No matter what arena of life or industry we are talking about, there typically is a constant struggle between the old guard and the new…
When I was growing up, hitting was essentially taught one way with a few basic principles that were universally accepted amongst the masses…
Get your back elbow up, swing down on the baseball and squash the bug were all things that we heard in Little League and we basically kept as hard truths we needed to implement in order to have success.
When I was younger, I didn’t think much of it because even though I would listen to my coaches, for the most part, I was simply reacting and letting my natural ability take over.
As I got older and became a true student of the game throughout the course of my professional baseball career, I realized my back elbow was never up, some of my best swings were when I swung flat or up at the ball, and there were times my back foot would hardly rotate yet I would bamboozle balls into the right-center field gap…
Ah fuck… Now what? 🤷♂️
When I started working for MLB Network, we were at the very beginning stages of the fly-ball revolution. For years, players were taught to swing down because low line drives and hard ground balls would give them the best chance of success…
The “New School” however, has used analytics to show that the majority of ground balls are outs and it’s actually towering fly balls and elevated line drives that give hitters the best chance to do the optimal amount of damage.
After digesting statistical data and hours of hitting videos from many of the game’s best players, past and present, I do agree with the “New School” theory that values exit velocity and launch angle as the two most important factors in hitting a baseball…
Yet, as much as we want to believe that this is a new school, there is absolutely nothing “new” about trying to hit a ball as hard and as far as possible.
The funny thing is that the game and ultimate outcome we are looking for hasn’t changed one fucking bit… Our process has.
We used to teach swing down to hit hard line drives and create backspin… Now, the verbiage is all about getting on a plane with the baseball, which often yields a flat to slightly upward swing arch.
Although the process of the two may seem vastly different, the truth is that in most situations every baseball player I have ever known, including myself, has tried to hit the ball as hard and as freaking far as we could…
I had several opportunities to hit with and discuss hitting with Barry Bonds…
In Barry’s mind, “swinging down” and simply trying to “catch” the baseball is what made his swing mechanics so successful.
From my perspective, it was very clear that although he swung down toward the baseball, there was a slight upward arch in his swing that would send the ultimate moonshots into the San Francisco Bay.
At the end of the day, whether we believe he swung down or up on the ball is a perspective that belongs to the eye of the beholder.
Either way, a new school or old school, when we achieve results of hitting a ball as hard and as far as possible, does it really fucking matter what words we use to describe it?
The gosh damn ball doesn’t lie…
-EB