Growing up as a somewhat passable rec league baseball player, I wasn't the most skilled when it came to offensive production at the plate. But what I did have was an uncanny (and useless) knack for mimicking batting stances used by MLB players, thanks to watching hours and hours of "Baseball Tonight," playing endless baseball video games and collecting thousands of baseball cards.
I mostly specialized in the Phillies, as that's where my family's allegiance has always belonged, but not too many casual fans were impressed when I whipped out my incredibly accurate Wilson Valdez stance. For those fans, I and so many others have defaulted to one stance and one stance only: that of Gary Sheffield.
The large majority of people that has ever followed the game of post-1990 baseball, even very casually, knows of Sheffield's iconic and bizarre look in the batter's box. It looks so unnatural, so exaggerated, so forced... and yet, that thing sure worked.
Where did it come from? Much like how Tom Glavine kind of stumbled upon his soon-to-be devastating changeup at random, Sheffield didn't have much of a strategy when he began using his famous stance. He did, however, have at least a little bit of inspiration.
"I'm going to be honest with you, I made it up. Because I wanted to be different and I said I want my own style," Sheffield told Bret Boone on the latest edition of the latter's podcast. "I used to love Rickey Henderson. And everything Rickey Henderson did, it was Rickey Henderson-style. And so I would always play with things, with my bat stance, with where I'd hold my bat, the way I run, how I'm wearing my uniform — everything I did, I wanted to be stylish like Rickey Henderson.
"And so I created this thing in batting practice and I wound up hitting ten balls out with that batting stance, and I said I'm gonna try it in the game. And I tried it in the game and I wound up hitting two home runs, and the rest is history."
He felt comfortable in his new stance, and it's not like coaches could argue with his offensive production through the years. Sure, it might not be the most mechanically sound way to face a pitcher, but nine All-Star nods and over 500 career home runs speak for themselves. And despite the fact that it might feel weird for most, it actually may have given Sheffield a strategic advantage at the dish.
"...A lot of people thought that [with] me moving the bat like that, they could come inside on me, and. would do it harder to bait them inside," Sheffield said. "Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. But some nights you're on your game, you don't even feel that bat moving. It became my Joe Morgan with the elbow going into my ribs. It was the different batting stances that you saw all the generations pull out, and that was just my style.
"And I owned it and I knew what I was doing with it."
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