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There’s a way in which the Kris Bryant story has a happy ending. He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 2015, and he was the National League MVP in 2016, the same year he helped end the most infamous sports curse of all time with the Chicago Cubs, initiating the very out that ended it, in fact, with a big smile on his face. “Most of us thought that would become his staple season,” Joe Posnanski would write of Bryant while looking in the rearview mirror in 2019, “the kind of thing he would do every year for the next decade on his way to the Hall of Fame. And sure enough, in 2017 he had more or less the same season.” “The charmed baseball life of Kris Bryant,” Tom Verducci wrote in 2017, “seems an invention of nostalgia, ripped from the Chip Hilton novels of Clair Bee in the 1950s and ’60s.” Bryant had the story, and the ring, and the trophy, and a slew of statistics I could not hope to explain to back up his preeminent standing in the sport, but mostly, to me, he had that swing. I’m not against the advanced stats revolution in baseball, I’m just personally more compelled by aesthetic.
“A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke.” That’s David Foster Wallace in his immortal Roger Federer as Religious Experience essay from two decades ago and he’s right, of course. The beauty in Federer’s backhand slice, or in the way Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone runs are at once self-evident and beyond words. So, how can one hope to describe Kris Bryant’s swing? In his profile, Verducci wrote: “Bryant wants his levers to fire sequentially in perfect timing: front hip, hands, back hip and, lastly, bat head, finished off with tremendous extension through the ball with his long arms.” That, however, is a bit too technical for our taste. Verducci gets closer, or as close as anyone can, a few sentences earlier: “(Bryant’s) is the Swiss timepiece of swings: a carefully timed chronograph of angles, gears and levers.” It suggests not only how all the elements of Bryant’s swing in congress were so visually pleasing, but in an unintentional way, equated him with Federer, as if his swing were a Rolex the Swiss tennis star hawks, classic, stylish, built to last. On the other hand, as Gary Shteyngart noted in his 2017 New Yorker piece about being a watch geek, there is something unexpected melancholy about a time-keeping device permanently affixed to your wrist, keeping track of the unrelenting passage of hours, minutes, seconds, of “our own demise.” Indeed, there is a reason I keep mentioning Bryant’s swing in the past tense.
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When Kris Bryant was traded in 2021 to the San Francisco Giants, it felt cruel, to the city of Chicago and to him. He lingered in the Wrigley Field dugout in what turned out to be his last game as a Cub, taking one last look, a romanticism that appealed to me almost as much as the swing, a player treating a business like a game. There was an ad for Midwest Express Clinic featuring Bryant at the Chicago Brown Line L stop that stayed up for almost a year after his departure, and though it was probably just CTA laziness, I liked imagining it as them thumbing their nose at the Ricketts Family.
In truth, Bryant was already in competitive decline, going on the injured list in 2018 for the first time, recovering, playing well, if never at the level of his previous standards. People who track stats could see Bryant was now swinging under a red sky at morning, and when he signed to the Rockies in 2022 on a massive seven-year contract, it all fell apart, an ironic twist given that when he entered the league from the University of San Diego in 2013, he thought the Rockies would draft him, not the Cubs. In the Mile High City, the injuries have piled up, arthritis and bone spurs and a bad back. He hasn’t hit. His batting average last season was .218, the year before .233, which is, like, Al Newman level. The team hasn’t won, and if once Bryant would have been viewed as their deliverer, now he’s just viewed as a financial drain, a $182 million emblem of all that has gone wrong. Local sportswriter Sean Keeler compared him to a car that might as well be sold for parts, perhaps just a glib line in a glib column, or maybe more revealing, suggesting athletes as subhuman, more like a product. No wonder Bryant has received death threats.
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Bryant’s story is not necessarily new. Famously, Chuck Knoblauch of the Yankees was afflicted with the yips, unable to throw from second base to first, causing his career to fizzle out. Chris Davis of the Baltimore Orioles mirrored Bryant in the twenty-tens, signing a big contract after considerable success and then going in the hitting tank. “I have no clue what I’m doing at the plate,” he told Stephanie Apstein in 2018 in a line that might as well have described my brief but abominable Little League career. My favorite baseball player Jerome Walton endured a career that was essentially one long, slow fade after a sensational Rookie of the Year season in 1989. But something about Bryant feels different, more sorrowful, and I think it’s the swing.
In Johnny Tillotson’s 1960 song “Poetry in Motion,” the one that may very well have given birth to the phrase itself, he’s singing about the girl he loves, how she’s poetry in motion, how he loves her every movement, how there is nothing about her that he would change. But once a baseball batter struggles at the plate, it’s natural for him to tweak his swing, and that’s what Bryant did, fundamentally altering his so that what was once poetry in motion became something more like hapless hacking. It was on full, gruesome display in his first at-bat of the 2025 season, gone swinging on three pitches. It was J.D. Salinger who famously wrote that “Certain things…should stay the way they are. You ought to be able to stick them in one of those big glass cases and just leave them alone.” Baseball puts a great many things in big glass cases, if only we could have put Kris Bryant’s swing in one.
Postscript: Since this post was published, the Colorado Rockies announced they were placing Kris Bryant on the 10-day injured list with lumbar degenerative disc disease. Sigh. Things cannot only get better.