Are Old Habits Creeping Back Up For Ty France?
“Baseball is 90% mental – the other half is physical.”
By Brittany Wisner, edited by Charles Hamaker
Seattle, WA - If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And if it was broken but has begun to mend itself, don’t interfere with its process.
Hitting a baseball is incredibly hard. It is the most difficult thing to do in all of sports. It brings constant failure and a hitter is often only as good as his or her ability to mentally compartmentalize and deal with that failure. For someone trying to break out of a slump, changes to the mental game are typically needed just as much as any mechanical adjustments being made. And if a hitter is on a hot streak? Well, there’s a reason baseball players are stereotypically so superstitious. If a player is on a hitting streak, you better not change a thing.
It’s just as much mental as it is physical. We often talk about players “pressing” in baseball when they are trying too hard to make something happen at the plate. It’s one of the easiest ways to get into a slump and it’s one of the hardest habits to shake because of what it actually takes to break out of it: trying less. It’s painfully counterintuitive. When a player mentally puts too much pressure on themselves to execute at the plate, their body typically stiffens up and with that their mechanics go out the window. This usually results in swinging at bad pitches, popping up pitches in the middle of the plate or hitting them straight into the ground.
Seattle Mariners first baseman Ty France throughout the 2023 season. (Photos by Liv Lyons)
Enter Ty France.
France is coming off his career-worst offensive year in 2023, slashing .250/.337/.366 with only 12 home runs and a career-high 117 strikeouts. His chase rate also reached a career-high at 33%. Things weren’t much better when he was making contact, grounding into double plays 25 times, the second most in the league. He struggled mightily with fastballs and could only seem to get around on an inside fastball when he was lucky enough to guess correctly.
He was, in extremely overly-simplified words, broken.
Seattle Mariners first baseman Ty France looks on after creating an out during the teams series against the Cleveland Guardians. (Photo by Liz Wolter)
Enter Driveline.
After watching his “best buddy” (his words, not mine) J.P. Crawford have a career-year offensively in 2023 thanks to the work he did at Driveline the offseason prior, France decided to follow suit. Driveline, a data-driven organization that uses state-of-the-art motion capture assessments in their training, worked with France and was able to discover and highlight numerous mechanical issues and bad habits that had become deeply ingrained in his swing over the years.
Where did these bad habits come from? How did Ty France go from an All-Star in 2022 to a below average bat in 2023? While some people speculate that this is just who France is – a below average hitter – the numbers suggest that a collision with Sheldon Neuse in 2022 likely led to Ty’s steady decrease in production. Since that collision landed him on the IL with an elbow strain, he has looked like a completely different hitter:
From March 2021 to June 23, 2022 (pre-Neuse collision),
France slashed .299/.375/.455 for an .830 OPS in 961 PA.
From June 2022 through the end of the 2023 season (post-Neuse collision),
France slashed .244/.320/.375 for a .694 OPS in 969 PA.
It’s easy to develop bad habits when you’re trying to overcompensate for injury and the longer those bad habits go unidentified the more they typically snowball. Luckily, Driveline was able to identify those mechanical errors and implement swing changes, increasing his bat speed by about 3.5 mph as a result. Ty also made a bunch of physical changes on his own, losing a significant amount of weight over the winter and working to get stronger in key areas.
And so far, we have seen France’s hard work pay off. Through his first 13 games, his average exit velocity is up to 94.1 mph which is in the top 5% of the league, per Statcast. His 60.6% hard hit rate ranks in the top 2% of the league. That is an incredibly significant improvement that cannot be dismissed as coincidence. Things were starting to click for him and, in an ice cold Mariners lineup with not much going for it to start the year, France was arguably the Mariners’ hottest hitter; that is, until just recently when we have begun to see glimpses of Ty’s old habits.
France had started the year batting in the 6 or 7 hole, a good place for a hitter still trying to get comfortable with new mechanics and working to gain some confidence. He looked comfortable and the results reflected that. A hitter with exceptional bat-to-ball skills, Ty is at his best when he’s putting the ball in play consistently and spraying it to all sides of the field. However, when Ty is at his worst, you see him expanding the zone, chasing pitches far off the plate and racking up more strikeouts than someone with his skill-set should.
On April 9th, the Mariners moved France up in the order. His strikeout percentage ballooned from 19.4% to 41.2% and we have since seen several ugly swings from him that are reminiscent of last year.
March 28th-April 8th (batting 6th or 7th): .379/.419/.414 with 6 Ks in 31 PA
April 9th-April 14th (batting 3rd or 4th): .176/.176/.235 with 7 Ks in 17 PA
While the sample size is small, that is a drastic turnaround.
Ty France had spent the better part of the last year and a half – 969 plate appearances, to be exact – struggling at the plate. He had just 31 regular season plate appearances – about 3% of the overall time that he had spent struggling – with his new mechanics before getting bumped up in the order. The pressure to produce increases significantly in the 3 or 4-hole and you could see France begin to press the minute he had an unproductive plate appearance higher up in the order.
Looking at some of his strikeouts over these last 17 plate appearances, you see a lot of “old Ty”: expanding the strike zone and chasing pitches off the plate.
You can also see him reverting back to old mechanics when he does make contact, rolling over the ball more instead of squaring it up. On Sunday, in a pivotal point in the game against the Cubs when the Mariners were down by one run, he grounded into an easy double play with the bases loaded – just like 2023 France would have done.
This is not difficult. Ty is pressing and was clearly not ready to be moved up in the order. The Mariners need France to be the “professional hitter” he was in 2021 and much of 2022, hitting the ball hard to all sides of the field and striking out at a relatively low rate. They were starting to get that from him, then jumped the gun.
Luckily, it is an easy fix but one that needs to be made quickly before this snowballs and all the progress he has made is for naught. They say it takes at least 1,000 swings to break a bad habit; I’d imagine it takes quite a few more if you have multiple bad habits. Those necessary repetitions need to come in lower pressure situations for the time being. Once the new mechanics become second nature to him, you can consider moving him back up in the order – although, ideally by that time, the rest of the Mariners lineup is actually producing and you won’t even need to make that move.
Hitting is so difficult and the best thing that can be done for a hitter trying to overcome prolonged struggles is to keep it as simple as possible. This means eliminating obstacles for them to mentally overcome, not adding them. If the Mariners want Ty France to be a consistent offensive producer for them, the best thing they can do for him is to remove the pressure, let him get in a groove and then leave him alone.
Let’s not make this more complicated than it needs to be.
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Cover photo by CSS photographer Rio Giancarlo.
