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 th

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.