Posted by: Daniel () on Thu Jun 14 10:57:01 2001

Watching Manny Ramirez this year he hits a lot of balls with topspin. Line drives that constantly dip in the out field and hard topspin ground balls. He also drives a lot of pitches over the fence including the record 491 ft job at Skydome last week. He was intentionally walked the other night 4 times in one game. Earlier this year he was intentionally walked with no one on base and he represented the winning run! I don't think there is a better hitter in baseball particularly since he has absolutely no one hitting behind him. He has been the offense on the Red Sox this year. I love watching his mechanics, they are pretty much what Jack
prescribes. .>>Manny seems to be a guy who aims for the middle and seldom hits it,some, top spin making people duck and others they just turn and watch it fly out of the park,pretty good either way.
>>In reading this whole post - there is a lot of "always" and "never" used, terms that just don't apply. The fact is, there's as many different swings as there are players. Most of the ones that deviate significantly from the norm are not very good swings - but they still show up in the pros from time to time. In terms of backspin - hitting slightly under the center of the ball creates backspin - period. Nothing more complicated than that. It can be done with a perfectly sound, rotational swing and produce a long line drive or home run. It can also be done with a lousy mechanical swing and produce something different. I wish I had a more current example of a downward swing - but the best one I can think of is Bake McBride when he played in the 70's. He started with his hands high, chopped down on the ball significantly and had success with it. If he hit it square, it was a hard grounder. If he hit slightly under it, he hit some line drives that went through the infield no higher than the shortstops head and one-hopped to a 400 foot wall. In my opinion - it was a stupid way to swing and I would never advocate trying it or teaching it. Nevertheless - it has occurred. Daniel