Giants’ Panik explains his early season HR binge

SAN FRANCISCO — Launch angle? Sure, Joe Panik was proud of the trajectory on his third home run of the season, against the Seattle Mariners on Tuesday.

Not so much with the ball, but with his bat toss.

“Yeah, good distance,” Panik said, tongue in cheek. “I joked to Buster (Posey) because that was one of those things that he always does.”

Other than the bat toss, the Giants’ surprising slugger has little interest in discussing launch angle, the latest rage around batting cages these days.

Across the game, players are recalibrating their strokes with more of an upward plane. Consider that the 10 longest home runs in the majors last season came with an average launch angle of 27.5 degrees, according to data collected at Statcast. It’s working for a lot of baseball’s best sluggers.

And while the scrappier Panik said his early power — three homers in the first week — can be traced to a new approach at the plate, his lefthanded swing is essentially as flat as ever. Panik’s average launch angle through the first six games was 16.3 degrees, just a few ticks above the league average of 13.3.

And his exit velocity — 87.74 mph on batted balls — was actually lower than the league average (88.89).

Not that Panik gives a flip. Heading into the three-game series against the Los Angeles Dodgers that starts Friday at AT&T Park, the second baseman is batting .381 with an OPS of 1.268.

“There’s a lot of stuff now: a lot of numbers, a lot of analytics. For me, I go by feel,” Panik said. “You are your best hitting coach. You have to know your body. You have to know your swing. That’s having feel and not going just based off numbers.”

The only angle that’s noticeably different in Panik’s swing is the direction of his front foot. Panik turns his right foot at about 45 degrees inward toward the plate, the result of some tinkering he did with Giants hitting coaches Alonzo Powell and Rick Schu.