One More Thing

I care about hitting if for no other reason than that I helped bring a hitter into the world.  Clare hit the way she did in part because her old man made her to.

So, yes, it was “see ball, hit ball” from the start, but I forgot to mention my other rule, “know the strike zone.”  If you don’t, you end up walking back to the dugout way too much.  Clare could hit from the start, and by that I mean before she turned four, but knowledge of the strike zone was something that came slowly, with a lot of what you might call “excited vocalizations” from her father.

Clare’s big weakness was sliders away.  When I threw them in batting practice, her butt went one direction and her bat went in the opposite as she tried hitting off her front foot.  The swing rarely resulted in contact, and, when it did, the ball was lucky to go a few feet.  You don’t hit .300 with a bunch of swinging bunts, that’s assuming the ball even went fair.

“And where was the ball going to go if you did hit it?” I asked closer to a thousand times than once.  All but a handful of hitters have weaknesses.  With Clare, it was that breaking ball away.  I taught her, more or less, to lay off it, even if that meant taking it for a strike.  Then, with two strikes, you go into protect-mode and foul off the outside pitch.  This my daughter learned to do.

Not that she laid off the high stuff.  Baseball or softball, Clare went after high heat.  In softball, it comes in the form of a rise ball; done right, it’s the equivalent of Nolan Ryan throwing submarine, and the pitcher can then take something off and turn the pitch into the most tantalizing change up you ever saw but never hit.

“Lay off the high stuff, Clare,” father and coaches pleaded, starting in high school, and she did, sort of.  But, truth be told, my daughter was quick enough and strong enough to hit rise balls with power.  She saw the ball, she hit the ball, and she knew the ball wasn’t going to be an outside strike.  That’s all I could ask of my hitter.