North Shore Tavern Mound Visit: Head's hands the key to more power

It will be years until we know for sure how many of the Pirates’ trades turned out, but at the moment, the Joe Musgrove trade looks promising.

David Bednar was one of the few bright spots from last season and could anchor that bullpen for years to come. Endy Rodriguez has emerged as a top 10 prospect in the system and could crack top 100 lists depending on his encore performance in Greensboro. Omar Cruz should pitch in the big leagues one day, perhaps even this season. Even if Drake Fellows never fully bounces back from his elbow injury, that’s a good mix of players who can help the major-league team now with some long-term high upside potential. 

Hudson Head falls into the latter category. At the time of the trade, he was the headliner of that trade package, ranking inside the top 10 of a talented Padres farm system with some major upside. He was very raw, playing only 32 games in rookie ball out of high school in 2019, but the Pirates gravitated towards high-risk, high-reward teenagers at this time (Liover Peguero, Eddy Yean. Brennan Malone). Head fit that mold.

But young prospects like that have a higher chance of fizzling out too. While it’s not fair to say that’s the case with Head, he did take a tumble on this year’s prospect charts, going from No. 11 on FanGraphs’ 2021 Pirates prospect list to No. 41 on this year’s. That doesn’t mean he still can’t be a quality major-leaguer, but he’s going to need to improve on last year’s .213/.362/.394 slash line.

Playing in Class Low-A Bradenton as a 20-year-old last year, Head got his first true look of full season pitching to very mixed results. He struck out in 31.6% of his plate appearances last year (see last week’s Mound Visit for why that 30% mark is so important), but his 13% swinging strike rate was actually right around several other notable prospects. Peguero and Oneil Cruz were within half a percentage point of his whiff rate, and their strikeout rates were noticeably lower, hovering at around 25%. 

I have a theory for why his strikeout rate was higher. Head was the truest of the three true outcome hitters in the Pirates’ system last year, drawing a walk (or getting hit by a pitch), striking out or homering in 54.1% of his 434 plate appearances. He walked in 15.7% of his plate appearances, which is outstanding at any level, but I can’t help but feel that the patience he showed might have been a double-edged sword and he watched too many strikes go by. He may have whiffed less, but that’s not as useful if you are on that wrong side of that aggressive/passive line.

There’s always going to be some swing and miss in his game, partly due to what an analyst told me was below-average bat speed. He sells out during that swing, which is why he’s still able to generate good power, both in terms of counting stats (15 homers) and a 41% hard-hit rate, which is already close to major-league average. Mix in a good average launch angle of 13 degrees – a credit to him hitting mostly fly balls and line drives – and there’s a solid offensive profile here, sans the strikeout rate.

But when you don’t have elite bat speed, you need to be efficient with your hands. That was a struggle for Head last season. It’s also been an area of focus for him this winter.

"I really worked on, my hands are now in a more consistent place,” Head said at Pirate City during minor-league spring training. “I think if you take just a month out of the year for me and just looked at video, I probably set up three, four, five different ways. So now I think I found that consistency where I put my hands, how I set up, where I set up, and that's probably the main part right there."

You can take Head’s word that his hands kept moving last year. His mechanics are very much a work in progress, partially because he didn’t play a ton of baseball in high school. 

Take this swing from 2019. There’s a lot that needs to be ironed out, especially in the lower half, but the hands are always moving, and not exactly in an efficient way. He gets to the load much later than a professional hitter would:

I could take Head’s advice and post about 20 different swings he had through last season here, but this swing from July is a pretty good, quick encapsulation of what he was trying to do at the plate for the first three months of the season. Upright stance, very high hands, medium sized leg kick. This time, it resulted in a homer:

Head took a turn for the worse in August, striking out 40% of the time. Here we started to see the approach change. He starts getting more crouched and the hands are lower. As a result, it takes him a little less time to get to his load:

This trend continued for the rest of the campaign.

That looked like a step in the right direction, giving him something to build on this offseason. Here’s a video I shot at Pirate City last week. Here, he’s a little less crouched and the leg kick appears to have gotten a bit bigger, but the hands are what really stands out. They’re higher than they were at the end of last season, practically at ear level, but he gets to his load faster, meaning he can get the swing out in front sooner:

In the past, Head would drop the hands and then go back to the load. Now it’s one motion, cutting down on some time by taking a shorter route there. Getting that swing started a little sooner can only help him get his contact point out in front more, resulting in more pulled fly balls and line drives, or catch up with challenging pitches in the zone to foul off some potential strikeouts. Both would really help his offensive profile.

It’s too soon to write off Head. Some of this was to be expected from a player making the jump to full season ball, especially for someone still figuring out his swing because he hadn’t played a ton of competitive games his entire baseball career to that point.

With that said, Greensboro is a hitters’ park. More consistent hand movements, in addition to a more aggressive approach at the plate, could put him back in the top prospect discussion.