Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.
They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.
Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.
Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.
They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.
Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.
Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.