Kershaw pulled after 7 perfect innings and 80 pitches

[Jerm]

Originally Posted by DJ's left nut

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.

Cool…I just used launch angle as a way to rail against analytics lol…interesting what you say though, for sure.

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by Jerm

Cool…I just used launch angle as a way to rail against analytics lol…interesting what you say though, for sure.

I just think the emphasis on blaming 'analytics' is backwards is all.

The game isn't suffering because offenses saw through numbers that HRs and walks were the way to win games by using analytics. Analytics simply provided the information and it's information that simply wouldn't have come out that way 25 years ago.

The game is suffering because pitching has become so overpowered that it MADE HRs and walks the way to win games. Especially when defensive shifts can cover for defensive deficiencies of power-forward hitters. And when smaller parks and increased nutrition means there's more power in the game than ever before.

I mean g'damn, look at a guy like Tyler O'Neill. That guy is a literal bodybuilder who is in the top 3% sprint speed in baseball. He's a freakin' monster. 30 years go Bo Jackson was a national phenomenon for being a guy just like O'Neill, now O'Neill is another face in the crowd.

Analytics didn't change the game - they simply told us that the game had changed.

And as it relates specifically to something like launch angle, I think the common fan simply misunderstands what the concept means. They're not always talking about how the ball comes off the bat (though that's part of it). They're talking about exactly what Williams is talking about there. It's about matching your swing to the path of the pitch so that your bat stays in the hitting zone longer to create more contact. THEN they'll start talking about mostly timing mechanisms that can address how the ball comes off the bat.

But it still all starts with the hit tool. If you can't put the barrel on the ball, all the raw power in the world doesn't mean anything but a fast grounder or high popup. So hitting coaches aren't teaching guys to try to hit up for loft. They're teaching guys to stay in the hitting zone by changing their attack angle THEN change their timing and their hands to do more damage at impact.

I'll probably never find it, but I saw an article about a guy who 'discovered' the Barry Bonds 'loop' in his swing by watching the knob of the bat. He thought he'd uncovered a holy grail. Nope - Williams was teaching THAT as well and any video of his swing back in the day demonstrates it.