Art or Science?

The weather outside is frightful, with the clock ticking down to the Rams-Bears’ kickoff at Soldier Field after nightfall. What better time to talk about baseball? Today’s Sun-Times had an interesting story on White Sox free-agent pickup Jarred Kelenic, a real prospect-to-suspect if there ever was one. According to the Times’ Kyle Williams, Kelenic thinks the Sox have a “clear plan of how they were going to help make me the player that I can be.” In other words, fix him. Williams noted the Sox “have rebuilt their infrastructure, emphasizing player development and improved communication, creating a more efficient process and shifting many game-planning duties from their lead coaches.” Wait, there’s more. “New hitting coach Derek Shomon will lead the batters. But the team has also hired Tony Medina, who will handle practice designs, handle the group’s batting-cage work and a ‘lot of stuff behind the scenes to really help our hitting department,’ according to manager Will Venable.” How telling but sad. Everything points to hitting as a mechanical exercise or just an exercise to be perfected through proper oversight. If Kelenic were a machine, this would be the perfect approach to increase production. Only he’s human, and he’s playing a game that refuses to be subject to the dictates of analytics. For a Christmas present, I once gave Clare a copy of Charley Lau’s The Art of Hitting .300. I was never a big fan of Lau’s take on hitting; it was mechanics-heavy and a harbinger of what was to come. Still, he realized that hitting was an art, and he had honest-to-goodness major-league experience as evidenced by an eleven-year career. Give me Lau over the system the Sox have in place. Better yet, give me Bill Robinson. Robinson was what the 26-year old Kelenic aspires to be, someone who goes from prospect to suspect to solid major-league hitter. Robinson couldn’t hit his way out of a paper bag until the age of 30, when he began hitting 122 of his 166 career homeruns. Before he stopped playing at the age of 40, Robinson had won a World Series ring with the Pirates, helping Pittsburgh top the Orioles with a 5-for-19 performance over all seven games. Robinson the player turned into Robinson the hitting coach. Let’s just say he didn’t hurt the Mets, the team he helped coach to a World Series win in 1986, with a philosophy that emphasized working with players as they were and not turning them into some kind of hitting machine. Or, as Robinson put it, “A good hitting instructor is able to mold his teachings to the individual.” Which meant, “If a guy stands on his head, you perfect that.” The White Sox, like the rest of major-league baseball, has gone in a different direction. Good luck to Kelenic in finding success with it.