Using Swing Plane to Coach Hitters: a Deeper Look - Driveline Baseball

What has changed from Ted Williams' day is we now have the technology to measure the matching of the hitters swing plane to the angle of incoming pitch. That's it, folks.

from drivelinebaseball.com
https://www.drivelinebaseball.com/2018/05/using-swing-plane-coach-hitters-deeper-look/

Swing plane is a commonly used, and certainly not a new, idea. Ted Williams famously discusses it in his book The Science of Hitting in 1971 and includes this awesome graphic. Swing plane is incredibly important, but the swing plane problem is much more complex than how it’s being discussed.

Same is in pitching where we now have better tools to measure a pitchers velocity than we did back in Williams day where we measured Bob Fellers fastball by running a motorcycle with a speedometer on a track next to Feller throwing a ball. Real precise measurement tool back then.

BTW, pitchers may not be throwing harder than back in the day as we need to adjust for the inadequacy of the tools being used to measure the speed which reduced the speed number by anywhere from 3-5 MPH. There are certainly more pitchers throwing harder since these days the pitching gurus are entirely focused on throwing harder whereas back in the day the "pitching guru wars" focused on how to throw more efficiently i.e.: with "perfect mechanics".  The focus has shifted.

The advancement in technology has led to a regression in the value, worth and efficiency of most modern day baseball gurus in my opinion, but only time will tell.

Launch Angle vs. Exit Angle | Inside Pitch Magazine

The Precise Point Hitting Mat is a tool hitters can use to practice optimal exit angle based on pitch location.

I get that everyone is blinded by recency bias, I still trust Ted Williams and Mike Epstein for that matter, for being pioneers in the "launch angle" revolution. 

from insidepitchonline.com

https://insidepitchonline.com/exitangle/

Launch Angle vs. Exit Angle

by Rob Ledington, Head Baseball Coach, Lynn Camp (KY) HSOver the past few years, there's been a great deal of discussion regarding the value of launch angles and offensive production, particularly as it relates to home runs, extra base hits, and runs batted in. The increased attention most likely contributed to the single-season home run record set by Major League Baseball this past season. However, does this information alone suggest that every hitter should increase their launch angle? The obvious answer is no.

A physical player with power and below average speed would obviously benefit from hitting home runs or balls in the gap for increased offensive productivity. These types of players are those who can most benefit from working on developing a higher launch angle. On the other hand, a smaller player with little power and superior speed would benefit from a lower launch angle, with their goal focused on producing line drives and hard ground balls. Even a 'swinging bunt' from smaller 'speed' guys is much more beneficial than most anything hit in the air. A buy-in to this approach can greatly increase offensive productivity by providing more opportunities to get on base, utilize their speed and ultimately, score more runs, which is what the offensive game of baseball is all about.
Exit angles, however, have equal value for all hitters regardless of size, speed, and/or desired launch angle. All hitters strive to hit the ball "squarely" thus maximizing exit velocity, and in some instances carry (travel in the air), while guarding against weakly hit fly balls and ground balls. What are exit angles? How do you determine the proper exit angle for each pitch location?

Exit angles are defined as the direction the ball goes after it is put in play. More simply put, the optimal exit angle is dependent on the lead foot, the bat and the ball creating a 90-degree angle at the point of contact. When this occurs, exit velocity is maximized for the ground ball, the line drive, and the fly ball because this contact will not create sidespin. Additionally, a fly ball will travel farther in the air when combined with the proper launch angle and backspin rotation. A high launch angle with a tardy swing (less than square) will create a high fade (in golf terms), or sidespin much like a sinker (in pitching terms), producing less exit velocity and carry. Conversely, an early swing at a high launch angle will create hook spin (in golf terms), or cutter/slider spin (in baseball terms) producing less exit velocity and carry. Therefore, only the ball struck at the optimal launch angle combined with the optimal exit angle will produce maximum exit velocity and distance in the air. It should be noted that is it entirely possible to hit a ball hard without "square contact."

It is common knowledge that a four-seam fastball (with backspin) has more velocity and carry than a sinker, a cutter, or a slider. Similarly, a drive down the middle of the fairway with backspin will travel farther in the air than a fade or a hook. Thus, to maximize exit velocity and distance in the air, the launch angle and the exit angle must work together, with the exit angle having greater importance of the two. This is especially for the smaller player, unless they enjoy jogging to second base and back to the dugout!

Since the invention of the game, baseball coaches have taught their players to hit the pitch thrown down the middle of the plate back through the middle of the diamond. Ironically when this happens "square contact" occurs as it relates to the lead foot, the bat, and the ball at the point of contact. Once this central contact point has been established, it becomes possible to determine every other point of square contact, both on the inside and outside parts of the plate. For example, if the pitch is outside, coaches will say things like, "let it get deeper" or "let it travel." When the pitch is inside, you are likely to hear "hit that out in front of the plate" or "get your foot down and swing earlier." These statements are painfully obvious to everyone, but without an understanding of specifically what needs to happen to yield optimal results, making these adjustments can be a challenge.

The general rule when it comes to handling pitches closer to the edges of the plate is to allow the pitch one ball's width outside of center to travel precisely one ball's width deep of the center pitch location, or behind the lead foot. If the pitch is two balls outside, two balls deep or behind the lead foot, and finally three balls outside, three balls deep or behind the lead foot.

The same concept would apply to pitches inside of the center contact position. One ball's width in, one ball's depth in front of the lead foot, two balls in, two balls in front of the lead foot, and finally three balls in, three balls in front of the lead foot. If this occurs, the batter will create "square contact" for each pitch location, resulting in optimal or maximum contact for each pitch.

With this understanding of what 'square contact' means as it relates to pitch location, creating a feel for the best exit angle on a pitch-to-pitch basis becomes much easier. It is even possible to practice these angles: for example, if a pitch is one ball's width inside of center, the optimal exit angle is 10 degrees for a baseball and 13 degrees for a softball (angle variance attributed to the difference in diameter of the balls). Each pitch location inside and outside of center will have precise and varying exit angles that can provide players and coaches with the opportunity to set up precise targets to aim for off the tee, during soft toss, and even during live batting practice.

Providing visual targets can help your team buy in to the concept of becoming a more complete offensive player. It also gives them instant feedback, which is something that this current generation of players is finding more and more desirable.

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Neuroscience Can Project On-Base Percentages Now | FanGraphs Baseball

Once this type of data can be incorporated into scouting and player development, there will be less draft mistakes and better hitters. 

Subject: Neuroscience Can Project On-Base Percentages Now | FanGraphs Baseball

from fangraphs.com

https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/neuroscience-can-project-batting-lines-now/

Neuroscience Can Project On-Base Percentages Now

Eno Sarris

I have an early, hazy memory of Benito Santiago explaining to a reporter the approach that had led to his game-winning hit moments earlier. "I see the ball, I hit it hard," said Santiago in his deep accent. From which game, in what year, I can't remember. Also, it isn't really important: it's a line we've heard before. Nevertheless, it contains multitudes.

We know, for example, that major-league hitters have to see well to hit well. Recent research at Duke University has once again made explicit the link between eye sight, motor control, and baseball outcomes. This time, though, they've split out some of the skills involved, and it turns out that Santiago's deceptively simple description involves nuanced levels of neuromotor activity, each predictive of different aspects of a hitter's abilities. Will our developing knowledge about those different skills help us better sort young athletes, or better develop them? That part's to be determined.

A team of researchers spread across Duke ran baseball players from two full professional organizations through a battery of nine tests on Nike Sensory Stations to measure different aspects of a player's sensory motor abilities. After creating something similar to Major League Equivalency lines for each player, the researchers were able to test the effect of each of the scores against real-life baseball outcomes.

"If you have a 23-year-old, completely average outfielder, the model predicts that his on-base percentage in the major leagues would be .292," explains Kyle Burris, one of the researchers on the project. "The model would expect a similar player who scores one standard deviation higher on the perception span task to have an OBP of .300."

The high-level, easy takeaway from their study is that these skills, taken as a whole, are predictive of good plate discipline. There was no link to slugging percentage, though, so we're not quite yet predicting full batting lines from your neuromotor scores.

But if you drill down a bit into these new findings, you'll see that there is a great deal here to get excited about. Here's a profound image that shows how each subsection of the larger skill set was linked to baseball outcomes. Darker colors denote a stronger relationship between the skill and the baseball statistic.

A table of findings reprinted with permission from Kyle Burris, Kelly Vittetoe, Benjamin Ramger, Sunith Suresh, Surya T. Tokdar, Jerome P. Reiter & L. Gregory Appelbaum "Sensorimotor abilities predict on-field performance in professional baseball" in Scientific ReportsTake a look at the row labeled "perception span," in particular, and you find an interesting story. That task was linked to good on-base percentages and strikeout rates, but not necessarily good walk rates.

"It's kind of like a game of Simon," says Burris as he tries to explain the perception-span task, "but for a split second, it gives you shapes that appear in various aspects of your peripheral vision, and you have to determine was there a square there, or a pentagon there, and it flashed at you in a split second and you have to try and remember what the shape was."
When we asked players what they see when the ball is released, a good portion of the responses detailed how little is ultimately visible to the eye. And there's that study of cricket which suggests that cricket players get more from information they gather before the release of the ball than after. This finding fits right in: players who are good at noticing things on the periphery — like the way a forearm might look different on a breaking ball, or the way the body might drag on a changeup — are better at making contact.
Hidden within the other differences between the tasks and their links to outcomes is a similar story: both the ability to suss out quickly the difference between shapes seen both near and far, and also to capture a target quickly were both good for making contact. That makes sense.

But why would hand-eye coordination be better for player's walk rate than his strikeout rate?

Partly, this could be because players have to start their swing before they know if they want to swing — a requirement velocity puts upon them — and hand-eye coordination helps them to better stop that swing if the pitch is a ball.

Partly, this could be a result of the limited capacity for actually testing hand-eye coordination. The particular task linked to that number requires respondents to tap baseballs as they appear on a screen, testing how fast they can do so.
"I'm not sure that it actually goes and tests hand-eye coordination," admitted Burris, who is headed to Cleveland for a summer internship with the Indians. "There is a little bit of hand-eye coordination in that you have to see it and then immediately translate that to a motor response, but I'd say that that was almost response-time-esque."

If you look at the separate reaction-time outcomes, you'll see a similar link to walk rate, so maybe that's the key skill in taking walk. Reacting quicker.
Or there's another way to separate the skills. You could consider the first three tasks — visual clarity, contrast sensitivity, and depth perception — as "hardware." They're linked to outcomes, of course, because there's a decent part of the game that requires good eye sight. But they're the sort of thing with which you're born.

"There will never be a blind ballplayer," said co-author Gregory Appelbaum.
Those other six tasks, though? They represent the software of our neuromotor system. They represent our ability to take the visual information given to us and process it. Software is more malleable, subject to updates. Software can be changed for the better.

"There is evidence that these processes can be improved," agreed Appelbaum. "There have been demonstrations of neuroplasticity in these processes."
Appelbaum pointed to two interesting studies that pointed to the fact that our neuromotor system's software could be trained. A study from 2015 of which he was part showed that "significant learning was observed in tasks with high visuomotor control demands but not in tasks of visual sensitivity," for one.
A 2014 study at the University of California-Riverside found that actual baseball outcomes could be improved by using a "perceptual learning program." In that study, players reported improvements such as being able to see further, and having eyes that felt stronger and didn't tire as quickly.
Appelbaum is ready to find out what these visual training technologies will look like as we go forward. He's helping launch the Duke Vision Sports Center, a clinic and lab where researchers will use sensory stations, immersive reality, and more, in order to pursue this line of thinking.

When it comes to new stats coming out of Statcast, I've personally seen a change in how players assess the numbers. Early distaste has given away to curiosity, as more players — Yonder Alonso and Andrew Heaney, for example, in my own experience — now speak up at the end of interviews to ask me about launch angle, exit velocity, and how they can use that data to train and improve.

So, while the Boston Red Sox have long been using the link between neuromotor skills and baseball outcomes in their minor leagues in an effort to bring "neuroscouting" to their own organization, these new findings offer a different use for neuromotor study. Instead of sorting players, there's major potential to use these activities to develop players and get the most out of them.
There may never be a blind baseball player, sure. But that's just hardware. Let's see how we can make the most out of our favorite player's software.

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Is The ‘Old School’ Method of Teaching Hitting Outdated?

Hi Charles Rachel Garcia Swing Test Experiment Recently, Rachel Garcia, an elite collegiate softball player (National Freshman of the year at UCLA) went through a simple before and after hitting analysis that I took a small part of and thought it might help to answer our question about 'Old School' teaching methods.  Rachel added 11 MPH in Tee Exit Velocity (Tee measures 'Raw' Power - no pitch influences), from 68 MPH to 79 MPH and increased her average Launch Angle from 5.4 degrees to 9.8 degrees in one 30 minute session.  In fact, her average Exit Velocity in her 'after' round was 5 MPH higher than her top speed in the first round.  The two most important metrics in hitting, Exit Velocity and Launch Angle, both increased significantly and immediately.  An elite athlete, seemingly already firing on all cylinders, adding 14% to her Exit Velocity.  How is this possible?   Elite performance and 'swing efficiency' are not the same things and it is possible to hit very well with slight swing inefficiencies.  We tend to look at elite players and just assume the reason they are elite is that their swing movements are perfect.  While she already had a good swing, there were some key mechanical movements that could become more efficient and thus the immediate increase.  ​​​​​​​ Read More Tomorrow look for a year end special on the Hitting Is A Guess - Time Training and all hitting  programs combined.............

GuessWorks, 41303 27th Street West, Palmdale, CA 93551, USA

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Study analyzes visual tracking strategies in baseball - UPI.com

http://perceptionaction.com/softfocus/

from upi.com

https://www.upi.com/Study-analyzes-visual-tracking-strategies-in-baseball/3351501861093/

Study analyzes visual tracking strategies in baseball

Aug. 4 (UPI) -- Researchers from Ohio State University's College of Optometry have found that batters change their visual tracking strategies depending on whether they swing or not.

The study, published in the August edition of Optometry and Vision Science, measured horizontal eye and head movements in two collegiate baseball players who were up to bat with a pitching machine.

Researchers found that patterns of head and eye movements are slightly different when batters are swinging compared to "taking" a pitch, meaning not swinging at a pitch.
The study tracked head movements in the baseball players by using an inertial sensor mounted on the players' helmets. Eye movements were tracked using a video eye tracker, both showed differences in tracking when swinging compared to not swinging at pitches.

The two batters followed a similar visual strategy in swinging and taking a pitch, however, when not swinging, they mainly moved their heads, not their eyes, toward the ball the majority of time the ball was in the air.

When the ball was about 150 milliseconds from arriving, the batters shifted their eyes ahead of the ball when it crossed the plate. 

"Large eye movements only occurred late in the pitch trajectory," the researchers said in a news release.

Conversely, when the batters were swinging at the ball, they followed a different visual strategy with head movements toward the ball being substantially larger than eye movements. The batters focused their eye on the ball up until about 50 milliseconds before it crossed the plate.

Researchers believe their findings support previous research that placing the gaze ahead of the ball is the optimal learning strategy and tracking the ball is the optimal hitting strategy.

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Hitting and the Power of Suggestion | FanGraphs Baseball

Good stuff from Fan Graphs. It illustrates why whether it's hitting (as in this article)  or. pitching verbal cues results may vary from player to player. So say good bye to the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all approach and maybe soon the perfect pitching/hitting mechanics model. You'll have success with some players, but lose others but for want of a better verbal cue.

from the article: 

This fact, that there's no universal instruction for baseball development may be frustrating, but if you think about the difference from body to body, it makes sense. 

Ochart himself had some thoughts along these lines. "Coaching, in many aspects, is approached as an art more than a science because the same verbal cue to a group of athletes can cause unique movement adaptations within the group," he told me in an email. "Learning what an athlete feels has always been a critical part of coaching movement, and technology is helping us figure out exactly what's happening and bridging the critical gap between 'feel' and 'do.'"

from FanGraphs.com http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/hitting-and-the-power-of-suggestion/?utm_source=Driveline+Baseball+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6ef49e1d1a-Sunday_Thunder_Nuggets_12_18&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_d541cdd9d2-6ef49e1d1a-311453553&mc_cid=6ef49e1d1a&mc_eid=48e9d48f3e

Hitting and the Power of Suggestion

I was drinking a beer with Kevin Youkilis — or rather, I was drinking one of his new brewery's beers, and he was drinking water — and we were talking about the state of the game. I think I mentioned something about chopping wood — how young players are coached (badly?) to hit down on the ball, and how that leads to a lot of swing and miss as players have to try to swing to a point in space — and he stopped me. "Nobody ever swings out to a specific point in space when they're told to chop wood or swing down on the ball," Youkilis said. "What actually happens is that they end up quicker to the ball." My mind was blown.

Youkilis pointed out that he spent his whole career with that philosophy, and though one player's strikeout rate (18.7%) and power (.197 isolated slugging percentage) don't prove anything, it was an eye opener for me. He basically was saying that the power of suggestion might actually have some value, even if the content of that suggestion was technically wrong. And once I thought about it, I realized I'd heard a few smart hitters — including Mark Trumbo — tell me something similar before, but I hadn't been listening right.

In any case, this is one of those testable situations with today's tools of the trade. I asked Jason Ochart of Driveline Baseball if he could create two situations and chart the outcomes using the data collection devices for which Driveline is famous on the pitching end.

In the first situation, Ochart told his hitter to be "quick to the ball." This is maybe not exactly the same thing as telling them to chop wood, but I didn't complain. I don't want him to tell his hitters something he doesn't want to tell them, and what he did tell them still permits us to (attempt to) answer our question: is it possible to change a hitter's swing metrics just by changing what you say to him?

In the second situation, Ochart gave his hitter the advice followed enthusiastically by modern hitters: "Get your hands to the slot first, and then swing." A fundamentally different coaching statement.

The results were different, too. In very interesting ways.

First, a table. Ochart used his Diamond Kinetics app to measure the player's swing by hand speed and distance in the zone. This player is a major-league baseball player.

Swing Stats for One Hitter, Two Conditions

Condition	Hand Speed	Distance in Zone
Quick to Ball	24 mph	23 inches
Hands to Slot	21 mph	28 inches

SOURCE: Diamond Kinetics / Driveline Baseball

Major league hitter told to be "quick to the ball' or "get hands to slot first" in two conditions.

For this hitter, the cue had an interesting result. Being quick to the ball was better for his bat speed, and bat speed begets power. However, he was in the zone for a shorter period, meaning that his swing was steeper and he was more likely to miss the ball. He wasn't giving his hands as much chance to get to the ball.

Here's what the two swings looked like, mapped by that Diamond Kinetics app. "Quick to the ball" is the green swing and "hands to slot" is in orange.

It looks like the "quick to the ball" cue compelled the batter to get his hands down to the slot faster! That might have cost him some time in the zone, though. And that missing time comes early on in the swing, when the brain may still have time to alter the path of the bat some.

The orange swing looks like it's better for a steeper launch angle, though, and that's something that the league's hitters have been seeking to do more over the last year-plus. Thanks to Bill Petti, we can see that baseball's hitter are hitting fewer balls in the 0 to -20 degree angles that produce poor outcomes. Maybe this is from more "hands to slot" coaching happening around the league, and maybe that coaching is due to analysis based on these Statcast stats.

Now it's time for a step back. We can't universalize this small finding to all players, not in a direct manner. What we can probably take from this is that coaching matters, and that each of these conditions is probably better for a specific swing. In other words, there are maybe powerful guys with good launch angle who could benefit from being told to be "quick to the ball." And maybe there other are guys with decent power but who need to lift the ball more; perhaps they'd benefit from being told to get the "hands to the slot" first.

This fact, that there's no universal instruction for baseball development may be frustrating, but if you think about the difference from body to body, it makes sense.

Ochart himself had some thoughts along these lines. "Coaching, in many aspects, is approached as an art more than a science because the same verbal cue to a group of athletes can cause unique movement adaptations within the group," he told me in an email. "Learning what an athlete feels has always been a critical part of coaching movement, and technology is helping us figure out exactly what's happening and bridging the critical gap between 'feel' and 'do.'"

And that's probably the perfect way to sum this up. Yes, it's probably not great to tell people to swing down on the ball. But if you take the kernel from that coaching, and tell them to be quick to the ball, you'll probably be saying the right thing to at least one type of hitter. Figuring out which type of hitter needs to hear which coaching is the next step.

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What's the secret to hitting a sharp-breaking curve ball?

This is what the curve looked like to me at times and I swung at where the ball was rather than where it was going to be. Good to know why I sucked at this though, my inner algorithm was off. Keeping the ball in the center of your visual field seems to be the key takeaway. Visual skills are important and trainable. 

from Daily Mall:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3135444/The-secret-hitting-curveball-Scientists-reveal-sharp-break-movement-mind.html

The secret to hitting a curveball: Scientists reveal how the sharp 'break' in the ball's movement is all in the mind

• Our brains track moving objects using a similar algorithm to GPS
• The algorithm estimates location based on its past position and speed
• We do the same thing when perceiving position in our visual periphery
• Knowing this can help us counteract the effect, the study claims

 Our brains track moving objects by applying one of the algorithms your phone's GPS uses, according to researchers at the University of Rochester. This same algorithm also explains why we are fooled by several motion-related optical illusions, including the sudden 'break' of baseball's well known 'curveball illusion'

Scientists at the University of Rochester say that our brains apply an algorithm, known as a Kalman filter, when tracking a baseball. 

In GPS devices, algorithms, including the Kalman filter, are used to estimate the location of your car based on its past position and speed.   

'Like GPS, our visual ability, although quite impressive, has many limitations,' said the study's coauthor, Duje Tadin, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester.

We see an object's position with great accuracy when it's in the center of our visual field. 

But the same can't be said for perceiving position when it shifts into our visual periphery.

Scientists reveal the secret of how to hit a curveball

When that happens, our brain gives greater emphasis to our perception of the object's motion.

'And, this is where we start seeing fascinating phenomena like the curveball illusion,' said Tadin. 

THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE ILLUSION 

We see an object's position with great accuracy when it's in the center of our visual field. 

But the same can't be said for perceiving position when it shifts into our visual periphery.

When that happens, our brain gives greater emphasis to our perception of the object's motion. 

When it is viewed in the visual periphery, the spin of the ball - the motion of the seam pattern - can make it appear to be in a different location than it really is.

So, when the ball enters your periphery, it appears to make an abrupt shift: The sudden 'break' of the curveball as it nears home plate. 

'We've found that the same algorithm that is used by GPS to track vehicles also explains why we perceive the curveball illusion.'

'A curveball pitch does indeed curve,' said the first author Oh-Sang Kwon, assistant professor at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea.

'But when it is viewed in the visual periphery, the spin of the ball - the motion of the seam pattern - can make it appear to be in a different location than it really is.'

Here, the brain 'knows' that position estimates are unreliable in the periphery, so it relies more on other visual cues, which, in this case, is the motion; the spin of the ball.

So, when the ball enters your periphery, it appears to make an abrupt shift: The sudden 'break' of the curveball as it nears home plate.

The optimal solution that our brain comes up with belies the actual behavior - and trajectory - of the ball, and the result is an optical illusion.

This means you have a better chance of hitting a curveball by realising that our brains, like GPS, can lead us to 'see' changes in speed or direction that don't actually occur.

'These illusions should not be seen as evidence that our brains are poor at perceiving the world around us, though,' explained Tadin. 

'They are interesting side-effects of neural processes that, in most cases, are extremely efficient at processing 'noisy' visual information.' 

Looking back on Barry Bonds : ESPN The Magazine

• Buster Olney, Senior Writer, ESPN The Magazine

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article appeared in the August 8, 2004 issue of ESPN The Magazine.

Looking back:



Hitting coach Jeff Pentland would tell other major leaguers, You don't want what Barry has, meaning they weren't equipped for the challenge of greatness. Pentland, who was Bonds' hitting coach at Arizona State and a lifelong friend, was amazed at how well Bonds coped with his own success. In that kind of spotlight, the more you accomplish, the more that's expected of you, the more you have at stake. Even the smallest failures become

enormous. Almost anyone would shrivel from that kind of pressure, Pentland believed, once they
understood it. Bonds embraced it.

He was obsessed with correcting flaws. A couple of months into his major league career, Bonds phoned Pentland and explained that pitchers were jamming him with fastballs.

"What do I need to do?" Bonds asked. "Barry, you're the smartest player I ever had," Pentland responded. "You'll
figure it out."

In time, Bonds moved closer to the plate, shortened his stride – "Just be slow with your feet," he once explained –and became the best hitter of inside fastballs Pentland had ever seen. And the best breaking-ball hitter. And the most disciplined, period.

Swinging a bat is the most basic instinct for ballplayers. They've been doing it since they were toddlers, and after years upon years of backyard games and BP and organized competition, the yearning to swing the bat is ingrained. A player walks past a new box of bats, and invariably he reaches in and pulls one out, hefts it, takes a
half-swing, checks out how it feels. It's a blind date with wood, and the ballplayer is looking to hook up. It's what they do. It's who they are.

So other players watched Bonds abstain, refuse to swing at anything out of the strike zone, and they were awestruck. He drew fewer than 100 walks in each of his first five seasons, but late in his
career, he was spitting at outside pitches. Bonds wouldn't see a strike for four or five at-bats – hell, for two or three days – and yet, when a pitcher tried enticing him with a fastball just off the
corner, he held back. He had the most potent swing in the game, more reason to swing than any of his peers, and yet he had conquered that most basic instinct. He was the pope of plate discipline.

....

You had to see him every day to understand. Everybody has bad days in BP. Bonds never did, carving line drives to left when he wanted, always smashing the ball squarely with his bat, forever precise, his concentration unrivaled. "The great players are able to slow the game down," said A's pitcher Tim Hudson, who allowed six hits in Bonds' first 14 career at-bats against him, including two homers. "He's been able to slow it down a little more than most. He's like the big kid in elementary school who was way better than everybody else."

Virtually all hitters identify pitches by the rotation of the ball after it leaves the pitcher's hand. If they see spin, the ball's face turned into a whirlpool of seams, they know the pitcher has thrown a curve or a slider. Otherwise, it's probably a fastball or a changeup. But Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn, who studied his rivals, maintained that Bonds could identify pitches before they were released. As a pitcher's hand reached its apex, Gwynn explained, Bonds could detect in an instant whether the pitcher held the ball with his palm and fingers straight up and down (a fastball), or if he gripped it from the side (a breaking ball). A flap of fingers sticking up from behind the ball meant changeup.

In practical terms, this meant Bonds had a huge advantage on other hitters, who had to wait until the ball was four or five feet into its journey toward the plate – an eternity, by comparison. "They always said it looked like he knew a breaking ball was coming," Gwynn said then. "Well, he did."

That wasn't exactly news to his teammate, pitcher Jason Schmidt. When Bonds hit his record 73 homers in 2001, Schmidt said, "They would throw him a breaking ball, and he was like a statue. He wouldn't even move. I've never seen anything like that. He knew it was a ball even before it left the guy's hand. He didn't offer. He didn't check-swing. You don't see hitters do that."

But by the time Bonds turned 40, Schmidt was used to seeing him do the impossible. Somebody broke out a deck of cards in spring training, and Bonds eyeballed the deck as it was shuffled, then predicted the identity of the bottom card. Four times in a row. You had to see it to understand.

Sam Holman lugged a bag of bats over to Bonds in the spring of 1999, bats made out of maple rather than ash. Bonds had heard about Holman and his bats from former teammate Joe Carter, and after Bonds launched homer after homer with the maple in BP, he sat with the former stagehand and asked precise questions about why the
bats seemed harder. Holman sent him a dozen bats a week. Bonds would phone
whenever he wanted to make tenth-of-an-ounce adjustments.

Bonds had asked for just such an
incrementally lighter alteration in the summer of 2001, when he was stalking Mark McGwire's single-season home run record of 70. Holman watched on TV as Bonds bounced a couple of long drives against outfield fences, and knew he'd be getting a call. Sure enough: "Dude, there's something wrong," Bonds said. He and Holman agreed to ratchet up the weight by one-tenth of an ounce, and Bonds blew McGwire away. "Barry and I both know," Holman said, "that the record could be 76 or 77. He did the work for that."

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