Posted by: Patrick (pj3p@earthlink.net) on Tue May 30 16:51:49 2000

> Tom,I fully understand Jack's theories and mechanics and
> agree with some of them,just not all of them.All the styles work
> well.....when the pitch is in the location you want and that is my
> point.Once you get to a certain level of pitching,how the batter
> adjusts when fooled is the difference.If you are rotational looking
> for inside fastball,what adjustments do you make if fooled low
> and away? I think we confuse hitting with homeruns.Please don't
> anyone tell me Sosa is a great hitter because of the homeruns
> unless they want to talk about career strikeouts also. The great
> hitters in history all made adjustments during a swing and
> understood that the pitch location dictates what you can do with
> it.
>
> > I think the last post brings up a good point. There seems to an
> obsession with the home run. Most of these posts seem to
> mention only McGuire and Sosa. They are great home run hitters
> but I personally would rather try to learn from great all around
> hitters. Hitters who hit for average as well as power and can hit
> to all fields. Names like Arod and Piazza come to mind. I find
> Piazza's opposite field bullet home runs more impressive than
> Big Mac's pulled fly ball home runs. Just my humble opinion.

Not that I have firsthand knowledge or anything, but Piazza and
Paul O'Neill both appear to use obscenely heavy bats. Swinging late
with these bats still will produce enough energy to drive the ball
out of the park. Personally I'm a softball player and I'm waiting
for the baseball crowd to catch on to the benefit of dropping
the top pinky [onto the bottom hand]. This results in a tremendous increase in backspin [thus distance] and about 10% in bat speed!