Is This Anything, Contd.

Clare stopped over for lunch yesterday, which gave us the chance to talk real estate and baseball. Our daughter is looking to start her family in a nice house; I get to give my opinion on possible choices. I was also asked about a move the Brewers made this week, promoting 27-year old Sara Goodrum to be the organization’s minor-league hitting coordinator. In a word, I’m skeptical. Yes, Theo Epstein was 28 when the Red Sox hired him as their general manager, so maybe baseball is merely giving another young person a shot. But a shot at what exactly? Consider where Goodrum was before her promotion, working in the Brewers’ “sports science and integrative sports performance lab.” Good thing the USSR isn’t around anymore, or I might think this was part of a Cold War attempt to engineer the perfect ballplayer, and we all know people can’t be engineered, right? Even the accolades for Goodrum gave me pause. Team vice president of baseball operations David Stearns told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Sara is well equipped to oversee a comprehensive hitting curriculum. She played at a very high level collegiately [Pac 12, Oregon]. She has studied how the body works [with a master’s degree in exercise and sports science], how the swing works, and how those two elements work together.” The body? And here I thought each MLB team had 25-28 “bodies” on a roster. Tom Flanagan, Milwaukee’s vice president of minor-league operations, told NBC Sports “I think her skill set is very unique. It gives her a very different perspective in terms of different training techniques she probably [?] has a lot of experience with that she feels she can implement and help re-establish our hitting curriculum and help our hitters train better and be better throughout our system.” Here we have our second Brewers’ honcho talking about “curriculum.” And that would be what exactly? Because nobody asked, we don’t know. Lastly, a piece in The Athletic calls Goodrum a “great technician of hitters,” and I go all Bill Robinson. At the risk of repeating myself numb, Robinson believed that if a guy hits on his head, his job as hitting coach was to make that player the best head-hitter possible. Or, to paraphrase the title of Charlie Lau’s instructional book, there’s an art to hitting .300, and I fear a technician’s approach can only ruin it. My beef here isn’t with Goodrum but with the new technological approach taking over the national pastime. With hitting, it’s the return of Walt Hriniak, he of the one true swing, now backed up by all the latest gizmos. Again, you don’t engineer people, at least until we wake up one day to find Ricardo Montalban’s Kahn has gone from Star Trek character to reality. Yes, a 27-year old former softball player can implement all sorts of technology to improve a batter’s swing and approach to hitting, provided she’s working within the natural parameters that player has; put another way, by all means use cameras and whatnot to make John Wockenfuss the best possible John Wockenfuss he can be. Just don’t expect to turn Wockenfuss into Juan Pierre into Aaron Judge. That won’t happen. Oh, and on the Brewers’ curriculum, I’d be interested in knowing what it says about opposite-field and two-strike hitting. Nothing? Then I’d suggest they need to go back to the drawing board and figure it out. Not only is the devil in the details, but in details dating to the very beginning of the sport. You can imagine my daughter sitting on the couch listening to her old man prattle on. (I should note her I bought her both Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting and Lau’s The Art of Hitting .300 to see what approach, or combination of approaches, most appealed to her.) Clare obviously wants a contemporary to succeed. She wonders, though, how Goodrum got the job. “I looked for baseball jobs for what, two-three years? And they never posted anything like this on the MLB bulletin board. I mean, how do women get hired to all these great jobs in baseball?” I think it has something to do with an old-boys’ network, except the connections wrought from experience have been replaced with ones based more on school and analytic connections. I also think some day in the not-too-distant future, there’s going to be a great reckoning and a restoration of a more traditional approach to the game. Then it’s going to be a matter of last-hired, first-fired. Watch your back, kid.