Two Home Runs, Both Alike in Dignity, in a Cold, Uncaring Universe, Where We Lay Our Scene

[Davy Andrews]

Before the world turned to garbage, Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick hit two extremely similar home runs using two extremely different swings.

Look, I know it’s bleak. The season has ended in abrupt, heartbreaking fashion. I’m sure you’re crushed. Everyone is crushed, and everyone will stay crushed for a while. If only there were some magic potion that could make us all feel better. Some elixir we could drink that would make us feel light and happy, just for a little while, to take the edge off all this pain. But unfortunately, no such thing exists. There’s no magic beverage out there that would let us drink away our troubles and then, later, maybe let us barf out a few of our troubles too. Surely, there’s no group of people who know how to concoct such a beverage. So let’s talk about the Brewers.

During the glorious seventh inning of last night’s game – before, you know, all the other stuff happened – Jake Bauers and Sal Frelick hit back-to-back jacks. They hit double dongs. They went onsie-twosies. Bauers hit a home run, and then Frelick also hit a home run, right after Bauers’ home run, consecutively. It was fun (until, that other stuff happened). Let’s watch them, shall we?

PLEASE EMBED ME, MATT!

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Ah, good times (briefly). Not long after the double fireworks, MLB.com’s Mike Petriello noted something fun. “Bauers and Frelick basically hit identical tanks,” he tweeted, along with this graphic. 

The two homers differed by less one mile per hour of exit velocity, two degrees of launch angle, and three feet of distance. Even the bat speed of the two swings was within 2 mph. If you use the slightly complicated formula that tells you exactly how well a player squared up a ball, you can see that Frelick squared it up at 94%, while Bauers squared it up at 93%. Again, nearly identical. But what makes this even more fun is that the actual swings were absolutely not identical. They were comically different. Watch that video again, both because it’s relevant and because it may well be the only thing that bring you joy for a while. I’m going to pull a couple stills. Here are the two players at the moment of contact.

Bauers is on the left, and you can see that the ball he hit was out over the plate, whereas Frelick’s was low and inside. But the big difference is in their legs. On the right, Frelick’s legs are spread wide. You can see him pushing off his back leg, then using what pitchers call a lead leg block. His front leg is perfectly straight, pushing back in order to channel all that force upward into the next link in his kinetic chain, his torso.

On the left, Bauers looks so much less athletic. Frelick was sitting first-pitch fastball and he got one. He timed it up perfectly, so he was able to turn on it with everything he had. But Bauers got an outside changeup, and he was way ahead of it. If he’d timed it up perfectly, he’d likely have driven it to left or to center. Instead, his swing was all about finding ways to stay back and slow things down. His back leg isn’t generating as much force, and because his swing is already so far along, he’s sticking his butt out and reaching back and out over the plate trying to hook the ball. The follow-through makes it even more clear.

Frelick is over there on the right, still looking athletic. He’s balanced, and because he timed everything up right, that lead leg block allowed him to lean back on the ball. On the left, Bauers is even more off balance. His butt is sticking out further, and his upper half is leaning further out over the plate. Holding back forced him to make his swing more rotational, so he’s still spinning. Slowing down his swing meant pushing less with his top hand, so now he’s got a high, one-handed follow-through.

So how did the swing on the left, where Bauers had to make every adjustment in the book just to reach out and hook the ball, end up with greater bat speed and almost identical exit velocity than the one on the right, where everything went perfectly? You already know the answer to that question.

To put it plainly, Bauers has not been good this year. The Brewers were hoping that he’d bounce back from the 87 wRC+ he put up in 2023, and instead he put up yet another 87 wRC+. The exact same performance, on the dot. Fool me once: Shame on you. Fool me twice: Please stop fooling me, Jake Bauers. The underlying numbers also indicated that he got lucky, since his hard-hit and barrel rates cratered. But still, this is why you get a power bat like Bauers in the first place. He can hit tanks. It’s what he lives for. In fact, after the game, Bauers said point blank that the home run was “up there with the birth of my child, for sure.” It’s the “for sure” that makes it dicey. Imagine if his child sees that quote. I know his child is literally a baby, but what if she’s one of those genius babies who reads the newspaper? She’s going to be so hurt. Bauers only has one baby, but hitting home runs is pretty much his whole job and he does it pretty regularly. Imagine if your dad came home from work tomorrow and said, “Yea verily, I did say unto the patron, ‘This Scripture you will carry in your heart you all your waking days,’ and gladly did he purchase three. Never have I known such lightness, save for the hour of your birth.” (Oh, I forgot to mention that in this hypothetical, your dad is a bible salesman, and he’s started to talk like a character from the New Testament.) It would definitely hurt your feelings to hear that the thing that he does for work every day can just, out of nowhere, be as special to him as you, his flesh and blood. But if you followed up, your dad could just say, “Nay, child, I was merely exaggerating. Thou art the apple of mine eye.” Bauers can’t do that, because he didn’t just say the homer was as special as his baby, he said it was for sure as special as his baby.

Frelick put up an 86 wRC+ on the season, nearly identical to Bauers, but he came about it very differently. (Also, he was also a slick defender, so he put up 1.5 WAR, while Bauers put up a nice, round 0.0.) Unlike Bauers, he’s not there to hit tanks. Frelick had 60 more points of batting average, but 86 fewer points of isolated slugging than Bauer. He has five career homers, and until last night, he hadn’t hit one since May 15. Over the course of his career, Bauers’ average home run traveled 399 feet. Frelick has only three balls that far in his entire career. Here’s what the bat tracking and exit velocity metrics say about the pair this season.

Player	Bat Speed	Fast Swing	Squared Up%	Swing Length	HH%	EV
Sal Frelick	66.3	26	31.7	6.9	19.4	83.4
MLB Average	71.7	23.2	25.1	7.3	38.7	88.8
Jake Bauers	73.8	31	17.6	7.5	41.8	89.4

This is the difference between a scrappy contact hitter and a big power hitter. In every single metric except for squared-up rate and swing length, Frelick is below the MLB average, and Bauers is above it. Frelick’s home run swing was the 10th fastest he’s taken this season, and it resulted in the farthest and hardest-hit ball of his entire career. In order to come within 2 mph of Bauers' swing, he had to take a much longer cut 8.5 feet, as opposed to Bauers' 8.1.  On the other hand, that wasn't anywhere near Bauers' hardest swing. He swung harder twice in that same at-bat where he hit the home run. The home run was just the third-hardest swing of the at-bat! Bauers’ fastest swing of the season was measured at 88 mph. His swing has so much potential for power that even when he’s making big, power-sapping adjustments left and right, his swing packs as much power as Frelick’s platonic ideal of an A-swing. All in all, it’s pretty fun. Or it was.

 

 

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