Ryan Braun tests positive for PED

[DJ's left nut]

Originally Posted by L.A.Chieffan

It doesn't, at least not directly. Maybe indirectly by making the pitcher throw you a hanging curve as opposed to a fastball because he's frightened of your mark mcgwire triceps.

How does getting a bat into the zone quicker not help you make up for slower pitch recognition? How does being able to fight off a breaking ball that you would have ordinarily swung through not get you an extra pitch to hit that the pitcher may then hang?

It's not going to help me hit a breaking ball, but that's not who we're talking about. We're talking about guys that were already the best 1% in the world at what they do - hitting a baseball. Guys that can already recognize a breaking ball to some degree and do so better than the tens of thousands of folks that would kill to play this game for a living.

You're working within razor-thin margins. All of those guys can see a breaking ball, it's just a matter of those hundredths of a second that their body takes to process and react to same. If you're a little slower on the trigger with the recognition, then the increased batspeed can make up for it.

Give me a rationale explanation as to how that's not true. Please, somehow explain to me how this does nothing to help hitters that were having to guess on breaking balls get just that extra Nth of a second needed to either fight one off or square it away.

The line between hitting a ball 400 ft and either spiking it to the SS or blasting it straight skyward is less than the blink of an eye. To argue that additional batspeed has nothing to do with the ability to hit a breaking ball given those constraints is just asinine.

It's not going to turn a HS hitter into a superstar, but it will take a mediocre Major League hitter (already a fantastic hitter in any other context) and make him a much better one.