shown some analytics, and he tweaked his swing. That doesn’t line up with the Eric Hosmer in this SBNation article from 2018, titled Eric Hosmer’s Declining Swing:
…Hosmer doesn’t seem very wiling to change, even though the launch angle issues are severely holding his offensive ceiling back. Over at FanGraphs, Travis Sawchik grabbed this good quote from him during early Spring Training (2018) action.
“‘A lot of guys like to look at the numbers and judge a player based off of that stuff. [Other] guys like to watch the game, have that eye, and judge it off that,’ Hosmer said. ‘Analytically, the stuff doesn’t add up in my favor. Me, as a player, I’m not going to change who I am because of what the analytics say.’”
Ah, but now he’s teammates with Tatis and Machado and Cronenworth and Pham and Myers and Grisham, isn’t he? All of those guys, even Fernando, have slumped at one time or another this year—which is why the Padres aren’t quite up there in the standings with the Giants and Dodgers—but all of those guys, when they’re good, have solid launch angles. They hit lots of line drives and fly balls.
A lot of them also wear high socks.
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If you asked Eric Hosmer why he’s wearing high socks, would he tell you it’s because his teammates do? Would he even know it himself?
From 2021 again, on trying to hit the ball in the air:
“It’s certainly a big deal, but I would say for me it’s not as important because I just want to be productive,” said Hosmer, who last season batted .287 with an .855 OPS, both highest by far in his three years with the Padres. “Misses are misses. There are certain things that jump out that you recognize as adjustments need to be made. For me personally, I’m more of a feel-type guy. If I’m in the cage working on stuff and doing the adjustments and feeling my way through that, then I’m confident that the result will get better. … I understand I made some pretty good adjustments when it comes to that stuff. There’s also a lot of adjustments that I can still be a lot better on. Just trying to tighten my game up, every way possible.”
Who, me? Change my swing? I mean I switch it up, but I don’t change my style to match the homies. I just feel it, baby.
Here’s where my metaphors diverge. A hitting swing isn’t like putting on clothes. You can’t just accidently ease into a new style, looking back at photos going ‘where did I get that swing’ like you’d say ‘how did I even grow those chops?’
It’s really, really hard to be swing in a new way consistently, it’s easy to fall back into old muscle memory, especially as a feel-type guy, and since starting the year got with the new swing, he’s regressed. Badly.
He’s often back to rushing the swing like 2018, where he’d get too pumped for a pitch and end up throwing his hips toward the dugout:
After weeks of ground ball mania, Hos finds himself at the bottom of Fangraphs’ WAR rankings among first basemen. He’s the only one with a negative fWAR, which means Fangraphs believe he’s the only qualified 1B in the league causing his team to lose more games when he plays than when he rides the bench. And now they say the Dads need a first base upgrade, which Padres Twitter would agree with.
If you’re hoping they’re going to trade Hosmer, don’t get those hopes up too high. The contract’s too big and he’s a (uh oh) leader in the clubhouse. (He once both wildly celebrated that Tatis Grand Slam and was the one to talk to him about the unwritten rules, very Hosmer.)
But it wouldn’t surprise me if they traded some prospects for an outfielder to ride with Pham and Grish, threw Hos into a platoon at first with Myers and Profar and said alright boys, somebody play good. Because even recently, Hos has moments where the newly-full crowd gets behind him and he finds his 2020 swing again, like that clutch dinger against the Reds. Patient approach. Hips square:
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Eric Hosmer doesn’t like changing his style. But he likes being left out even less, and I’d bet you a floppy hat he’s in the cage at this very moment, taking cuts in his 2020 swing, trying to become an upgrade on himself, not admitting to anyone, not even himself, that it’s anyone’s swing but his own.