Major League Baseball

Former Astros, Giants star Hunter Pence on doing things his own way

Updated May. 4, 2022 7:59 p.m. ET

By Ben Verlander
FOX Sports MLB Writer

Hunter Pence was a fantastic baseball player who never did things the "normal" way. He did everything the Hunter Pence way.

It was funky, it was weird, it was downright unorthodox — and he embraced that.

He didn’t always plan on that being the case, though.

Pence was always an incredibly hard worker — even, in his words, something of an "overworker."

"They would only let you have a little bit of time in the cage and a little bit of time in the weight room," he said this week on "Flippin' Bats." "I remember I would go get my own weight room memberships because I was like, ‘That’s not enough!’ I just wanted it so bad."

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Pence tried to make changes on the field as well. He learned from the best of the best in the Astros organization by picking their brains whenever he could.

"I had a notebook," he said. "I wanted to interview them. I wanted to go to breakfast. I wanted to learn all of their secrets.

"What was cool is that I would even talk to people from other teams and stuff. And what I would find is that a lot of times, I would try and do something someone else's way, and I would actually get worse."

He learned throughout the process to embrace being himself.

"You have to know yourself. You have to find out what works for you," he said. "By being the scientist and going out and trying to learn from everyone, I just took a little bit from each one and saw which ones worked for me."

What Barry Bonds, Jeff Bagwell and Lance Berkman taught Hunter Pence about hitting

Hunter Pence tells Ben Verlander how he set up meetings and lunches with players on his team and opposing teams to learn everything he could about hitting.

Later in his career, Pence learned that he has Scheuermann's Disease, which causes the vertebrae to grow at different rates. That causes flexibility issues and could be why Pence's swing looked unorthodox.

As for his funky arm motion, Pence knows exactly when that started.

He grew up in Arlington, Texas, where at Rangers games, there was a hill that kids would race down.

"I ended up separating my shoulder rolling down the hill too fast in a race," he said. "My shoulder never really came back correctly, so I couldn’t get [my arm] over the top, and it was hurting."

The Astros tried to correct that after drafting Pence but weren't successful.

Eventually, the team's stance was "'You throw pretty hard, and you’re pretty accurate. Just get out there and play,'" according to Pence.

The morale of the story?

You don’t always have to do things the "right" way. The "normal" way isn’t what’s best for everyone.

Work as hard as you can, learn from as many people as possible and be open to change, but at the end of the day, go with what's best for you.

Nobody did that better than Hunter Pence, who had a lot of fun and won a couple of World Series championships with the San Francisco Giants along the way.

Ben Verlander is an MLB Analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the "Flippin' Bats" podcast. Born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, Verlander was an All-American at Old Dominion University before he joined his brother, Justin, in Detroit as a 14th-round pick of the Tigers in 2013. He spent five years in the Tigers organization. Follow him on Twitter @BenVerlander.