Just before his highest moment, Alex Bregman stared at his lowest body part. His left foot—his front foot when he hits—had been betraying him for something like two years, and just as he had started to figure out how to put it where he wanted to, he lost it again.
After his second at bat of Saturday’s Game 2 of the World Series, which his Astros would win 5–2 over the Phillies to even the series, he returned to the dugout looking disgruntled. He had put good swings on the ball in both at bats, but his back hip was drifting backward and leaking forward, which slid that left foot a few inches behind where he wanted it to go. The result was a pair of grounders to shortstop.
“I’m flying open,” the third baseman lamented to hitting coach Troy Snitker.
Snitker had heard this before. He’d also said it before. Almost since he arrived in Houston in 2019, Snitker had been gently suggesting to Bregman that he consider focusing on his lower half. He’d been mentioning this “for a while,” he says, smiling. “Forever,” Bregman says.
But at this moment, with the Astros up 3–0 a night after allowing a 5–0 lead to evaporate, neither man was thinking about the nights they spent dissecting video or the emotional conversation they shared in the batting cage one afternoon or even the time, on the eve of the season, when Bregman admitted he was afraid to play baseball. They were thinking about that foot.
After it was over; after Bregman had stridden to the plate in the fifth inning, taken two Zack Wheeler sinkers inside and deposited a slider in the seats above the Phillies’ bullpen; after he had hit his 15th postseason home run, tying him with Babe Ruth; after he had called this stretch “the most fun I ever had playing baseball”; he would credit Snitker for finding the key that unlocked that swing.
During the American League Championship Series, they had settled on a new swing thought—”stay tall, land closed”—that seemed to work, but that was no longer enough. Toward the end of that series, Bregman felt himself begin to struggle again, and in Game 1 of the World Series, he says, “I was late because I was thinking about it too much in the box.”
He still needed to stay tall and land closed, but as he and Snitker watched video on the iPad in the dugout, Snitker suggested another term: “Keep your back hip over your back foot.”
“So the next one,” Bregman says, “I thought about keeping my back hip over my back foot.”