A12| Friday, February 28, 2020 THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
in the air, not the ground, produce
offensive success, prompting bat-
ters across the league to change
their swing paths in order to lift.
It’s had an enormous impact. In De-
cember, a panel of scientists com-
missioned by MLB to study rising
home run rates attributed 40% of
the surge to a “change in player be-
havior”—or how hitters swing. (The
other 60% has been caused by a
more aerodynamic baseball, which
remains an area of study.)
Wanting to hit those fly balls to
the pull side was a natural progres-
sion, since the fences are much
closer in the corners than they are
in the gaps and in straightaway
center field. That explains why the
number of pulled fly balls across
MLB has climbed by 37% since- Target Field in Minneapolis
has a spacious outfield, topping out
at 411 feet in deep left-center. In
the left-field corner, the fence is
just 339 feet away.
“At our field, right down the left-
field line, that’s your best bet for a
right-handed hitter,” Twins chief
baseball officer Derek Falvey said.
Josh Donaldson, the 2015 Ameri-
can League MVP, first brought the
gospel of the pulled fly ball into
the mainstream. While playing for
the Toronto Blue Jays in August
2016, he appeared on MLB Net-
work, pointed to the camera and
said, “If you’re 10 years old and
your coach says, ‘Get on top of the
ball,’ tell him no.”
So it should come as no surprise
that the Twins viewed Donaldson
as a perfect addition when he hit
the free-agent market this winter,
especially after he hit 37 homers
for the Atlanta Braves in 2019. Last
month, the Twins gave the 34-year-
old Donaldson a four-year contract
worth $92 million, adding another
fearsome slugger to an already
powerful lineup that also features
Nelson Cruz, Max Kepler and Mi-
guel Sanó. Donaldson’s ideas about
hitting, once relegated to the
fringes, are now in the mainstream.
“People are becoming more
adapted to the idea of hitting the
ball in the air versus hitting the ball
on the ground,” Donaldson said.
The Twins’ hitters stressed thatJASON GAY
Joe Burrow and His ‘Tiny’ Hands
A combine measurement provokes a reconsideration of a gifted NFL prospect. Is this tradition just silly?
SPORTS
Allegedly small-handed quarterback Joe Burrow speaks to the media during the NFL combine in Indianapolis.Fort Myers, Fla.
PROFESSIONAL BASKETBALLun-
derwent a revolution when a bunch
of data nerds arrived at an earth-
shattering conclusion: 3-point shots
are worth more than 2-point shots.
That revelation led to smart
NBA teams like the Golden State
Warriors and Houston Rockets
hoisting up an unprecedented
amount of threes. It didn’t take
long for them to use their mathe-
matical talents to come up with an-
other brilliant innovation—threes
from the corner of the court are
better than threes from the middle,
because they’re nearly two feet
closer to the rim. Today, the
corner three is perhaps
the deadliest shot in
the NBA.
Now that same
logic is making its
way into base-
ball, and it’s
changing the
game in unprece-
dented ways. The
Minnesota Twins
set an all-time re-
cord by bashing 307
home runs on their way
to 101 regular-season wins
last year by defying conventional
wisdom. Instead of looking to hit
the ball up the middle, as has long
been taught as ideal, their batters
aimed for the corners, which is the
easiest way to reach the bleachers.
Essentially, the Twins have
emerged as the MLB version of the
Warriors and Rockets—and it’s
made them not just an offensive
juggernaut, but also a legitimate
World Series contender.
“If you work up the middle,
you’re going to hit a single, or
you’re going to hit it to that guy,
and that guy catches everything,”
Twins catcher Mitch Garver said,
gesturing to the team’s Gold Glove
center fielder Byron Buxton. “I
don’t want to do that.”
That’s why Garver pulled the ball
more than 51% of the time in 2019,
far more than the league-wide rate
of less than 41%, according to the
statistics website FanGraphs. (For a
right-handed batter like Garver,
“pulling the ball” means hitting to
left field, versus right field for a
lefty.) The approach paid off:
Garver blasted 31 homers and
posted a .995 OPS, the best OPS in
baseball among all backstops with
at least 300 at-bats.
The Twins followed Garver’s
lead. They pulled the ball in the air
more frequently than any team in
the majors last season, 68 more
times than their next closest com-
petitor, the Houston Astros, another
data-driven organization. It re-
sulted in the Twins setting
a record with eight dif-
ferent players hitting
20 or more homers.
Their five players
with 30 or more
homers was also a
record—and all
five are still with
the team.
All of this makes
sense. Since the cre-
ation of Statcast,
MLB’s tracking tool, in
2015, about 63% of all homers
have been hit to the pull side.
“Pull side is where the home
runs are,” Garver said. “Pull-side
damage is the goal.”
Not too long ago, a player saying
he wanted to pull the ball would’ve
been considered radical. The base-
ball establishment has long taught a
short, compact swing designed to
produce grounders and low line
drives to the middle of the field.
Dead pull hitters were seen as less
skilled batters who were willing to
compromise their overall produc-
tion and sell out for power.
Then came Statcast and the pop-
ularity of launch angle, the mea-
surement of the angle at which the
ball comes off the bat. These new
tools definitively proved that ballsstepping up to the plate simply
looking to pull everything could
lead to a long swing with easily
exploitable holes in it. Good hitters
must use the whole field to be suc-
cessful, and nobody can completely
guide where they hit the ball.
But by being selective with
what pitches they swing at and
trying to make contact out in
front of the plate, rather than
deep in the zone, the Twins have
maximized their ability to hit the
ball, high and far—and in the
right place.
“That’s been true in any decade
of baseball,” Falvey said. “Now it’s
just a little bit more intentional in
the way they approach it.”
The question is whether their
home-run prowess will be enough
to send the Twins to the World Se-
ries for the first time since 1991.
They know that at some point this
October, they’ll likely have to get
past the New York Yankees. Since
2003, the Twins have faced off
against the Yankees in a playoff
series six times. All six times, the
Twins lost.The Minnesota Twins set an all-time record by bashing 307 home runs last season, including 41 by Nelson Cruz.The Twins Are Targeting
The Down-the-Line Homer
Baker Mayfield’s (9.25-inch hands).
Plus, Burrow would be playing in
northern climates, where “it’s go-
ing to be cold, it’s going to be wet,
the ball’s going to be slippery, the
football’s a little bit bigger than it
was in the college game, and it
could potentially be something of
an issue.”
It was a perfect opportunity to
quote E.E. Cummings—nobody, not
even the rain, has such small
hands—but you can’t have every-
thing, I guess.
Tinyhandsgate was on. To which
Burrow, who’s shown himself to be
rather witty, offered this dry re-
sponse:
Considering retirement after I
was informed the football will beslipping out of my tiny hands.
Please keep me in your thoughts,
the 23-year-old quarterback
tweeted.
It was an ideal way to kick off a
combine: a dramatic reconsidera-
tion of a quarterback whose last
season had been not just great,
but historically great, to the point
that very sane people who weren’t
LSU alumni said Burrow had the
best year of college football quar-
terbacking they’d ever seen. That
aura is allegedly in flux, because
the footballs used in college
games are approximately an inch
or so smaller than the ones used
in the NFL, and, at the profes-
sional level, it’s preferable to have
heftier dukes, like the 10.25-inchhands of stars Drew Brees and
Russell Wilson. (You can do this
deal at home yourself, measuring
your extended hand from thumb
to pinkie. My own hands, like Bur-
row’s, turn out to be 9 inches,
which means, I, too, will be win-
ning the Heisman and national ti-
tle game for LSU next year.)
Let’s be real. Burrow’s status
isn’t in flux—it’s just in “kooky
pre-draft flux.” ESPN was soon
walking back the alarm with an-
other story, headlined: WHY THE
NFL COMBINE BUILT A MYTH
AROUND QB HAND SIZE, A MEA-
SUREMENT THAT DOESN’T MEAN
ANYTHING. A zillion people—in-
cluding Patrick Mahomes him-
self—pointed out that this year’s
Super Bowl winning quarterback
had hands only a quarter-inch big-
ger than Burrow’s.
It’s silly. We do this with NFL
prospects every year, talk ourselves
in and out, then in again. Cincinnati
is taking Burrow at No. 1. Not even
the Bengals can botch this.
Or could they? The more press-
ing intrigue is not whether Cincin-
nati wants Burrow, but whether
Burrow wants Cincinnati, a ques-
tion Burrow kinda/sorta put to
rest in his combine news confer-
ence when he said “I’ll play for
whoever drafts me,” and scolded
the media for trying to drum up a
fake “narrative,” which is a word
that should be banned from
sports for five years.
“Yeah. I’m not going to not
play,” Burrow said. “I’m a ball-
player. Whoever takes me, I’m go-
ing to go show up.”
It wasn’t exactly stripping off
one’s shirt to reveal stripes and
screaming WHO DEY! I LOVE DEM
BENGALS!
If you told your family you
were taking them on a vacation,
and they said,Wherever you’ll
take us, we’ll go...We’re not going
to not go on vacationit would be
at least mildly deflating.
Still, it’s a signal of wisdom
and maturity to be at least a bit
concerned about playing for Cin-
cinnati, a franchise that hasn’t
won a playoff game since 1990, six
years before Burrow wasborn.
Joe Burrow is a tremendous
talent, with a knack for rising to
the moment, and wants to be the
No. 1 player picked.
But how this all plays out?
That’s in Bengal hands.
Or is it paws. BRIAN SPURLOCK/REUTERSMICHAEL REAVES/GETTY IMAGES835
The number of fly balls and
line drives the Twins hit to
the pull side in 2019, 68 more
than any other team in
baseball.The NFL combine
is under way in
Indianapolis—
football’s annual
post-college job
festival, in which
potential appli-
cants stand before
flinty evaluators and show off
skills in running, catching, pass-
ing, and pretending to be OK
about having to play for the Cin-
cinnati Bengals.
There are weightlifting show-
downs, jumping contests, overly
parsed news conferences, and
weird team interviews in which an
NFL dinosaur reliably gets in trou-
ble for asking a probing, personal
question, like,Can you wear a
seersucker suit with no socks?
(To which the answer should al-
waysbe“Yes.”Youcangobarefoot
in seersucker, if you know what
you’re doing.)
It’s strange theater. Bill
Belichick sits grimly in a preppy la-
crosse sweatshirt. Somebody runs
a slow or supersonic 40-yard dash,
and then we argue about whether
or not the 40-yard dash means
anything. TV announcers inevitably
show that old video of Tom Brady
running the 40 looking like he just
ate a Porterhouse for two. There’s
always a bizarre, probably mean-
ingless “revelation” about a gifted
prospect, and we have this year’s:
Joe Burrow has tiny hands.
That’s right: Joe Burrow, aka
Joe Burreaux, the presumptive No.
1 pick, the LSU sensation, the
cheeky quarterback who rolled
over Clemson in the national
championship then lit a contra-
band cigar in the basement of the
Superdome, had his mitts mea-
sured at the combine, and they
turn out to be 9 inches. ESPN ran a
story headlined SOURCE: JOE BUR-
ROW MEASURED WITH 9-INCH
HANDS AT THE NFL COMBINE and
I admit I stared at the headline for
a while, wondering:wait...is a 9-
inch hand good or bad?
It is, apparently, mildly subop-
timal, at least for football. Nine-
inch hands are not tiny, per se—
an average male mortal clocks in
somewhere around 8.5—but in the
context of the NFL combine, in
which every human attribute is a
potential disqualification, or at
least something to argue about on
talk radio for a few days, it may
be something to mull if you’re
about to make Joe Burrow your
franchise quarterback for the next
generation.
“The combine’s all about pick-
ing apart players and finding
flaws,” ESPN’s Adam Schefter said
on the air earlier this week. “We
have found a flaw in Joe Burrow
before the combine really gets un-
der way.”
Schefter said he still thought
Cincinnati would take Burrow, an
Ohio native, with the No. 1 pick in
late April. But he acknowledged
that 9-inch hands were perhaps “a
little bit of a factor,” as Burrow’s
hands were now officially a half-
inch shorter than last year’s No. 1
QB, Kyler Murray (9.5-inch hands),
and a quarter inch shorter than the
No. 1 pick a couple of years ago,BYJAREDDIAMOND