Strike 3: The flood of misinformation that all human beings are all forced to deal with these days – courtesy of social media and the internet – is staggering. What used to be easily checked out and dismissed as a falsehood or even a downright lie is now oftentimes accepted as an “alternative fact” just because someone decides they like the source.
These days, if you tell a lie over and over again, pretty soon people start to believe the lie is true.
Major League Baseball players are not immune. For example, for a number of years now, a whole lot of MLB hitters have been, and continue to be, duped into listening to a bunch of outside noise from amateur wannabe hitting coaches that have done more to harm the art of hitting a baseball than any 102 mph fastball.
There’s currently a proliferation of worthless “teaching” and downright nonsense floating around on the ‘net courtesy of these self-anointed “hitting gurus” who all claim to have THE answers to turning Little Johnny into Mike Trout faster than you can say Shohei Ohtani. While many of these guys are making big money off this scam, the vast majority of MLB hitters who indulge them are not only paying them, but suffering from the association.
It’s sad enough that parents and young players see this garbage and decide they need to send money for hitting lessons to someone who hasn’t stood in a batter’s box since he was cut from the high school JV a couple dozen years ago. What’s even sadder is that talented professional hitters are also falling for this garbage.
Do you want to know one big reason why the Colorado Rockies haven’t been able to successfully put together a new group of hitters that’s in any way similar to the Blake Street Bombers of old? Why Rockies batters continue to strike out at the kind of pace that makes Tony Gwynn roll over in his grave? Why Colorado’s lineup, which features players who grew up hitting the baseball very hard and are in the big leagues because they have the talent to continue to hit the ball, just can’t hit anymore?
Hint. It’s not Bud Black or Hensley Meulens’ fault.
The art of hitting has been infected by too much useless and confusing information that makes its way into the heads of too many hitters. They’re all hearing different messages – most of it pure nonsense – from people they’ve decided to associate themselves with outside of the teams that employ them. Many are deciding to employ their own “personal hitting coach” who oftentimes has ideas and messages that don’t mesh with what the team is trying to get the hitter to do. The result of all this is a hodgepodge of ideas? Clogging up the minds and messing up a player’s swing.
For fans, the easy answer is to blame the team’s hitting coaches. Just like Dave Magadan before him, Meulens, the current Rockies hitting coach, and the others on the Rockies staff have plenty of knowledge and expertise they can pass along to guys like Ryan McMahon, Michael Toglia, Ezequiel Tovar and the rest of the Rockies lineup, a lineup that was recently shut out for an entire three game series in San Diego.
Yet the absorption of too much disinformation from the outside contaminates even the good stuff they’ve learned over the years.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking the advice of a different voice or coach and trying different things in an effort to improve. The smart players do listen, and often try out something different. If it doesn’t work for them, they kick that idea to the curb and go back to what’s always worked for them. The best hitters in the game have a singleness of purpose and they don’t over complicate things. Yet pushing aside stuff that doesn’t work is harder to do if a player has actually hired and is paying the guy spewing it to be his personal hitting coach on a year ‘round basis.
For example, if Rockies Player A has been convinced that the upper cut swing that his personal coach has taught him will make him an All-Star in the immediate future, and that striking out twice a game is no big deal if he hits 30 home runs for the season, then what can Meulens and his staff do about it?
As if they don’t have enough to think about, with pitchers coming at them with triple digit fastballs on a nightly basis.
Today’s hitters – especially those who are blessed to play half their games at Coors Field – need to take a longer look at what they’re doing and why. Identify what’s not working, dump it and go back to what does. (Hint: the upper cut swing doesn’t work.)
The only answer to all these hitting woes? It’s between their ears.
