Image: (Michael Reaves/Getty Images)

Whether you are standing in the on-deck circle in the MLB, grabbing your drop-twelve bat for Little League baseball, rushing out of the dugout to the plate for your intramural league, or in the backyard for a wiffle ball game, everyone wants to hear their favorite song or a pump-up song to get them in the right headspace to go out there and get on base for their team. Walk-up songs might be one of the most overlooked aspects of baseball; however, this small ten to thirty-second walk-up to the plate can change everything. 

These songs help the player mentally and allow the player to focus on the moment and their upcoming at-bat. It gives the player confidence, swagger, and rhythm. It gives the player a sense of routine and comfort with a familiar song that they love. It gives them a boost of energy to go out there and attack the baseball. 

The walk-up song also gets the crowd into the game and gets fans on their feet, joining in on the song of their favorite player. For example, for Francisco Lindor’s famous walk-up song of “My Girl” by The Temptations, Mets fans get out of their seats and join in and continue singing long after the 10-30 second part of the song has been played into the at-bat. This energy and pumped-up crowd gives the utmost confidence to the batter, and can even prove to be intimidating and can be some form of psychological warfare towards the pitcher and the opposing ball club.

Given all of the interesting performance and psychological aspects of a walk-up song, I was interested in what kind of song would be best for a player to succeed. I wanted to specifically know if there was a sabermetric method of analysis that could be conducted to help find what kind of song would be statistically best for a player to succeed. However, no such data exists that quantifies and analyzes the performance and psychological effects of a walk-up song during a baseball game. 

Despite this, I still wanted to find out what kind of walk-up song (or what genre of music) would be most effective to help a player get hits and contribute to winning games. For players to generally improve their game, it is common to watch film of the best players in the MLB to mimic their swing, how they approach their at-bats, their tee routines, and much more.

For example, many players would watch swings of players like Mike Trout and other elite baseball players to see what the top players are doing and how they can tweak their swing path to hit the ball more efficiently and perform better. So I thought to myself, if mirroring and mimicking the actions and routines of what the best players do in order to succeed, then why not also mimic what kinds of songs these players use while walking up to the plate?

When thinking of the show’s finest, everyone immediately thinks about the All-Stars, and more specifically, the All-Star starters. (However, I know there have been many controversial picks of starters and who was snubbed. Don’t even get me started on why Juan Soto is not an All-Star. But these are conversations to be had another day.) So to be the best, you have to implement what the best players are using to succeed, and part of that (even though this effect may be small) is their walk-up songs.

Here’s a chart of all of the MLB All-Star starting batters with their walk-up song collected from online research on Google, the genre of that song, the player’s fWAR, wRC+, xwOBA, and OPS as of July 22, 2025. 

______________________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________________

What I wanted to find out specifically is what genre of music best helps a player succeed statistically in the sport of baseball. And here are the results (the averages) from the show’s finest:

Soul (only Francisco Lindor): 3.3 fWAR, 112 wRC+, 0.337 xwOBA, 0.751 OPS

Country (only Riley Greene): 2.8 fWAR, 137 wRC+, 0.349 xwOBA, 0.861 OPS

Pop (only Jacob Wilson): 2.7 fWAR, 124 wRC+, 0.308 xwOBA, 0.861 OPS

Hip-Hop (Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Aaron Judge, Will Smith, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Kyle Tucker, Shohei Ohtani): 4.48333 fWAR, 161.6667 wRC+, 0.408 xwOBA, 0.9525 OPS

Latin (Gleyber Torres, Junior Caminero, Javier Báez, Freddie Freeman, Ketel Marte, Manny Machado, Ronald Acuña Jr.): 2.47 fWAR, 140.57 wRC+, 0.369 xwOBA, 0.864 OPS

Rock (Cal Raleigh and Ryan O’Hearn): 4.1 fWAR, 151.5 wRC+, 0.3775 xwOBA, 0.904 OPS

______________________________________________________________________

Given the data, Hip-Hop is the best genre of music to succeed in the sport of baseball and to statistically produce at the highest levels. Players who used a Hip-Hop song in their walk-up ranked first in fWAR, wRC+, xwOBA, and OPS. For all categories, Rock music came in second behind Hip-Hop. Latin and Country music were in the middle of the pack amongst the show’s finest. And at the bottom of the list was Pop and Soul music.

______________________________________________________________________

I acknowledge that this is a very small sample size of data and that there are no true measures of how to best quantify, sabermetrically and statistically, how a genre of music for a walk-up song impacts a player’s performance. However, by pulling data from the best players in the game (arguably) who have started in the MLB All-Star game, it enables us to take our best guess and estimate what genre of music correlates with a higher level of performance. 

When you are walking up to the plate for your next recreational league game, Little League game, professional game, backyard wiffle ball game, or pumping yourself up before your team’s next at-bat in MLB the Show, throw on your favorite Hip-Hop song to elevate your level of performance like Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Aaron Judge, Will Smith, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Kyle Tucker, and Shohei Ohtani all have done in the big leagues. 

Categories: Analysis

Tags: Atlanta Braves, baseball, Cubs, Detroit Tigers, Francisco Lindor, Kyle Tucker, Los Angeles Angels, Los Angeles Dodgers, mets, Mike Trout, mlb, Pete Crow-Armstrong, Pittsburgh Pirates, sports, yankees