This piece originally ran on the main site. We hope you enjoy a preview here. Kris Bryant never made much secret of the fact that he liked to hit the ball in the air. “I liked hitting home runs when I was little,” he told the Chicago Tribune last year. “To do that, you have […]
Tag: Swing Path
With Bryant, the Proof Is in the Swing Plane
Here we are, August 23: the Dog Days, the Stretch Run, the days of Magic Numbers and Playing out the String. If you squint, you can see the final strains of the regular season, shrouded in fall freshness and early darkness. The end is nigh; we’ll begin to look upon who did what, and how, […]
Harnessing the Power: Kris Bryant’s Next Level
In the summer of 1998, the baseball world was captivated by a steroid-assisted home run race, and six-year-old Kris Bryant was in his second season of serious training with his dad. A student at the Ted Williams school of hitting since age five, he was already swinging for the little league fences with the advice, “hit the ball […]
Javier Baez, Eye Level, and Guessing at the Bottom of the Zone
Two years ago, Javier Baez was not a good major-league hitter. Over 229 plate appearances in 2014, he put up a .169/.227/.324 triple-slash line, with nine home runs and a glaringly awful 41.9 percent strikeout rate. That’s really, really bad. But things got better. Last year, although he hardly reached his ceiling, it’s fair to say that […]