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May4Lee Judge
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Hochevar bounces back…
Three times Luke Hochevar threw innings using 12 pitches or fewer. That’s a sign that he’s being aggressive, throwing strikes and letting his defense play. He started with a 23-pitch inning, walking the first two batters he faced, but dealt with the pressure well and bounced back to get out of the inning without giving up a run.
He didn’t use MY preferred method of dealing with pressure (curling in a ball, crying like a baby and blaming others), but he did pretty good anyway.
You don’t swing level…
Some day I’ll completely lose it and start choking some father at the batting cages. The reason will be the worst and most often repeated piece of dumb hitting advice ever given to generation after generation of confused kids: ‘Swing level!’
Hey, Einstein, the bat’s above your shoulder, the ball’s at you waist…how the #@$% are you going to swing level?
Watch Mike Aviles and you’ll see he’s keeping the barrel of the bat above the ball until contact. That takes the loop out of the swing and makes for a short, quick trip to the ball. This is probably what all those misguided fathers mean when they say swing level…who knows?…but it also means he’s actually hitting slightly down through the ball which produces rising backspin, which gives it that nice golf ball trajectory…and wasn’t it nice to see someone run hard on a home run until they saw the ball clear the fence?
Of course, I’ve got no experience in either activity: hitting home runs or running hard, but I still might still get a chance … as long as I don’t swing level.
P.S. I’m not sure they can afford to not have him in the lineup. How many DHs are we allowed again?
Mistakes…
I’ve said if we make mistakes we’ll admit and correct them and we managed to get the swinging strikeout stat in the mental mistake category for a while yesterday. It took most of the day for someone to notice, so apparently most Royals fans had no problem accepting the idea that they could make 6 mental mistakes in one game.
(To be fair, I guess it wouldn’t be the first time … it just didn’t happen Monday night.)
Just so you’ve got an idea of what we’re going through to bring you this information: I score every pitch of every game in a scorebook, while making notes and filling out a paper grid.
The paper grid has 1,100 boxes on it. After the game I transfer that on to an electronic grid of 1,100 boxes (trust me, given 2,200 chances to make a mistake, the odds that I won’t are minuscule) and that’s emailed to the web editors. Then they get their 1,100 chances to make a mistake.
Even though the process is complicated and I’ve got the attention span of a hummingbird on crack, the Star’s editor’s say they have confidence in me.
Which is, of course, a mistake.
More Morman…
OK, so Russ Morman sees what I wrote yesterday about his ‘help’ regarding my hitting and says he forgot to add that I was now in the ‘2 club: too old, too slow, too blind’.
He also said the ‘Flying Squirrels’ logo is the hottest one in baseball.
I responded that if they REALLY wanted to sell some T-shirts perhaps they should call themselves the ‘F#@%*&# Idiots’ … I know I’d wear one…and lots of readers would be willing to buy it for me.
Just so you know, this war of words is NOT over.
Morman, just wait until you’re old and slow…oh, wait, that’s right…you are! At least they don’t have to take me to those truck scales to weigh me.
P.S. Could you bring me one of those Flying Squirrel caps when you come home?
Guillen
Hochevar
Aviles
Love what you're doing here, but I was wondering why a swinging strikeout doesn't count the same as a strikeout looking? Seems to me that a strikeout is a strikeout regardless of how it happens.
OK, swinging strikeout vs. looking strikeout: Once a hitter gets to two strikes, coaches want them to change their approach. The hitter is no longer being selective and looking for a certain pitch. Now his job is to find a way to get the ball in play. That puts pressure on the other team. When Clint Hurdle was managing in the minor leagues, he would set two cups out and tell his players to put a sunflower seed in one cup for groundouts and the other cup for fly balls and strikeouts. After 27 outs, if the flyball-strikeout cup had more seeds, they would probably lose, because neither type of play puts as much pressure on the opposition. It drives most managers bats (myself included) to have players tell you how incompetent the umpire is and then leave strike three up to him. And called strikeouts can indicate the batter is still guessing with two strikes: a bad approach.