Meet Sparkle: Emmanuel Rodríguez's Unique Swing is Great, But What Happens Afterward is Better

Nobody who arrives in the major leagues wants to be called 'adorable'. That's a word you use for a puppy or a kid. It's good for scarves and craft projects. It fits a brawny young athlete like a mid-2000s NBA draftee's suit. These guys are tenacious and resilient. They're competitive. They're often handsome, but they don't want to be cute. Surely, they don't want to be called 'adorable'.

So, to Emmanuel Rodríguez: I'm sorry. I don't mean this as condescending or infantilizing. If I could come up with a better word for this, I would. But the English language hasn't yet found a better term for what happens when Rodríguez connects cleanly on one of his picture-perfect swings and sends a ball sailing toward the gap. It's adorable, man.

First, let's go to the tape. Here's Rodríguez hitting a gorgeous two-run triple to flip the scoreboard against the Yankees on September 14.

We will—I promise, we will—return to an analysis of Rodríguez's swing itself; that's what I thought this article was going to be all about. But for now, just absorb that, aesthetically. Now, enjoy this double, the very next night.

I wonder if maybe you've already spotted it, but I won't assume that you have, or demand that you go back and find it. Here's another example, when he doubled (to break a miniature slump) Sunday in Anaheim.

And finally, here's the homer Rodríguez hit late in Monday night's loss to the Giants. What a swing. What a hitter.

Already, it's clear that this guy will be a dynamic presence in the Twins lineup. There's some really interesting data on his swing, which we can evaluate sooner and better than ever thanks to Statcast's ever-deepening trove of great numbers. But I don't want to talk about all of that just yet. We need to talk about this, instead.

You offer me a better word than 'adorable,' and I'll take it, but I'm defying you. I don't think it exists. When Rodríguez catches the sweet spot—when he really gets through one the way he wants to—he absolutely cannot help himself. Involuntarily (sometimes just momentarily; he occasionally catches himself and shuts it down fast), before he's even done following through but as he sees the ball jump off his bat the way he felt sure it would, he breaks into a big old smile.

Hitting in the majors is serious business. It's damn hard, and it's no fun when you're piling up rollover grounders or strikeouts. The culture of the game still expects quite a bit of decorum, really. You're expected to be so intense that you often look dour or angry, even at your moment of triumph.

But anyone who's ever picked up a bat and squeezed out the sawdust—anyone who's wiggled their fingers and swished the stick and stepped into a box and waited and watched and given their best pass at a ball—knows the truth under all that professionalism. There's maybe one better feeling in this world than hitting a baseball pure, and if you want to talk about it, you need to open an incognito tab and go discuss it on a very different website. The tactile joy of hitting a ball so cleanly that you don't really feel the contact is as close to the thrill of flight as most of us will ever feel. If you know that feeling, you're either smiling even as you read this, or fighting your own cheek muscles to stop it. 

Rodríguez knows that feeling when it comes, and he doesn't bother fighting his own face. The delight spreads across his visage, and we all get to share in his moment of happiness. That's a huge part of what being a sports fan should be. It's a wonderful service he's doing for Twins fans, even at the disappointing end of a squandered season. 

You really don't see this that much. Most hitters can hit a ball 450 feet and maintain a glower. Rodríguez can't. I propose we all agree to nickname him 'Sparkle,' because the flash of his teeth on this handful of swings has been the brightest set of scintillations to hit Twins Territory since the first time the sunlight hit the limestone at Target Field. The best part is that it's utterly unpretentious. Not one bit of it is a put-on; Rodríguez is doing it without making a conscious decision. It's just the love of the game spilling out of him, at the very moment when we all sympathize with that feeling the most.

While we're here, let's talk just a little about why he's already cracked five extra-base hits and has gotten so many chances to show off the pearly whites. Rodríguez has an outlier of a swing, in addition to the impressive plate discipline that everyone knew about long before he reached the majors. By and large, the shorter a hitter's swing, the slower it is. Creating torque and bat speed takes space, and most hitters with fast swings also have long ones. Not Rodríguez, though.

See that red X in the lower right portion of this chart? That's Rodríguez. For a guy who's so direct to the ball, he's shockingly good at getting the bat moving fast by the time he gets to the hitting zone. The only player with a similarly fast swing who's close to being as short to the ball as Rodríguez is the Brewers' Garrett Mitchell. 

You might be surprised to hear this about Rodríguez (and Mitchell, for that matter), because in general, short swings are expected to produce high contact rates. Rodríguez (and Mitchell, for that matter) whiffs a lot, which doesn't fit the narrative. The problem is pretty simple: the tradeoff he's making by getting from 0 to 76 MPH in such a short space is that he has fairly little control of the barrel when he gets near the contact point. He also hits it farther in front of his body than most players with short swings, and again, it's not a coincidence. His directness allows him to wait a long time to decide to swing, and contributes to his patience. However, it also means that if he's even slightly wrong about the pitch speed or movement he perceives, he'll be unable to make an adjustment and catch the ball with his bat, let alone his barrel.

That might mean a long adjustment curve for Rodríguez as he settles into a full-time job in the majors. Hitting in the majors is hard, and his approach from the minors won't quite work here. However, his swing is a lethal, thrilling thing—and that reaction to the times when it produces the results he's looking for is (sorry) adorable.

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