Inside Alan Roden's Swing Overhaul: What Changed and Why the Twins Believe

[Parker Hageman]

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-Imagn Images

Nobody reads anymore.

A recent Atlantic article found that just 16% of Americans read for pleasure. The other 84%? Apparently they're reading because life, work, or the IRS forced them to.

That means if you clicked on an article breaking down Alan Roden's swing changes, you're either part of a dying breed or you accidentally tapped the wrong link. Either way, welcome.

I'll make you a deal. We'll get to the video almost immediately, and then we'll spend the rest of the article figuring out why the Twins believe Roden's new setup might unlock more offense than the version we watched a year ago.

 So what did you just watch?

My guess is your first thought was something along the lines of, "Alan Roden has a pretty unorthodox swing." That slow-pitch softball leg kick catches a lot of people off guard. Your second thought might be that the two swings actually look fairly similar, aside from him setting up a little lower this season.

You'd be right on both counts.

But let's dig a little deeper.

In 2024, Roden hit a career-high 16 home runs. The left-handed hitting outfielder believed he had the tools to produce that kind of power more consistently. His goal became improving his launch angle to the pull side so he could drive more baseballs in the air and over the fence.

Here's what Roden told Fangraphs' David Laurila about his stance during spring training last year:

"The stance is about pre-setting the slot so that once I get to launch position I can just turn — it’s how I’m posturing, and directionally moving through the swing to match the plane of the pitch. There is a little more space behind me now, and the turn starts a little bit earlier. It’s been a process to get to this point, but I really like where I’m at right now."

When Roden talks about "pre-setting the slot," he's referring to the relationship between his hands, arms, and bat throughout the swing. In simple terms, he's trying to maintain a strong triangle between his arms and hands as he delivers the barrel.

Compare that to his setup at Creighton. His pre-pitch posture was noticeably looser than what we saw during his 2025 season.

Alan Roden with his 5th HR of the season gives Creighton a 3-0 lead over San Jose State! pic.twitter.com/QIzcgndDMy

— Nebraska Public Media (@NebPublicMedia) April 17, 2021

While Roden found success against college and minor league pitching, those results didn't immediately carry over against major league arms. In 55 games with the Blue Jays and Twins in 2025, he hit .191/.261/.294. In his 12 games just with Minnesota, he hit .158 with 13 strikeouts, no walks, and just 40 plate appearances.

Rather than continue doing the same thing and hoping for different results, Roden made meaningful adjustments entering 2026.

The first noticeable change is in his lower half.

Just as he previously focused on pre-setting his slot, he's now pre-setting his back hip. You'll notice he's hinging much more into his rear leg compared to last year's upright setup. In 2025, his lower-half move eventually got him into this position. Now he's ready to fire the moment he gets into the box.

He's also starting from a much more open stance. This season he's set up at roughly 45 degrees compared to 34 degrees a year ago, which was already well above the MLB average of 11 degrees.

His hand position is another obvious adjustment.

He's starting with his hands lower and farther away from his body than he did last season. In 2025, the bat would wrap behind him during the load, creating a longer path to the baseball and making it more difficult to get to velocity on the inner half. Now his hands stay much more in line with his torso, creating stretch without pulling everything offline.

There are also several underlying traits that make Roden an intriguing offensive bet and someone worth giving every opportunity to figure things out.

He owns one of the better strike-zone profiles you'll find. Throughout the minors, Roden actually walked more than he struck out, a rare accomplishment in today's game.

Interestingly, his bat speed is merely average. It's an extremely small sample of just 14 competitive swings in the majors during 2026, but his average bat speed is actually down one mile per hour to 69.1 MPH. League average sits at 71.7 MPH.

The tradeoff is that the bat is getting to the ball on a shorter path. That's one reason he's consistently able to control the strike zone.

There's no guarantee these changes turn Alan Roden into an everyday major leaguer. Hitting is rarely that simple.

What matters is that he's attacking the problem instead of hoping it fixes itself. Every adjustment in his setup has a purpose, from the way he loads his back hip to how he positions his hands.

The next few months won't tell us whether Roden can hit. They'll tell us whether this version of Roden is the one the Twins believed they were acquiring.

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[old nurse]

As the article is listed as being posted 15 hours ago, I would assume Parker is right about people not reading.  Maybe the TD faithful have forgotten who Parker is

[bean5302]

The information presented in the video would be more valuable slowed down with an added text explanation... and there's a lot of free music out there. Jr. Varsity high school band practice isn't the one I would have chosen, haha. Anyway, good stuff is presented. I've found Movavi to be inexpensive and pretty easy to use to create good videos with plenty of free audio. Since you might be using this for TD, I think it's more like $400 for a commercial license, though.

Back to Roden. He's been swinging (2025-2026) at like 33% of pitches out of the zone and only 60% of pitches in the zone. Both well below MLB average. His contact rates for pitches outside the zone is pretty abysmal, but inside the zone it's very good.

I think his plate adjustments are trying to make the absolute most of his talent. Polish has probably carried him as far as it can, we'll just have to see how he performs over the next 100-200 PA to get a better feel for whether his pitch recognition skills will be good enough for MLB.

[Parker Hageman]

@bean5302 Thank you for the feedback. I've made some adjustments to the video in order to help call out his adjustments better (and ditched the music, which wasn't supposed to be as pronounced as it came out). Feel free to give it another whirl. 

(I use CapCut Pro. It is very simple and powerful too. I'm obviously a self-taught video editor but as we start to expand into a world with less readers, I'm working on flexing that muscle as well, particular with the visual information that I typically write about. Naturally, voiceovers and the like make it easier to digest but that's going to take me some time to develop that skill. )

As for Roden, yes, that small sample of major league pitch decision isn't great. It's not uncommon for prospects -- even ones with strong zone discipline skills in the minor leagues -- to struggle with that. Sometimes it takes consistent plate appearances and sometimes it takes mechanical adjustments in order combat it. My big takeaway from where he was to where he is now with his set-up and swing suggests that he/the Twins staff understand those issues and is working on improving his pitch recognition ability. That said, the world is littered with promising prospects with big tools and big minor league numbers that never got over that final hurdle.

[bean5302]

28 minutes ago, Parker Hageman said:

@bean5302 Thank you for the feedback. I've made some adjustments to the video in order to help call out his adjustments better (and ditched the music, which wasn't supposed to be as pronounced as it came out). Feel free to give it another whirl. 

(I use CapCut Pro. It is very simple and powerful too. I'm obviously a self-taught video editor but as we start to expand into a world with less readers, I'm working on flexing that muscle as well, particular with the visual information that I typically write about. Naturally, voiceovers and the like make it easier to digest but that's going to take me some time to develop that skill. )

As for Roden, yes, that small sample of major league pitch decision isn't great. It's not uncommon for prospects -- even ones with strong zone discipline skills in the minor leagues -- to struggle with that. Sometimes it takes consistent plate appearances and sometimes it takes mechanical adjustments in order combat it. My big takeaway from where he was to where he is now with his set-up and swing suggests that he/the Twins staff understand those issues and is working on improving his pitch recognition ability. That said, the world is littered with promising prospects with big tools and big minor league numbers that never got over that final hurdle.

I like the adjustments a lot! Video editing is far more tedious than people realize. To top it off, what makes content work on a site like Twins Daily will make it "not work" on a short clip consumption platform like TikTok. It forces 3x the amount of time investment into editing to have a multi-platform video.

You did some impressively quick editing there. It can take me an hour or more to make significant edits, save, export, and upload a video. Then, if it's a longer video, waiting for youtube to finish the HD version can be a pain. I wind up watching it over and over again tinkering before I upload. My average 10-20min videos for youtube take 2+hrs to cut together. Shorter videos don't save a ton of time as much as people might think, either. Getting the video concentrated down to 30-120 seconds while sharing the meat of the content is incredibly difficult. Tons and tons of cutting and editing.