What makes a good pinch hitter in 2026? One manager might have revealed the secret

It all began with an innocuous comment during spring training. In Surprise, Arizona, Texas Rangers manager Skip Schumaker was breaking down the virtues of utility player Tyler Wade. One phrase stood out from the usual platitudes spoken that time of year.

"He is the perfect role player, in my opinion, because he can do so many things. The versatility is there, the ability to compete inside the box, not trying to do too much," Schumaker said. "Coming off the bench is real. There's a lot of guys that can't produce off the bench because they don't have these short, compact swings. And when you have these long swings, it's really challenging to produce in a pinch-hit type of role."

Wait, what? Short-swing guys make better pinch hitters than long-swing guys? Is that actually true, or is that just one of those things that managers say? It makes intuitive sense, but is it a claim that can be verified?

Let's dive into the current state of pinch hitting to find out.

Are we seeing more or fewer pinch hitters these days?

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I was fascinated by pinch hitters -- these old, unathletic players who would come off the bench in key situations, usually hitting for the pitcher but not always, because they could be counted on to slap a line drive somewhere.

In those days, teams would sometimes employ hitters whose only job was to pinch hit. The avatar of this kind of player was the legendary Manny Mota, a .304 career hitter who hit .299 in 499 plate appearances as a pinch hitter. In his later years, it's pretty much all he did for the Los Angeles Dodgers. But there were years, such as 1978, when the Dodgers had room for two such players on the roster -- Mota and Vic Davalillo.

The annals of baseball are peppered with the names of players whose reputations endure because of their ability to come off the bench and produce. Some were players hanging on after suffering chronic injuries (Charlie Keller), some were once-outstanding hitters playing out the string (Rusty Staub) and others were true specialists (Terry Crowley, Gates Brown).

Such players no longer exist. Too much roster space is given to overstuffed bullpens to allow for a full-time pinch hitter. Bench players are selected for positional versatility more than anything. Now that the National League has adopted the universal DH, it wouldn't make sense to do it any other way. But what about the art of pinch hitting in the era without pitchers hitting?

With the adoption of the universal DH, the raw total of pinch-hitting appearances has dropped precipitously. In 2021, the year before the rule change, there were 5,879 pinch-hit plate appearances. In 2022, that number fell to 3,230.

At the same time, it appears that teams are using pinch hitters more frequently, hitting-for-the-pitcher situations aside. In 2022, there were 0.66 pinch hitters used per team per game; over the past couple of years, that number has been around 0.77.

The trend is longer than that, though, which we can see if we zero in on American League data. Last season, AL teams used 0.85 pinch hitters per game, the highest figure for that circuit in the past 23 years. It's more than twice as high as the low point of this period, 0.41 per game in 2011. And that figure includes hitting-for-the-pitcher spots for AL clubs playing on the road in interleague play.

Teams don't have to hit for pitchers anymore, but they still find plenty of reasons to pinch hit -- and those reasons seem to be growing.

Is the way pinch hitters are used different from in years past?

We're now talking about reasons other than hitting for a pitcher. One way to look at this is to consider the average leverage index over the years of pinch-hitting at-bats. (Leverage index is a measure of each plate appearance's possible impact on the game's outcome; the average is 1.)

According to FanGraphs, the league-level leverage index for pinch hitters has been dropping. Last season, it was 1.42, the lowest score since 2017 (1.38) and the second lowest of all measured seasons since 1974. In the early going this season, the total is a record-matching 1.38.

This is a change from the Mota-type pinch hitters, who were often called off the bench based on situation as much as platoon advantage or because a pitcher was due up. The highest leverage index for pinch hitters since 1974 is a three-way tie at 1.86 -- 1974, 1975 and 1979.

Mota's best season as a pinch hitter was 1977, when he hit .389/.522/.500 in 48 plate appearances off Tommy Lasorda's bench. That's impressive enough, but consider this: Mota's average leverage index at the plate in 1977 was a whopping 2.28 -- easily the highest of any NL batter with at least 10 plate appearances. Even though Mota appeared in only one game defensively that season, his 50 plate appearances were enough for him to rank 55th out of 408 NL hitters in win probability added.

That's the kind of pinch-hitting impact we don't see anymore.

Have pinch hitters gotten better or worse?

It's complicated. Looking at pinch-hitting numbers is like looking at exaggerated overall league-level numbers. That is, the trends in pinch hitting tend to mirror those present in hitting overall, but they also tend to be more extreme.

Last season's .635 OPS for pinch hitters ranks 39th out of the past 53 seasons. (The figure is .544 this season. It probably won't stay that low, but if it does, we've got a trend.) That was down from .641 in 2024 and .659 in 2023. So, pinch hitters' performance has been dipping even if the frequency of them has been rising.

This has happened as overall offensive levels have dropped, and to filter that out, there's another way to think about this: We can measure whether pinch hitters are performing worse in those spots than in non-pinch-hitting spots. And here the answer is no -- pinch hitters have gotten better.

This is most apparent when looking at three-year rolling averages. Over the past three seasons, pinch hitters have retained just under 90% of their overall baseline performance. That's a high-water mark in the period going back to 2003.

So ... was Schumaker right about short-swinging pinch hitters?

And now for our main attraction.

The first thing to keep in mind is that it's difficult to excel at pinch hitting. There is an inherent penalty in doing it. Hitters, in the aggregate, perform better overall than they do while pinch hitting. Over the past three years, hitters have a composite .645 OPS while pinch hitting, but a .723 OPS when they are not.

Why is this? Some of it is probably due to the challenge of coming off the bench cold, but just as big a factor, and probably more, is that most pinch-hitting at-bats these days come against hard-throwing relief pitchers working fresh in short stints. But are some players, as Schumaker suggests, better suited for the role than others based on swing type?

When thinking about Schumaker's claim, we can look at overall performance by swing length, but we can also think of it in terms of baseline performance retention. Thanks to the release of bat-tracking data at Baseball Savant a couple of years ago, we can address these questions with real data. To get there, I divided hitters from 2023 to 2025 into three groups of swing lengths: short, medium and long. I used z-scores to decide the cutoffs for each group, and that happily yielded three groups of comparable size.

Long-swing players have the best OPS in non-pinch-hitting spots. Here are the numbers for the three groups:

OPS, non-pinch-hitting spots

Long swing: .747
Medium swing: .720
Short swing: .701

The differences here are explained by the power component of a hitter's skill set. Long-swingers produce more total bases per hit, and that advantage is illustrated here. Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani, to cherry pick two examples, are long-swingers.

Now, let's consider the same groups but only in pinch-hitting spots:

OPS, pinch-hitting spots

Long swing: .646
Medium swing: .651
Short swing: .645

This was very surprising. There isn't a huge difference between the groups, but the advantage that long-swingers have overall disappears. Medium-swingers perform the best, but the edge is slight. We're starting to get closer to verifying Schumaker's claim.

But there's a selection bias risk here -- if long-swingers are better overall, they are less likely to be pinch hitting. So, let's go one step further: Which group retains the highest percentage of their baseline performance when pinch hitting?

OPS retention, pinch-hitting spots

Long swing: 86.4%
Medium swing: 90.4%
Short swing: 92.1%

Now, we're getting somewhere. All groups fall prey to the pinch-hitting penalty, but it is indeed the short-swingers who suffer the shortest drop. This is something managers can factor into their decision-making.

Think of it like this: You have two pinch-hitting options on the bench. One is a baseline .730 long-swing hitter, the other is .700 short-swinger. We'll assume they have the same platoon tendencies.

The .730 guy is the better hitter overall, but if we adjust his baseline to account for the long-swing pinch-hit drop, that number sinks to .631. Meanwhile, the .700 guy with the short stroke drops to .645. Interesting, no? In a vacuum, the short-swinger is a better option.

Games aren't played in a vacuum, and there are many other factors Schumaker and his cohort have to consider. One of those things is the situation -- maybe you need a higher home run probability in a given spot, so the long-swing guy might be the better pick.

Still, we can at least say that Schumaker wasn't just saying words. He was right. A couple of days later, I was back at Rangers camp and told him about how I had spent a large part of the previous day reading way too much into a simple comment.

"Was I wrong?" Schumaker asked.

No, I said; he appears to be spot-on, and I wondered if he had seen research on the topic. He hadn't. He's just had a long life in baseball, which, as a player, included 270 pinch-hit plate appearances, during which Schumaker hit .235 (batted .278 overall in his career) with a lone home run, which came off Pittsburgh's Matt Capps in 2009.

"That's just what I believe," Schumaker said. "You're typically facing high-velo, high-spin guys in the back of bullpens, and that's usually when you pinch hit. I had a number of pinch-hit at-bats, so I kind of remember those. It's the longer-swing, less-compact guys that tend to get abused. It's just harder to do."

Obviously, the biggest consideration is the player's hitting ability, full stop. Wade, a speedy baserunner who can play all over the field on defense, has a career OPS of .578. That kind of baseline is unlikely to make him the best option in any pinch-hitting spot, unless there is no one else left on the bench.

Nevertheless, Wade has been a solid role player, just not because of his bat. His profile -- one with a better OPS baseline -- is one to model for utility-type players looking to differentiate themselves. Play a lot of positions, flash some speed and, at the plate, feature a good, short stroke that makes you a good option in the late innings.

But Wade, who is with the Rangers' Triple-A affiliate, has been called on to pinch hit 40 times in his career. He's 4-for-35 (.114) with four walks and a sacrifice in those spots. But there is one thing that suits him for pinch hitting: His bat-tracking metrics land him squarely in the short-swing group.