Now that Matt Holliday's going to be a Cardinal for pretty much the duration, I thought I'd take a quick look at his swing and see how it rates on the, "Which swings of the Cardinal players do you like," scale. I will do this using the clip below, which shows Matt Holliday hitting a home run to Left Field off of a 92 MPH fastball inside in the 8th inning on September 3rd, 2009.

The bottom line is that, with one minor-ish exception, I like Matt Holliday's swing a lot and wouldn't have a problem if my son started emulating it in games.[1]

Lose the Leg Lift?

I can understand why Mark McGwire tried to get Matt Holliday to tame down his leg kick. It sure is funky and unusual. However, based on studying Matt Holliday's swing, I can tell you that his leg kick is intertwined with his timing. If you're smart, you don't mess with a hitter's timing mechanism. As a result, it's like an inoperable brain tumor; you can't do anything about it without running a huge risk of killing the patient (or the swing, as the case may be).[2]

Walking Away from the Hands

A hitter's primary source of power is the muscles of the core. As Ted Williams understood, hitters tap into the muscles of the core by rotating their hips ahead of their shoulders (and thus their hands). One way to achieve this separation is by walking away from the hands; by leaving the hands back as you start to stride forward toward the pitcher. In the clip above, Matt Holliday provides a nice example of what this looks like in action.[3]

Textbook Position at the Point Of Contact

At the Point Of Contact (POC) Matt Holliday is in an absolutely textbook position. His back elbow is bent 90 degrees and in the Power L position, his front elbow is bent a bit due to the inside location of the pitch, and his back knee is also in the Power L position. Matt Holliday does make the Power V, but it's one or two frames after the POC. Matt Holliday's swing is also quite short, at 3.5 to 4 frames at 20 frames per second.

Ryan Ludwick, Are You Paying Attention?

Another thing I like about Matt Holliday's swing is how stable his head is. While Ryan Ludwick's head droops like the head of a frat boy who's realized (too late) that he's walked into a drag bar, Matt Holiday's head is quite stable. That is all the more remarkable given Matt Holliday's big leg kick. Like Albert Pujols, Matt Holliday watches the ball more with his eyes than with his head and, just as importantly, he doesn't try to watch the bat hit the ball.

That's All For Now

That's all I've got for now. I reserve the right to add sections as the mood strikes me or if someone asks a particularly interesting question.

[1] I still prefer Albert's swing for younger kids because there are fewer moving parts and thus less to screw up.

[2] A leg lift like Holliday's can take an extra bit of coordination to pull off, and men often lose that extra bit around 30 or so (or at least I did, and of course what I lost wasn’t just a little bit and I didn’t have that much to start with). Think about how Tiger Woods had to rebuild his swing a couple of years back. This could have been what McGwire was thinking about when he worked with Holliday a year or so ago. He may have been trying to be proactive about this. Holliday’s upper body is fine and his eye is good, which is important.I could see Holliday struggling in the next few years and having to rebuild his timing mechanism to something simpler like you see in the swings of Chipper, Carlos Beltran, A-Rod, or Manny. Given his more upright stance, I don’t know if Holliday could pull off Pujols’ minimal stride.

[3] Keeping the hands back is something that Albert talks about because, in addition to increasing separation, it can also increase your adjustability to off-speed and breaking pitches.