Quote:
Originally Posted by Jerm
Analytics is the killing the sport and the worst ****ing thing to ever happen to baseball and no one will tell me otherwise.
MUH LAUNCH ANGLE….**** outta here…
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Ted Williams was teaching launch angle and matching your swing plane to the incoming pitch 60 years ago. It's the RIGHT approach.
This was from Ted Williams book in 1970:
That's 'launch angle' fellas. It's what modern hitting coaches are teaching guys to do now to ensure the bat head stays in the hitting zone longer. In the 60s and 70s through to the early 2000s when hitting coaches were teaching guys to 'swing down' on the ball and attack the front half of it, they were ignoring what the greatest hitter of all time had been telling folks they should be doing for half a century.
This isn't new and it isn't bad. The problem is small parks combined with stronger players and pitchers who are told to let it fly along with new understanding of how pitches work that make them more effective and deceptive than ever.
Stuff like seam shifted wakes and pitch tunneling make pitchers more capable than ever of 'surprising' the hitter in the 5 feet before ball crosses the plate. And pitch tracking technologies have given them an edge that they simply didn't have, especially when combined with organizational shifts w/r/t things like shoulder loading to find additional velocity. Guys are more capable of seeing where it is that certain pitches they threw 'went wrong' through motion capture imaging that teaches them how to duplicate the nasty pitches while scrapping the hangers.
When you can't 'out-smart' the pitcher anymore and merely have to wait for them to execute poorly, the tables turn significantly in favor of pitching when the game was already 60/40 in their favor to begin with.
In the last 10 years pitching has just stormed forward and has gained so many advantages that hitters have realized that the odds of stringing hits together for long rallies are longer than simply swinging for the downs or trying to draw walks.