So, there is something called the Old Man Test. It has been around for at least five to six years, but it has toured the internet again. The idea is very simple. You have to wear socks and shoes without having to let your feet touch the ground. You raise your left foot and keep it in the air, when you reach out to grab the socks, put on the socks, reach to the ground to grab the shoes, place it Then tie it up and do the same with your right foot. It tests your balance, strength, flexibility and everything else that should have. If you fail the test, you are an old man, I think? Maybe you immediately became an old man? Maybe a healthy elderly person is just showing up outside your window and laughing at you? That part is not clear yet.
I tend to accept the idea that the elderly test is measuring important things because whenever I have to do physical therapy, I am forced to do a lot of one foot exercise. If you have ever been in physical therapy, I bet you have to do that, too. There is nothing a physical therapist loves more than the difficult level of simple exercises that force you to stand on one leg. Once you are good at making a lot of effort, they will put you on a resilient ball or other side, and if you are sure of that, they will start pushing you harder. Indeed, no one on Earth is shorter and fatter than a physical therapist.
I brought it all up because the other day I noticed Steven Kwan playing with something fun. The graphics capture the dance hall’s dance pictures, showing each player interesting little footprints in three ways: their resting hitting posture, when the pitcher releases the ball and when the bat actually intercepts the ball. This is the 2024 graphics:
Kua has one of the narrowest hitting positions in the game, so his forefoot is a lot towards the mound, but other than that, it is nothing significant. He is a little guy with a little pose and took 11 photos. But this is the peace before the storm. Here is the same graphics this month. Please note the blue footprint:
When I look at this, I’m confused. Was Steven Kwan actually stepping on the plate when the pitcher releases the ball? This seems to be something I’d noticed before, but there’s that blue footprint, right on the plate, clear. How can anyone start swinging with their body so closed? Is it even legal to step on the plate in the middle of the swing? This is absolutely illegal. I pulled up the rulebook and started looking at it before I realized what was actually happening. If you are familiar with Kwan’s swing, I’m sure you already know the answer, which will bring us back to the Old Man’s test.
Qun didn’t step on the plate, but he had one of the most eye-catching leg kicks in the game, in which he hung his foot directly on the board. There is no way to show that his feet are 18 inches from the ground in the two-dimensional diagram. Sometimes, I’m not exaggerating here, Guan En’s entire foot is in the strike area and the ball is already on the way to home plate. In the middle of the court, no batsman is closer to the place where he is tied to his shoes:
I went back to baseball racers and looked at the batting posture diagram of each qualified player, with hundreds of cleats on the batting box, black to blue to red. I would estimate very roughly that half of today’s batsmen didn’t move their forefoot too much, but that still left huge leg kicks and dozens of players whose blue forefoots moved in all directions. None of these players did what Kewan did. None of them did anything similar to something about it. When hitting the ball from the right, Ozzie Albies did place most of his left foot outside the batter box, but that was mainly because he put the distance from the board five inches closer to Kwan than Kwan, and his feet were still far away close to the plate. Nobody’s picture looks like Quain’s because nobody’s leg kick looks like Quain’s feet.
This is the secret. He not only has leg kicks. He had a leg kick, and then in the middle, he had a second leg kick. This is a double kick. A normal leg kick is just lifting the foot under the foot, and perhaps worth noting that this is a bit inappropriate. There is a difference between lifting your legs and kicking anywhere outside of a baseball diamond. In baseball, they are the same person. Anyway, Guan did this, stretching his knees until the femur is parallel to the ground, but he just keeps moving forward. At that time, he stepped forward towards the plate and swept the pitcher in a circular motion to put it down:
The leg kicked, and then he got a kick. It wasn’t fair to say he put his right foot in and shake everything. It’s an impressive balance display, and to my knowledge it’s unique. I don’t just look at all the charts. I looked at every player I could think of, who had a thigh kick. I watched YouTube videos that brought together huge leg kicks from the past. The closest leg kick I could find belongs to Alek Thomas and Gary Sánchez, who both moved their front feet while swinging, but they were far from being a two-foot kick. No one did this.
The doubles did not start immediately. It seems that it has been a while since now. When he was selected from Oregon State in 2018, Kwan had a small leg and kicking on his legs and couldn’t see a double kick. I couldn’t find any of his videos from the next two years, but he started with the double kicks in 2021:
Very subtle in the video above. Kwan made his debut in 2022, the double kick was there, but it was still evolving. As he entered the 2024 season when he told MLB Network during spring training, he hoped it would be harder to affect the ball, which meant a more aggressive leg kick. “Previously, I was going to get up and then I just put it back in place,” he said. “So my hands were able to work and I could manipulate the bat as needed. But last year, I tried – the leverage of the bats, early in the number – to really try to take big strides, and now I’m going to go out and get it. Interestingly, in the video, even though Kwan showed off the leg kick (what he called leg lift), he didn’t do the double kick. He probably didn’t even know he was doing it. Only in the heat of the game, double kicks would happen.
This focus is to go out early with the ball call, which is likely the reason why this season has only started to appear on the baseball racer chart. It has something to do with his timing. This year, the second kick didn’t seem to get his feet forward or higher, but it was also faster. If Statcast can show us its full path, it may look almost the same as the path in 2024 or 2023, but it only shows us its position when the ball is released. At that time, Kwaman went further, so his feet were already on the plate. He also got ahead of him a second, and his footsteps started early, part of his low field rate in his career.
Watch any baseball game and you’ll see 18 different batsmen with 18 different timing mechanisms. No one is exactly the same, but they tend to fall into several categories. Players with quiet feet, players with toe taps, and players with leg kicks. Those leg kicks almost drove their feet in every direction. Some players straighten their legs, some players pull back as a lifting mechanism, some kick with their legs to improve a very open position, some start narrowing and push their feet towards the pitcher. But Guan En is the only one who just hung his foot there and kicked him out of the strike zone before attacking the court. This is a feat, and a feat of balance. At least, he should be every physical therapist’s favorite player.
