"Aggressive Accuracy" How the Giants are making preparation the key to development success
Richmond Hitting Coach Danny Santin watches pre-game batting practice from behind cage
“You can’t throw away something that can potentially help you impact a player’s career,” Richmond Flying Squirrels’ Hitting Coach Danny Santin said, sitting in the home dugout last week in the calm before a game. “I don’t like to guess. I guess I like to be aggressively accurate.”
Santin uses the phrase “aggressive accuracy” a lot. He talks about planning and preparation and data, too, about game planning and the importance of individualized instruction, but that phrase “aggressive accuracy” keeps returning, and it feels like it sums up something important about the Giants’ approach to helping hitters improve their game skills. A balanced phrase that grafts together the static and the dynamic, the mind and the body, the idea of an aggressive accuracy applies as much to the prepared mind as to the hands that throw the bat head. But at its heart, for Santin, being accurate is an act of empathy.
“The more information I have and I can put together, the more accurate I can be. I don’t want to let anything slip through the cracks, especially when we’re talking about a player’s career, because that’s really important.”
As information and biomechanics technology has boomed on the pitching side of scouting and player development — with laboratories shaping every element of every pitch down to the precision of a pitcher’s finger pressure — many in the game feel that technology for developing hitters lags behind. Unlike a pitcher’s ability to create significant improvements in the shape of his pitches by varying grips and pressures, the crucial elements that determine success in hitting often take place in the brain, where our ability to measure what’s happening in the body hasn’t quite caught up.
Santin pushes back on that notion. Pitchers, he maintains, will always have an advantage over hitters — not necessarily because we know more about pitching, but simply because they create the action of the game. “A pitcher, he’s got complete control of the situation. He’s got the ball, he’s throwing it. We’ve got to react off him. We’ve got to deal with time and space, change in speeds and different movements…The pitcher knows what he’s going to do before he throws the ball. We’ve got to make split second decisions. So, of course, pitching is always going to be a little bit further ahead.”
So how does a hitter bridge that gap? For Santin, and for the Giants’ organization, the answer lies in preparation. “The more prepared we are, the more aware we are of our strengths and our weaknesses, the better we’re going to fare.”
Another truism that held sway in the development game for generations was that you can’t really improve a player’s plate discipline. They have it or they don’t. Hackers will always hack. The key was to find the players who were disciplined to begin with. The Giants are focused on making all of their players disciplined. I saw this in action in the minor league camp during spring training. Watching camp games involving players 17 or 18 years old, I saw hitter after hitter work long, patient at bats.
The idea is not to measure — and tinker with — the outputs, as it is with so much of pitching development now, but rather to focus on the inputs. “It’s being committed to your plan, right?” says Santin, “collecting the data, being aggressively accurate” — that phrase again — “with what you’re doing up there.”
What you’re doing up there — at the plate — starts with preparation, a point of so much emphasis from the top to the bottom of the organization.
“Let’s say you’re trying to lay off breaking balls in the dirt. So we’re just going to eliminate the bottom of the zone — we’re just going to look at stuff up in the zone.” Not that any one approach fits all sizes. Each player brings their own strengths and weaknesses, their bodies built to damage different parts of the zone, their bat paths working better or worse against different types of pitches. But each and every player can become a better version of themselves by creating a detailed game plan and working to execute it. “If you know what you’re looking for,” says Santin, “that helps your ability to make good decisions.”
Good swing decisions is the goal of all Giants’ hitters (at the time of my conversation with Santin, the data showed Richmond hitters’ swing decisions were among the best in the minor leagues). But how you get to good swing decisions? That comes from preparation and planning.
“What are we missing? How is he getting us out? And how am I going to stay off that pitch? How are we going to push [the pitcher] in so we stay off the slider that’s running away, or pushing them up so we’re not getting that sinker off of our ankles? I think game planning really plays into good swing decisions.”
All of which goes back to data, that aggressive accuracy. “When you can go back and show [the players]: this is what you’re doing when you’re making good decisions. That makes the buy-in really easy, right? [They’re] seeing the fruits of it.” Accurate data collection leads to better game planning for players and then reflects the fruits of the implementation of those plans back again in a virtuous cycle. The more players see improved results, the more invested they become in the process.
This focused emphasis on preparation, accuracy, attention to detail comes directly from the new Developmental Hitting Coordinator Ed Lucas. Lucas came to the Giants from the Milwaukee Brewers organization in 2021, spending his first year in the organization as Assistant to Hitting Coordinator Michael Brdar (now part of Bob Melvin’s major league staff in San Diego). “I think [Ed’s] a game changer,” Santin says, “he’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with.”
Lucas’ philosophy pairs an emphasis on preparation and game planning with the kind of high intensity workouts that Gabe Kapler’s staff has emphasized with the major league roster. Hitters practice against high velocity with pitching machines cranked up and placed half way to home plate. In cages, they’ll hit off foam balls that spin at unrealistically high rates. The result, according to Brett Auerbach, is that the game experience can slow down for hitters.
“What Ed and Danny are doing has really helped me,” Auerbach told me before a recent game. “Training really hard and preparing yourself so when you get in the game, it’s almost easy, because you have already trained yourself to hit a ball that’s unrealistic and spinning like crazy, so when you get in the game and you’ll see something nasty, and it’s like: oh I’ve already seen it.”
Everything is focused on putting players in the best situation for success — being prepared, having a plan, reflecting on success and failure and drawing lessons from that to prepare for the next night. Nothing can be overlooked that might help the organization support a player’s efforts to improve themselves.
It’s worth stopping there a moment and considering that relationship. The players themselves are, ultimately, responsible for their own development. The organization is there to support them and give them what they need for that development — but credit always goes to the player first. These aren’t widgets that a Smart Organization™ is churning out with enhanced algorithms. The players are the ones who stand in against the nastiest stuff ever thrown, and the players are the ones who will have to find success within themselves — through their own efforts, first and foremost. Speaking with Santin about the development strides that David Villar has made over the last year, Santin stopped me and made sure to emphasize that point:
“And that’s credit to him!” Santin interjected. “I’m sure that he and the rest of our player development staff put an enormous effort into making that happen. But at the end, he did it! So credit to Villar, you know?”
Aggressively accurate again — even in assigning credit. Therein lies what the Giants hope is the secret to success for many of these players.
To hear more of Danny Santin’s thoughts, listen to this week’s There R Giants podcast: