It’s your golf swing’s ‘Moment of Truth’. Golfers screw it up in two ways

The golf season never sleeps but Major League baseball does, however the recent start of ‘spring training’ means it’s time for our second annual tradition of linking the two sports.

Last year we talked about the changes Giancarlo Stanton made to his swing. This year, we’re looking at one of the Yankees’ biggest offseason additions: Cody Bellinger, whose baseball swing went through a kind of slump before returning to great form.

There’s a lot his journey can teach us about the golf swing. Even Bellinger thinks so, as he told the New York Post:

“You hear golfers talk a lot about injuries and how they lost their swing, they’re very open about it. And I feel like us baseball players aren’t as open as they are. I hear these golfers like, ‘Yeah I lost my swing, I’ve lost my confidence, it’s not the same.’… And a year or two later, they’re winning a major again, and then they’re winning the Masters. It’s kind of like the same thing in baseball, like, you can just lose your swing, you can lose your confidence, and you have to fight like hell to get it back.”

So, what went wrong, how did he get it back, and what can we learn, as golfers?

It all came down to something the Mustard app calls the “Moment of Truth”, which as Golf Digest No. 1-ranked teacher Mark Blackburn explains below is the moment before delivery of the club into impact.

“The moment of truth really refers to that point just before the last parallel where the club is kind of slotted,” he says. “It’s the last part where you can really affect what the club is doing.”

Anyway, back to our baseball-related example. Let’s start with Bellinger’s swing from his MVP 2019 season. Notice here how he’s square to the pitcher.

As the pitch comes, Bellinger then wheels his front leg (his right leg, in this case) over to his right. This creates some separation between his upper and lower body, which then allows him to clear his hips.

And, because Bellinger started with an almost directly upright stance, this step-and-turn drops the bat deep behind him. In golf, we call this shallowing the club, or dropping it in the slot. For Bellinger, it allowed him swing through the ball with a vicious upward blow.

Where Bellinger briefly found trouble in subsequent seasons was when his stance crept more open.

With his right foot already more out to the right, Bellinger would then do this same wheel-his-front-foot-out-to-the-right move, which put his upper body way too far behind the ball. It left him struggling to catch up to the ball, and swinging very severely upwards.

Bellinger launched it when he made contact – his average launch angle jumped five and three degrees respectively during his disappointing 2021 and 2022 seasons – and his launch angle sweet spot percentage was at its highest during these two years. The problem was his strikeout percentage jumped some 10 percentage points during the same period, and his batting average dropped to career lows. In short, consistency was the issue.

He returned to form in 2023 when he squared off his stance again. The example here is from the home run Bellinger just hit during spring training last week.

Notice how he also changed his step so it was less of a big step out to his right, and more of a little step directly towards the pitcher.

This lessened the severity of his upward swing at the ball, and synced up his upper and lower body turns, which helped him make contact more. His average launch angle returned to where it was, and his strike-out percentage dropped accordingly. After hitting .210 with just a .389 slugging percentage the year before, Bellinger’s average jumped to .307 and his slugging soared to .525

Understanding “Moment of Truth”

Anyway, I’m telling you all this because his swing evolution is littered with useful information for golfers.

Bellinger’s swing went haywire when his lower body started moving out of sync with his upper body the moment he began swinging through. The Mustard app, which uses AI to help both golfers and baseball players improve their technique, calls this the “moment of truth”. For golfers, it’s the crucial moment between backswing and downswing, and it’s the source of most golfers’ swing problems.

It’s probably the most important move in the golf swing, and according to Mustard’s own stats, these are the two common mistakes that usually arise:

Moment of Truth Mistake No.1: Upper body turns too soon

About 17 percent of golfers turn their upper body ahead of their lower body in the moment of truth. The key to preventing this is feeling your club dragging down a wall behind you.

Moment of Truth Mistake No.2: Lower body spins and thrusts

About 16 percent of golfers thrust their hips towards the ball in transition. Another 18 percent spin their hips out too fast, and leave their arms “stuck” behind their body. This is the problem Cody Bellinger struggled with, and it’s especially common in athletic junior golfers (even young Tiger Woods said he struggled with this). Golf Digest Best in State Teacher Joe Pecker explains that nailing your shift-rotate-rise downswing sequence is essential to solving these overly-active lower body problems. When you rotate or rise before you shift, that’s a recipe for getting stuck.