Hunter Pence had one of the most unorthodox physical approaches to baseball that I've ever seen. I think I can best define it as... herky-jerky? Overly mechanical? Rickety? His stance, his swing, his throwing motion... all of it was just so Hunter Pence, and I feel confident saying that no one else could try and replicate the way he did things with any chance at legitimate success.
But it isn't only his physical approach that came off as bizarre. In the latest episode of Chalk Media's "Green Light with Chris Long" podcast, Pence revealed his borderline insane mentality that he had to resort to if he wanted to find success against certain pitchers.
"There's certain pitchers you have to face that you have to be at peace with, like, death," Pence said. "Because there's certain pitchers, like Carlos Marmol or Jake Arrieta — Marmol was throwing 97-mph sinkers, and he threw a slider that looked like a fastball at your neck that came in for a strike. So you had to just be like, I'm not moving.
"If that's a fastball, I'm dead. If that's a slider, I have to stay in to hit this. So the only way to hit him was to be like, alright, I'm either dying or hitting it, because if I back up it's a strike every time. He's throwing it with everything he has, and it's happening way faster than it looks, and it looks like a 97-mph fastball at your neck and then it just breaks right over the plate. So, I mean, is that fun? No, but that's what you signed up for..."
Sounds easy enough, right? I recently wrote about how I would cower in fear at home plate in the final season of my rec baseball days after I was plunked in the thigh with a devastating 52-mph heater, give or take a few miles per hour — it all happened so fast for my fourth grade brain to have accurately processed. Thus, I'm not sure Pence's approach would be my forte, but to each his own.
After all, it worked pretty well for him. He went 6-22 off Marmol in his career, with a home run, two doubles and a slash line of .273/.304/.500. In six at-bats over the 2007 and 2008 seasons, Pence may not have developed that mindset yet. He went 0-6. Over the next four years, however, Pence was 6-14 — that's a .429 batting average for all you non-math people out there. Marmol's career batting average against was a paltry .188, so Pence clearly figured something out.
Still, he wasn't as crazy as some players that he observed and played with throughout his career.
"It's weird with people, like there's different people. Like, I unconsciously have matrix moves, it's super hard to hit me and I don't even know how or why," Pence said. "...My reactions are just [to] get out of the way, and there are some people that just don't know how to move. Like, legit, I saw Chase Utley just take a ball in the head, didn't even move, like boom."
And that's a whole different mentality of insanity (from my perspective), or a willingness to sacrifice yourself and get on base for the good of the team (most ballplayers' perspectives). You won't find Pence in the top 1,000 batters on the career hit by pitch (HBP) leaderboards. But you don't have to look too hard to find Utley: he's one of eight players in MLB history with over 200 HBP in his career.
Whether you look at Pence and his matrix-like ability to get out of the way or you look at Utley and his unflinching determination at the plate, you'll find a whole lot of success. So if you're looking into a career of baseball, you might want to add "getting over fear of death" to your to-do list.
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