Cubs Quick Hits – 01/27/2017: Jason Heyward Hit Fewer Grounders on Inside Pitches

If you watched many of Jason Heyward’s at-bats last year, you can probably visualize him rolling over on a pitch and dribbling it to the second baseman. It happened too often, and the major reconstruction of his swing attempts to fix exactly that. As we see in exclusive video of his batting session at Sloan Park yesterday, it looks like Heyward is trying to maximize his body weight transfer from his back side.

Maybe these changes will help him lift the ball, especially against pitches on the outside portion of the plate. As you can see from the heat map below, that’s the area that saw Heyward hit the most grounders.