Posted by: Chris O'Leary (chris@chrisoleary.com) on Tue Nov 21 14:32:32 2006

"Maybe I am confused about what exactly is meant by 'squish the bug' but if it means rotation of the back foot I fail to see how Pujols does NOT do that in this clip."

I interpret "squishing the bug" as lifting the heel of the back foot and rotating the back foot 90 degrees on the ball of the foot (so that the toe of the back foot goes from pointing at the 1B dugout to pointing at the pitcher). When "squishing the bug", at no point does the the ball of the back foot leave the ground.

Squishing the bug looks kind of like this photo of Albert Pujols...

http://www.chrisoleary.com/projects/Baseball/Hitting/Images/AlbertPujols/ImageSequence_AlbertPujols_1B_002/Video_Hitting_AlbertPujols_1B_002_25.jpg

The problem is that, while Albert does look like he's squishing the bug in that photo, the photo below makes it clear that Albert does not in fact squish the bug (if you define it as I did above)...

http://www.chrisoleary.com/projects/Baseball/Hitting/Images/AlbertPujols/ImageSequence_AlbertPujols_1B_002/Video_Hitting_AlbertPujols_1B_002_23.jpg

In the photo above, which is from two frames before the first photo and is from around the point of contact, Pujols' back toe is completely off the ground.


"This shifting of weight BACK to the back foot would not be possible if the following had occurred: 1) foot came completely off the ground 2) foot did not rotate at all 3) foot rotated too far."

But Pujols' back foot clearly came off the ground. That was made possible by the fact that his weight was on his front foot but his center of mass was still behind his front foot (his weight has counterbalanced by the rotation of the bat in front of his front foot).

My interpretation of the problem with the "squish the bug" cue is that it doesn't create the correct lower body action (which I interpret as more of a front side pull than a back foot push).