Eyes have it: La Stella’s vision seen as key to his ability to avoid strikeouts
Gary Gilmore watched Tommy La Stella hit college pitching for two seasons, but it’s what La Stella would say after those atbats that left him wideeyed. In 25 seasons debriefing hitters as head coach at Coastal Carolina, Gilmore said, he’s never heard anything else quite like it.
“I would ask him what he saw,” Gilmore said last week of La Stella, the nowA’s infielder. “And he would see things that no one saw.
“Where guys see a ball coming out of the hand, he could tell you which fingers it was coming off of. I mean really stupid eyesight stuff, honestly. I can’t swear to you that his swing is better than anyone else’s or whatever. But he has an innate ability to find the plane of the ball with his eyes and make contact with it. I’ve never coached anybody like him. He’s a freak of nature.”
It’s said that some hitters can read spin or see the red seams as a ball leaves a pitcher’s hand before making the splitsecond decision of whether to swing. Seeing finger placement, which could offer a hint of what pitch is coming, would seem to be on another level. And maybe it is.
Ryan Harrison is a sports vision trainer who has worked with many majorleague players and teams, including the Giants. His father, Bill Harrison, trained athletes on visual skills for more than 40 years. This past offseason, Ryan Harrison said, an Angels strength coach brought a few of the team’s hitters by his training center in Southern California. La Stella was among them.
“When we look at vision for baseball, it’s not only eyesight — it’s depth perception skills and other visual skills, and even more important is the tactical side of using your eyes to perform,” Harrison said. “Tommy’s got phenomenal vision, natural visual skills. … Now, Tommy trained them to be better this offseason because he wants to be better.
“The guy that he really compares to visually — and this is not hittingwise, this is visuallywise — in baseball is Barry Bonds. Barry’s got some of the best vision my father ever tested, as a minorleaguer actually. And there are guys that are very close. And when I evaluated Tommy’s vision, I said, ‘Tommy, you see things that other players don’t see.’ ”
It all might help explain something that anyone watching the A’s for the past month has noticed: La Stella is very good at making contact with swings. And he is very difficult to strike out — more difficult, in fact, than any other hitter in the majors this season.
Strikeouts have never been so prevalent as in recent years, with 2019 (8.81 per team per game) and 2020 (8.67) seeing MLB’s highest rates ever. La Stella is the rare hitter who has trended the opposite way. In 2019, he averaged one strikeout per 10.4 atbats, the fourth lowest rate of any hitter with at least 300 atbats. This season, he averaged one per 16.3 atbats. The Yankees’ DJ LeMahieu was next lowest, one per 9.3.
When the A’s acquired La Stella from the Angels for Franklin Barreto in August, general manager David Forst cited that trait as appealing to an Oakland team that at the time led the majors in strikeouts. In 27 games for the A’s, La Stella hit .289 with a .369 onbase percentage, reaching base in all but three games. He drew 12 walks and struck out five times.
La Stella, who hit five home runs this season, is obviously not a Bondstype hitter. Where they compare, said Harrison, is their “highlevel depth perception,” or the “ability to see something moving and judge the velocity as well as the trajectory.”
Harrison said the ability is natural for some but can also be improved and that he and La Stella worked on “how to control his vision, to recognize and react.”
At 31, La Stella has been a disciplined hitter throughout his career. He had more walks than strikeouts in the minors. From 201518 with the Cubs, he struck out in 13.5% of his plate appearances (7.3% the past two years). But he was mostly a bench player and pinchhitter with Chicago, and atbats were sporadic. Earlier this month, La Stella said playing time helped develop his grasp of the strike zone.
“I think the probabilities of hard contact begin to plummet when you start to expand the strike zone,” La Stella said. “So for me that was really of paramount importance to make sure I’m not expanding the zone, especially early in the count.”
Last year, in a more regular role with the Angels, La Stella broke out. He was hitting .300 with 16 home runs in 78 games before fouling a ball off his shin in early July and suffering a fracture. He returned to go 1for9 in two games in September. His walk rate hit a career low in 2019, but so did his strikeout rate.
As early as 2015, thenCubs hitting coach John Mallee said, La Stella believed he could hit for more power than he was showing. Mallee, now the Angels’ assistant hitting coach, said La Stella took on a “selectiveaggressive approach” — attacking pitches he could drive and adjusting later in the atbat if necessary.
“At the end of the day, he has no fear,” Mallee said. “He doesn’t worry about getting behind in the count. He’s going to relax and let his eyes tell him whether he should swing or not. Where most people decide, ‘I need to be aggressive here in this count,’ or do different things, he tries to see it first.”
Indeed, La Stella this year was especially tough to put away. MLB hitters in 2020 hit .167 in twostrike counts — .161 after falling behind 02. La Stella hit .257 with two strikes and .303 after 02. His 90.1% contact rate on swings was second only to David Fletcher (91.9), his former Angels teammate, who attributes La Stella’s fortitude in part to “how calm he is at the plate.”
“You never really see him take an outofcontrol swing; it’s all controlled violence,” Fletcher said. “His mind is super calm up there, and his body’s super calm. And it lets him see the ball really well, I think.”
During MLB’s shutdown this spring, Fletcher and La Stella worked out together, taking groundballs and swings often at high school fields in Southern California. “He’s super detailoriented — kind of the opposite of me in a way,” said Fletcher, who nonetheless hit .319 this season, ranking third in the AL.
“I’d go jump in and start taking batting practice, and he’d be in the cage for a halfhour taking like 50% swings off the tee. He takes a lot of time on the details, taking care of his body. … But it’s part of what makes him good, how detailoriented he is.”
Earlier this season, A’s pitchers praised the Angels’ lineup partly because of how often Fletcher and La Stella seemed to be on base. Starter Chris Bassitt said those “scrappy” hitters present a different challenge in a time of gaudy home run and strikeout totals.
“You get guys like Fletcher and La Stella in a lineup that are just absolute gnats, and it’s like, what the heck is this? Where’s the guy that’s swinging for the fence every pitch?” Bassitt said. “La Stella does not give up an atbat, it’s nearly impossible to strike him out … His value is so high in today’s game just because he will wear a pitcher out, mentally and physically.”
It could pay off in the playoffs for an A’s lineup that strives to get into an opponent’s bullpen. Oakland’s offense struggled in the final week of the season, but hitting coach Darren Bush’s response was telling when asked about working with La Stella for the past month.
“He’s just a professional hitter,” Bush said. “There’s not a whole lot you do. You just remind him of who the pitcher is, what he does, how his command is and what his tendencies are. And then you let Tommy go hit.”