So Far, Corbin Carroll’s Stance Change Is Paying Off

Spring is a time of batting stance changes. As players come back from their offseason workouts and sessions with their private hitting coaches, they may have new setups and mechanics that they believe will make them better hitters in the year ahead. Typically, we can notice stance changes right away, but throughout spring training and the first few weeks of the regular season, it can be difficult to determine whether an alteration will have any real impact on a player’s performance. A lot of times, a change can be noise, so filtering through why it was made is critical to understanding its eventual effectiveness. I approach this by thinking about a hitter’s weakness and how the change might address it. In the case of Corbin Carroll, there is a straightforward story to be told that makes me confident his new stance will be impactful in the long term.

Before we get into why Carroll changed his stance from a data perspective, let’s discuss his reasoning behind the change and what it looks like, much of which was reported on during spring training. As Carroll told Alex Weiner of Arizona Sports, his intention with the stance change was to “have a better hand position to fire from.” Carroll has been tweaking his hand position since the second half of last season, but where his hands are now versus then is different, as you can see below in this side-by-side screenshot posted by DBacks Dispatch:

Corbin Carroll has changed his batting stance in spring, he’s brought down his arms and has crouched in a little more pic.twitter.com/MVihuS5I2x

— DBacks Dispatch (@DbacksDispatch) February 24, 2025

My main focus is how he’s shifted his hands forward, closer to his face than they were even after he made his tweak last summer. That change alone puts him in a much different position before his downswing, and therefore, sets him up for a different bat path. Let’s get into why.

Despite a scorching hot summer for Carroll in 2024, he finished the season with just a 107 wRC+ because of his first-half struggles. That was a major disappointment considering the year before he posted a 132 wRC+, finished fifth in the MVP voting, and won the Rookie of the Year Award. One big reason for his woes was that he couldn’t handle pitches on the inner third of the strike zone. Here is a quick summary of his performance on inside, middle, and outside pitches in both 2023 and 2024.

As a rookie, Carroll was 20 points of xwOBA better than league average for a lefty batter on inner-third pitches; last season, he was 117 points below average. I mean, sheesh. Sometimes, the story doesn’t need to be complicated. If you’re a pitcher, your job becomes so much easier when you’re facing a hitter who can’t cover one side of the plate. In the case of Carroll last season, opposing pitchers knew they could pound him in on the hands with heat and go soft away; it’s one of the oldest approaches in baseball.

Carroll’s drop-off from 2023 to 2024 was likely due to a combination of approach and swing mechanics, but we’ll focus on mechanics here because of how they relate to his stance change. Let’s watch some swings from Carroll last season against pitches on the inner third:

If you want to pay attention to anything specific, it should be the hands. He begins with them high and then loads them to fall in line with his shoulder plane. That downward motion is the single most important movement because it’s what creates a “pushy” swing. Pushy is a term used in both pitching and hitting. On the mound, it’s when a pitcher is reliant on linear forces more than rotational ones; this is more prevalent among pitchers who don’t throw hard. In simpler terms, they’re moving on a straight path down the mound without much hip or torso rotation, leaving it to their arm to generate most of the force behind the pitch and making it more difficult to reach high velocities.

In the batter’s box, a pushy swing happens when a hitter has a shallow entry into the zone, putting the barrel on a path that’s above the ball rather than on the same plane or under it. Because of this, it takes more time for him to get his bat on plane with the pitch, let alone slightly under it to create launch. In the clips above, you’ll notice a lot of foul balls and suboptimal launch angles on inside pitches. The only way for him to square up a pitch with a pushy swing on these inside pitches is to make contact way out in front, which explains the foul balls. Conversely, if he lets the pitch get deeper, the best he can do is beat it into the ground or pop it up.

Starting with high hands isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Plenty of batters have great bat paths with high hands – in fact, Carroll still starts with his hands high — but it becomes an issue for hitters who don’t rotate or turn their barrel during their hand row (the movement of the hands before the downswing). Without the barrel rotation, the bat doesn’t have time to get to an optimal attack angle.

To put some data to this, the league-wide hard-hit rate for sweet spot batted balls for lefties on inner-third pitches was 16.6% in 2024. That same number for Carroll? 4.7%. He only had five batted balls that were hit at least 95 mph with a launch angle between eight and 32 degrees on inner-third pitches all season. Targeting that zone and letting Carroll beat himself was an easy choice for pitchers. This had to be addressed heading into this season, and so far, that seems to be the case:

It’s not perfect, but perfection shouldn’t be the goal this early on. Making a stance change this drastic takes time and repetition, and for Carroll to already have positive results compared to last year is a big plus. Entering play Friday, his bump to a .314 xwOBA on inner-third pitches is still below league average for a lefty hitter (.336), but it’s much closer to where it was his rookie season — and it’s a vast improvement compared to 2024. Besides, that league average is almost certainly going to come down as the season progresses. The highest league-wide xwOBA on record for left-handed hitters on inner-third pitches for a full season is .309, set back in 2019. Remember that 4.7% hard-hit sweet-spot rate for batted balls on inner-third pitches, which worked out to five out of 107 balls in play? Well, this year, that number is up to 18.2%, or two out of 11 balls in play. Of course, this is an extremely small sample, but at this point, we should be encouraged by what we’re seeing. The change he is making is a logical, targeted one to improve his greatest weakness from last season. That makes me confident the numbers will hold.

By moving his hands closer to the front of his body, he’s allowed more space and time for his hands to turn over before he starts his downswing. In theory, that should create a deeper barrel path, and as a result, fewer mishits on pitches inside because he isn’t pushing his barrel to the ball, and it’s already on a path to work through the zone. A very important piece to pay attention to as the season progresses is how consistent Carroll can be with this barrel turn. Adding more movement means there is more potential for noise, so consistency will be key. Having the feel of where your barrel is in space after a new change can take time, but in this case, I think it’ll be for the better.

Considering how bad he was on inside pitches last season, if Carroll can become even league average against them, he’d be a much more dangerous hitter. Pitchers no longer would be able to just pound him inside because he’d now be capable of doing damage on those pitches, too. Instead, they’d have to vary up their plan of attack so that he can’t just sit on inside pitches; this should lead to more pitches over the middle and outer third, where Carroll is at his best.

Over his first 13 games of the season, Carroll is slashing .320/.424/.740 with five home runs and a 215 wRC+. Naturally, it’s not quite that simple. Pitchers are really good. Inevitably, they will adjust to this new and improved version of Carroll, and he will cool off from his offensive heater. When that happens, we’ll have a better idea of how effective this new stance will be in helping him adjust to what pitchers are doing. He won’t be a 215 wRC+ hitter all season, but based on the rationale behind his changes, I think he’ll be just fine.