How Luke Voit is Trying to Fix His Power Outage

Though thick and burly, Luke Voit has always cut an athletic figure. His very setup in the batter's box telegraphs his desire to be athletic in his swing. He prefers a deep bend of his knees, an open stance, and a big stride. Those things inevitably lead to a lot of swings and misses, because they're all geared toward generating maximal bat speed and torque, and not toward staying short and compact in his swing. 

When things are going right, though, no one worries much about the whiffs. Voit led MLB in home runs during the COVID-shortened 2020 season. Of the 240 batters with at least 500 batted balls from 2020 through 2022, Voit had the 15th-highest Barrel Rate (the percentage of batted balls that blend exit velocity and launch angle in an optimal way). His game is hammering the baseball, and despite some painful inconsistency, he's been one of the league's best at that over the last few years. 

His game has deserted him in 2023. Voit's average exit velocity is down over four miles per hour from 2022. The percentage of his batted balls that leave the bat at 95 miles per hour or faster has dropped from well above average to slightly below. He's whiffing far too often within the zone and drawing walks far too rarely to maintain any value, but those are symptoms of the larger problem. Voit just isn't mechanically right.

He's trying something new, though, in the hope of changing that. To see what's going on, we need to first go back to a good swing from last year, when he was with the Nationals. Here's one.

 This has all the markers of a typical Voit swing. The long, multi-phase, swooping leg kick is there. So are the high hands. The barrel of the bat pops up as he begins his swing, engaging his core and leaning into the swing, but then it flattens back out to get him behind the ball. His hips open up, but he stays on the outside pitch enough to drive it to right field with authority.

Now, let's take a look at a swing typical of his dreadful start to 2023.

The setup is the same. The basic movements are the same. Voit's timing has gone wrong, though. As his hands bring the barrel back down to start its arc toward the hitting zone, there's a deadly hitch. It throws everything out of whack. He's late, or else he's rushing to catch up to his lower half, and thus off-balance.  

Here's another look at things going poorly, from more recently. 

 The adjustment he's trying here is actually to lengthen his stride and the hangtime of his leg kick, in order to give himself more time to get his hands started while staying in sync with the rest of his body. As you can imagine, though, the same problems of balance enter into things there. He's also not able to work uphill to the ball, and thus generate the loft needed, with this tweak.

Now, let's take a look at the long, long single he hit against the Giants on Friday night.

You needn't be an expert in hitting (which is good, because I'm not one) to see what has happened here. Voit has his feet underneath him a bit more. His weight is back into the middle of his feet a little more, so he doesn't end up lunging or leaning farther forward than he can manage while maintaining balance. His leg kick has quieted back down.

The really huge change, though, is in his hands. It jumps right out at you. He starts them much lower, and it speeds everything about his swing path right up. He goes through the same sequence of timing cues--tip the barrel up, then bring it back down--but it doesn't flatten out as much, and there's no hitch. The movements are smaller and tighter, and his whole body can move more fluidly because of that.

That's no guarantee that Voit has found a permanent fix for everything that ails him. His approach has also been a bit flawed. He still has some areas of weakness that pitchers will attack, and if this change to his mechanics creates some problems, he'll have to find a new one to fix them. He's never been able to settle in with exactly the same swing for very long, and that's unlikely to change now. However, getting back to a fluid transition from load to swing was a vital fix for Voit, and his leg kick now seems better calibrated to deliver power without compromising his ability to see the ball and make good swing decisions. The Brewers need Voit to produce the way they envisioned when they signed him, to help pull them out of their offensive funk. These changes could help him meet that need.