Say What?

We live in strange times. It used to be April meant baseball, and plenty of it. Now, football has bullied its way onto the calendar with its annual draft. For reasons beyond me, a whole bunch of people out there appear to care about who takes whom in the seventh round. I say this after having watched a clip of a zoom call the Bears’ seventh-round pick had with WGN Sports. If only I could find a baseball story that made sense. Instead, the Tribune ran one today straight out of the “Twilight Zone,” where major-league teams employ a “director of hitting” and a “biomechanist.” The White Sox pay Ryan Fuller to be their director and to talk about third baseman Miguel Vargas (.189 BA) like this: Being able to have where his hands could go to with his first move stay a little bit higher to cover the top part of the zone when they were going high to low; his barrel was underneath. He crushed the bottom part of the zone but a pretty good hole in the middle, top part where he was getting attacked swinging to find a solution for that part of the zone.” Got that? Maybe the gibber makes sense to a hitter tuned in; Vargas is, I admit, starting to hit, batting .308 (8-for-26) over his last seven games. But here’s a thought—what if he’s just a good low-ball hitter? Can the biomechanist really increase his hot zones? The Sox are tied with the Bluejays for 26th place in runs scored (93) and rank dead last in team batting average at.209; their on-base percentage (.284) put them at 28th. The figures don’t lie. It’s the people doing the talking I wonder about.