Posted by: HoffmanLa () on Sun Dec 3 20:47:13 2000

Hi all

Some folks around here are rapidly becoming creeps.

These hitting forums are obviously populated by a lot of people with differing levels of experience and expertise. Some are enthusiastic dads with video cameras and high hopes for Junior. That's okay. Most never played much and don't try to fake otherwise. Still, their journey can have nobilty to it. We are all we have, in many ways. The pros sure aren't paying any attention. So we must accept our community as it is.

Some here display an arrogance and ignornace, though, that really blows their cover. Pete Rose, someone said, is not a great athlete. Ok, maybe compared to Vlad Guerrero or Tony Oliva. But what the hell else? Pete Rose, during his career, could have walked into your neighborhood YMCA and scored 25 against the best you got. You will never know an athlete as talented as Pete Rose in your lifetime. So stow it. How are we to know how well you are judge athletic ability? You might have the athletic instincts of a brick, for all we know. Nobody else here spends any time arguing athletic ability of folks with 4,000 hits. Why do you? More important, who cares? He has 4,000 hits. We want to learn from it. We can acknowledge greatness, admire it, then clinically take it apart.

You make absurd statistical claims. You somehow think the mechanics that permit hard shots past third base are different from those that create homers. That strikes most of us here as weird.

Maybe you are being deliberately provocative. Screw around with the hitting geeks. Great, okay, we get it, very clever. What kind of loser, though, spends time and effort in a weird joke like this? You must not have much to do if this is the case, and we sense your odd nature and wish you ill. We all have a lot to do.

This same fella throws out terms such as "customized swing" and "pure swing." We don't care. We care about swings with top hand torque and rotation and up plane. You have become a bother. Not because we have to respond to you, but because you bother us and we don't like to suffer fools among us. Ever get beat up because you were an idiot who did not fit at junior high? That is what we are doing. You are getting pummeled because you do not fit in. The minute the creep finds another place to fit in, the beating stops. Take the hint.

We don't care that some folks are unable to understand the swings used by great pros. We can. We have studied them. We have video cameras and computers and talk among ourselves. We will give our opinions, based upon that study, to those who ask. If you don't like it, hike.

You are a creep and a loser, with some odd need for punishment. Your masochism scares us because we think you are unhealthy.

HoffmanLa