Former Division II baseball player Richard Schenck, the self-taught personal hitting coach for Detroit Tigers outfielder Kerry Carpenter, was sitting on his porch in April 2018 in Missouri when he received a phone call from Manny Ramirez, a 12-time MLB All-Star who played 19 seasons.
Ramirez, a two-time World Series champion, wanted to discuss Schenck’s greatest discovery.
Launch quickness.
“I don’t like you,” Ramirez said. “I saw a video of you, and you said I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Manny, you could do it,” said Schenck, a 67-year-old father of three from St. Peters, Missouri — a suburb of St. Louis — who owns a pool hall called “Teachers Billiards.” Schenck, who learned to emulate Barry Bonds‘ swing in his basement, told Ramirez, “You’re one of the best ever at it, but you couldn’t explain what you did.”
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One of Schenck’s latest success stories is Carpenter, a 19th-round pick in the 2019 draft from Virginia Tech. The Tigers didn’t invite him to their minor-league minicamp last February, which included the likes of then-top prospects Spencer Torkelson and Riley Greene, and quietly shipped him to Double-A Erie to begin the 2022 season.
Nobody was talking about him.
By August, Carpenter had 30 home runs in the minor leagues, followed by a promotion for his MLB debut. This February, the 25-year-old will compete in spring training for a spot on the 2023 Opening Day roster. If all goes as planned, he could establish himself as an everyday player.
“I wouldn’t be in the big leagues if I didn’t go see Rich,” Carpenter said. “I think that’s a true statement. I wouldn’t have the ability to hit the velocity that I’ve hit all year and then also be able to adjust to the offspeed. The quickness that my swing gives me was a catalyst for the year that I had.”
What Carpenter learned from Schenck resembles what Ramirez accomplished naturally. He also taught the concept of launch quickness to Aaron Judge. In January 2018, Judge endorsed Schenck to the baseball world — three months before Ramirez’s phone call — as the next big thing.
“All the great hitters, in my opinion, do what I teach,” Schenck said, specifically naming Bonds, Judge and Miguel Cabrera, “whether they know it or not.”
Ramirez started laughing.
“That’s why I called you,” he said. “You’re the only one that can explain what I did.”
‘Like water through the dam’
Before Carpenter burst onto the scene, he wasn’t considered a true prospect in the Tigers’ farm system. In late February, while top names such as Greene and Torkelson were participating in minicamp amid MLB’s lockout, Carpenter visited Schenck in Missouri.
That visit — inspired by a recommendation from former Tigers outfielder Jacob Robson — changed his career. In 2021, Carpenter hit .262 with 15 home runs for Double-A Erie, but those results weren’t enough to put him on the map.
“When it turned on, it just exploded like water through the dam,” Schenck said. “He’s an exceptional young man and deserves everything he’s getting. I think his future is really bright.”
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Flipping the switch, and enhancing his left-handed swing, took three days in February. Those felt like the longest three days of Carpenter’s baseball career, as he took somewhere between 1,000-1,500 swings over the weekend. (For reference, he takes about 100 swings on game days.)
Carpenter walked in the door aware of his situation: decent swing, decent bat path and solid hand-eye coordination. But he either had to jump high-velocity fastballs, or he had to cheat to attack secondary offerings, and if he guessed wrong, he would look foolish.
Essentially, Carpenter struggled to get his bat up to speed quickly. Imagine a Corvette and Volkswagen. Both vehicles can reach 100 mph, but a Corvette will always get there before a Volkswagen.
For too long, Carpenter felt like the Volkswagen.
“It’s just the quickness from the time that I tell myself I want to swing and when my hands actually go,” Carpenter said. “It’s called launch quickness. I can let the ball travel just a little bit longer to make a decision, and when I do that, I take more balls and swing at more strikes.”
Launch quickness
Schenck discovered launch quickness — powered by a rearward move of the bat and a snap of the hands — in September 2006 after spending several years watching videos of Bonds and trying to copy his left-handed swing.
Now, Schenck teaches the concept.
“When you’re waiting for a pitch, your hip is coiling around the rear leg with the intention of twisting the rear leg,” Schenck said. “Your hip coils and your back muscles pull back with the coil. We snap our hands and tilt our torso, so the leg unwinds with supernatural quickness.”
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Carpenter began his first session with the command drill. A baseball was set on a tee, and Schenck issued the order to swing. “Load up … go,” he would say. Most players, upon hearing the command, load up some more and then swing the bat after the command.
The goal of the command drill: to eliminate the time between the command and the swing, thus improving pitch recognition.
“And then we have a couple drills where I teach how to twist the rear leg,” Schenck said. “I call them stretch and fire drills, where you coil and stretch your back against your back leg and then swing and hit some balls off the tee.”
One-legged drills were crucial to the development of Carpenter’s swing. He would stand on his left leg — the back leg of his stance — with his right leg in the air and angled toward an imaginary dugout. Hitting balls from that position revealed how the hip and back leg work together.
Carpenter does this drill before every game.
“Another one-legged drill is when we stand on one leg and lift our lead leg, but it’s not behind us like the other drill, it’s just lifted up,” Schenck said. “We start to move forward slowly with the idea of never letting that leg come down. When we do that, in order to not let that lead leg come down, we have to coil and pull back with our back, which twists our rear leg, which is exactly what we want to do.
“When you’re going forward, you can’t hold that lead leg up forever. At that point, when that lead leg is going to come down, that is the absolute best spot to swing the bat. You’re fully stretched. You’re fully loaded.”
A more advanced drill, similar to the command drill, involved a pitching machine. Schenck asked Carpenter to swing his bat at pitch release to prove he was ready to swing then, even though it was impossible to make contact with the ball.
Carpenter does this drill before every game, too.
“If we’re loaded and could swing the bat at pitch release, that means we are literally waiting for every ball out of the hand,” Schenck said. “We’re waiting for 100 (mph), we’re waiting for 95. And if we’re waiting for the fastball, it’s not all that hard to wait a tick longer for the offspeed pitch.”
‘It was such a blessing’
After three days in Missouri, Carpenter packed his bags and traveled to Lakeland, Florida, for minor-league spring training. He struggled early on, but luckily, Schenck was working with Judge, a longtime disciple, and new client Anthony Rizzo nearby in Tampa.
So, Schenck invited Carpenter to join them.
“He continued to struggle a little bit, but we found out what was wrong,” Schenck said. “He just had to get better at it. One thing led to another, and pretty soon, he got a few hits and then the season started. He started a little bit slow but finally got it going.”
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In 2022, Judge crushed 62 home runs — breaking the American League record — while Rizzo tied a career-high 32 homers. (Schenck pre-scheduled 10 meetings with Judge throughout his historic campaign, including one late-April session at a facility in Waterford.) And Carpenter launched 36 homers combined in minor- and major-league play last season.
With the Tigers, he hit .252 with six homers, six walks and 32 strikeouts in 31 games.
“It was such a blessing,” Carpenter said. “Sometimes, I can’t even believe that I get to do this for a living and do this at the highest level. I didn’t have the most consistency that I wanted, but I was still able to produce a good amount up here.”
Carpenter realized he could succeed in mid-August during a four-game series against the Cleveland Guardians at Progressive Field. He doubled off right-handed starter Xzavion Curry and took righty reliever Eli Morgan deep in the second game of the series, then homered off righty starter Zach Plesac in the third game.
Cleveland’s pitching staff ranked sixth last season with a 3.47 ERA.
“Having some good games in that series helped build my confidence,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter then went hitless in his next six games before a strong final 20 games, batting .282 with four homers, two walks and 20 strikeouts. “I think we can confidently say he has put himself on the map and earned his way up here,” manager A.J. Hinch said Sept. 29.
His rookie season ended at the end of September because of a lumbar spine strain, but he has since returned to full health. From Aug. 10-Sept. 27 — the duration of his career in the majors — Carpenter’s 126 wRC+ ranked 115th among 1,135 position players and tied Akil Baddoo for the best mark on the Tigers.
His 5.3% walk rate and 33% chase rate are areas to improve.
“There’s some stuff with my approach, like controlling the strike zone,” Carpenter said. “I feel like my swing can let me do that because I can be quick to the ball, so I can make later decisions and better swing decisions. Pick pitches that I can drive and handle, and then later in the count, do a better job of putting the ball in play and helping the team out more.”
Carpenter has spent his offseason in Phoenix training alongside some of his teammates, including Torkelson. He recently attended a clinic in Knoxville, Tennessee, where he reconnected with Schenck. They are scheduled for a hitting session in Arizona before spring training begins. This time around, Carpenter gets to compete for a more permanent role with the Tigers.
He was one of the best stories in 2022.
And he expects to make more big-league memories in 2023.
“Each level you go up, the pitching gets better,” Schenck said. “He handled Double-A. He handled Triple-A. He got off to a rough start in the big leagues but then came on pretty good. When he gets comfortable with the environment — the fact that he’s a big leaguer, plays every day and gets to see pitchers more than once — I think he’s going to have a very good major-league career.”
Contact Evan Petzold at epetzold@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @EvanPetzold.