MLB 2026: Ted Williams, Joey Votto and the art of hittingHow does Ted Williams’ hitting philosophy hold up in 2026? Here’s what never-before-seen footage tells us. Diamond Images/Getty ImagesJeff Passan
On Oct. 9, 1987, a debate more than half a century in the making unfolded on the banks of the Rogue River in Oregon. Ted Williams and Bobby Doerr first met in 1936. Williams was 17 years old, Doerr 18, and even then, before their Hall of Fame careers with the Boston Red Sox had even begun, they disagreed on things.
Over the following decades, among their conversations on endless subjects, none animated Williams and Doerr like talking hitting. Doerr came from the classic school of baseball instruction: swing down on the ball to create the backspin that would carry it over the wall. Williams sneered at convention. He believed the vast majority of coaches were frauds. He thought the entire hitting apparatus in Major League Baseball was broken. And he would tell anyone who would listen.
They decided to formalize their discussion in the middle of a three-day fishing trip — all captured on a video camera and revealed in long-lost footage found last year in the home of their late Red Sox teammate, Dave “Boo” Ferriss and shared with ESPN. Canoes in the background, tour boats whirring by, Williams and Doerr were given strict rules: Each would have 10 minutes to espouse his perspective on hitting, then both could use five-minute question-and-answer sessions with their fishing buddies to round out their philosophy.
What came next was a Ted Williams masterclass, a visual companion to his beloved, brilliant dissertation, “The Science of Hitting.” Listening to Williams in 2026 is similar to listening to a major league hitting coach in 2026. Anyone who ever doubted Williams’ acumen need only see what he reported nearly 40 years ago in the Rogue River debate — and recognize that he applied those virtues to his own game decades earlier.
It is a point, in fact, made by his debate opponent.
“He was so much ahead of anybody else,” Doerr reported, and though Williams’ foresight is something to behold, Doerr deserves plenty of credit for essentially taking on prime Mike Tyson in a debate on hitting. Doerr was not, it turns out, Buster Douglas. Even though the fishing pals voted on the debate and called it a tie, Williams’ wisdom was undeniable.
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We thought we’d heard the last new words from Ted Williams, that we’d never have more to learn from the Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived.
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— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) August 17, 2026
It can be boiled down to five specific points that six-time All-Star and former National League MVP Joey Votto, the foremost devotee among modern players of Williams’ hitting philosophy, assessed below.
“I travel with the holy book,” Votto reported. “‘The Science of Hitting’ was always with me at every major league stop. And I used it from the very beginning of my minor league career all the way until the end of my major league career. And the more you play, the more professional reps you get, the more you realize how special that book is and how connected to the hitting experience Ted Williams was, of course, but was able to communicate to the average reader. And the video is another step. It’s almost like he had to distill down his ideas in ‘The Science of Hitting,’ but he was able to elaborate how complicated the hitting experience is in this 45-minute video.”
Point 1: “Now, there’s two things about hitting that I want to stress. Quickness. This is a quick game and a strong game. You wanna be as quick and strong as you can be.”
How does it apply today? The average MLB position player during the bulk of Williams’ career, throughout the 1940s and ’50s, was around 6 feet tall and between 180 and 185 pounds. The average every-day player today is 6-foot-1, 210 pounds. Hitters know that size and speed, as much as anything, make the player. They’ve geared their efforts toward those ideals, whether it’s with strength training in the weight room or bat-speed training in the cages. And the benefits, as Votto explains, go well beyond the obvious Newtonian principles.
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Votto’s take: “From the very beginning of the video, he reported quickness. And for a hitter, that is the word that represents swing decisions. Quickness is another term for: I have the option as the ball’s approaching to read and react. And then because my swing is so quick, I’m making an almost-cognitive decision: This is an appropriate one to swing at, and this one isn’t. The goal is to create a positive feedback loop with your swing and swing decision. Center of the plate, swing. Center of the plate, the goal is to almost — we use the term groove your swing so you’re only comfortable in the middle of the plate.
“And that combination of grooving your swing for center of the plate with this natural sort of process of feeling uncomfortable when things are away from that grooved swing will lead to better swing decisions and inevitably lead to more walks, higher on base. And so the modern hitter, I think, is realizing in combination with the ABS, I just have to hit the middle pitch. And then the ones kind of on the edge — if they’re 50/50, it’s a reasonable thing to take with a full count.”
Point 2: “Everything you do, hips ahead of hands.”
How does it apply today? Ted Williams intuitively understood the sequencing of a swing, and though he never used the words “kinetic chain,” it certainly applies to his principles. The idea is: To generate the most energy that can be imparted when bat meets ball, the body must move in a deliberate, sequential fashion.
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Williams never had force plates, which hitters use today to help measure how much energy they’re creating during a swing. Absent the technology to deliver objective numbers, he opted for a simple, repeatable, memorable nugget — hips ahead of hands — that he emphasized by aggressively coiling and uncoiling his front hip before his hands followed through the zone.
Votto’s take: “His guidance was of course hips, but watching him stand up and demonstrate it throughout the 45-minute video helped me better understand where his mind was. And so as someone that had to take the guidance in the book and then create it in my own head, to see him articulate it physically is a whole ‘nother world. And fortunately, I and many of the other hitters that read his book that made it to the major league level and had success — we may have gotten it right, and Ted may have been happy with us.”
Point 3: “You cannot have good hip action without a slight upswing.”
How does it apply today? In 2015, 33.8% of balls that were put in play were fly balls, according to FanGraphs. In 2026, it’s 39%. Williams recognized before any other hitting philosopher that fly balls are good — and it’s extremely difficult to drive the ball in the air by swinging down or even flat. Almost every extra-base hit is in the air. J.D. Martinez, Justin Turner and Daniel Murphy found the best versions of themselves by embracing fly balls. Votto saw this coming, telling FanGraphs in 2017: “I could see hitters evolving into more of a fly-ball-hunting-type group.” From there, the launch-angle revolution changed baseball — all by doing what Williams had advocated several decades earlier.
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Votto’s take: “It’s another commentary to how special he was. The hardest thing to do, as a hitter, is to pull the ball in the air. And my best way to articulate this is if you’re hitting the ball the other way, or if you’re hitting the ball in the middle of the field, the barrel of your bat gets to flatten perpendicular to the center of the field. You get all this barrel space, and you have all this field to play with. But the second the bat passes that perpendicular mark and it closes off, the barrel starts getting smaller.
“The face of the barrel gets smaller. Combine that with the speed of the pitching, the complicated nature of pitching — changes speeds, up, down, all these variables — to be, like he reported, strong enough and quick enough to be able to accurately match barrel to ball and hit it on the easiest side and put it in the air is the trinity. It’s the holy grail of hitting. And it’s why so many hitters die at the altar of pulling a baseball in the air.”
Point 4: “In order to be quick and strong, you have to have a certain length of stroke. I can get you here or I can get you a little further out. But the more stroke you have, the more stroke you have. The more chance you have to build up power and speed in this bat.”
How does it apply today? This is another Williams discourse under a different name: bat speed. Not simply the idea that swinging the bat faster is generally beneficial. That’s obvious. Rather, these principles have been applied by hitting coaches who advocate for players to pull the ball in the air.
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The logic is simple: The longer a baseball bat travels, the more speed it gains. So when a bat meets a pitch in front of the plate — preferably farther in front — it has gone on a momentum-building journey to get there.
This doesn’t necessarily invalidate opposite-field hitting — Williams knew there was a place for that — but in terms of pure maximization, bat speed is generally superior on balls pulled in play than ones sent to the opposite field.
Votto’s take: “Every time you swing, you have to max out the potential return. And you only get so many swings. And Ted didn’t need a juiced ball. He could have homered with dead balls. And so hitting a fly ball at 6-foot-4, 225 pounds, with a vice grip, at old Fenway, the ball’s going to go over any fence. And to argue in Bobby’s camp, Bobby [Doerr was listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds] couldn’t do that. Bobby can’t hit a fly ball that’s going to go over the fence.
“In this debate, you see both sides, both major league hitting experiences. But now that guys are bigger, now that guys are stronger, now that guys are more comfortable striking out, hitting a fly ball is absolutely the right move because it turns into a ball off the fence or over the wall. It turns into immediate points that the team needs.”
Point 5: “I wanna puke and get a knife in my throat when I’m out in front and hit a f—ing ground ball at first.”
How does it apply today? If fly balls are the priority for a majority of hitters, pitchers are eternally trying to do one of two things: strike them out or induce a ground ball. It’s no surprise that the sinker — the pitch designed to induce grounders — is at its highest rate of usage (16.6%) since 2018. Pitchers understand that as comfortable as hitters have become striking out, the pull-side rollover incenses them — something that has not changed over generations.
Votto’s take: “There is nothing more infuriating than grounding a ball to the right-hand side as a left-handed hitter. And the reason why is people think he’s saying I’m out front. But he spent the entire first little bit of his explanation describing his hips and quickness, being strong and getting under the ball. But what he may or may not understand about his swing is he was actually late.
“Because the sequencing that happens before the swing is released, all of those things that don’t look like they’re moving — to be able to get the barrel to the right spot, they may have mis-sequenced or he may have misread it. And then the bat escapes that strong, through-the-zone feeling. And then you end up rolling the ball over to the first baseman or the second baseman. And so when I would face the Pirates, their style was always pitching in and pitching with sinkers. And they were desperately chasing that ground ball on the right-hand side. And I’d spend the entire series snapping bats and losing my cool in the dugout identically to what Ted Williams is describing in this video.”
