Watching Clement a few times from the Cheney stands, we were perplexed at the 'net reports that Jeff Clement had woeful batspeed. We hadn't noticed, sez we, but hey, we'll check it. Never did get to Cheney after that.
Having seen Trey, the #3 draft pick in all the land, from the CF camera, here's the Tao of Bat Spee Do :- )
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As Bruce Lee pointed out a decade or four ago, handspeed has three components. The laws of physics, acceleration, and neurology do not warp inside 90-foot squares.
Lee correctly pointed out that the ability to land, or block, a punch, depends on three things. Baseball watchers would do well to identify which of the three they are talking about when they refer to batspeed.
1) Perceptive speed
2) Reactive or Reflexive speed
3) Throughspeed
Perceptive speed? That's how long it takes your brain to register what is going on.
This can be modified. A lot. Through pattern recognition and instinct. In fact, you can't box effectively until your brain reacts instinctively to the shoulder and chest twitches that warn you of an imminent punch.
It's an axiom in aikido that you are not ready to defend yourself until you apply wristlocks (in a given position) without being aware you're doing it. (Aikido strikes, BTW, are delivered from areas the uke cannot see at all — an uppercut in one position, a strike from behind a high front side in another, etc.)
D-O-V readers will have no problem drawing the baseball analogue: if a hitter can't "take a shortcut" to deciphering a pitch, by reading delivery and spin and whatnot, he can't hit.
Lefthanders have no chance against a George Sherrill because his deception is near perfect. No matter what they tell you, if the first cue a batter gets is when he sees the flight of the ball, he's already done.
If somehow a Jarrod Washburn 88 fastball "materialized" in front of the mound as it came to the batter, no ML hitter would ever touch it.
In aikido, they work constantly on "extending ki" — one of the Four Golden Principles — and what that means is, pick up the punch as early as you possibly can. Like, in the locker room.
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Reactive Speed? These are simple reflexes. You have probably been to the Pacific Science Center and seen the little game where you see a light flash and then hit a button. If you get your reaction down to .18, .19 of a second — consistently — you're doing very well.
My understanding is that this can't be changed much. You can get a little stronger and be in good shape, but your pure reaction time is always going to have a floor, somewhere around 1/6, 1/5 of a second.
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Throughspeed? In Jeet Kune Do, Lee commanded to punch "as fast as you can without 'flickiness' ". ML hitters seek approximately the same thing.
No matter what they tell you, you can COMPLETELY gauge ANY hitter's throughspeed simply by measuring the distance the ball is hit. (The latest science indicates that the batter could even let the bat go at the moment impact and nothing would change. Velocity off the bat, given the same pitch, is 100% the same thing as bat throughspeed.)
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A compact swing is a fourth factor, and it can affect apparent batspeed.
If — after the batter decides to launch the bat — it takes 0.3 seconds to get the bat to the strike zone, rather than 0.45, obviously that makes a huge difference.
Here you're talking only about address position to the ball. Followthrough, as such, is irrelevant (except in the sense that a given followthrough is connected to a different backswing). Ken Griffey Jr. is very compact to the ball and then has a long, flowery followthrough. In the martial arts they call this a 'preying mantis' attack. Dr. D uses this mechanic in the handslap game. :- )
Dave Henderson confessed this kind of cheating when facing guys who throw hard: "over 95 mph, you go to your pepper swing."
Note that a more compact swing might not look different at at all. The muscle load, the harder swing, might be happening 'under the skin,' so to speak. In aikido they call this 'moving without motion.'
Baseball people seem to use the term 'long swing' in inconsistent ways. A lot of times you'll hear an ex-ballplayer on TV talking about a long followthru…
It is odd that Ichiro, in many ways, has a sensationally LONG swing, which is why he can hit the ball 400 feet despite himself weighing only about 160 lbs. You'd think that would leave him vulnerable to changeups, but in other ways Ichiro's swing is compact. The reconciliation? He winds up like a golf swing and can interrupt the backswing to begin a compact swing at any given moment.
It's easy to sympathize with ML scouts who didn't expect to see Ichiro! He's unique even in the way he swings the bat — more power + quickness than any other player.
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Scouts usually use "batspeed" in two senses.
(1) They'll talk about an aging hitter, having his HR's die on the warning track, as having lost batspeed. I suppose you know (even if they might not!) that this is referring to throughspeed.
(2) They'll talk about a hitter who has to "cheat" on fastballs. This means that the hitter is not waiting to read a pitch and then "honestly" getting the bat around with quickness, but is simply "timing" his swing to when a fastball arrives. (Of course he gets torn up by GOOD offspeed stuff, but can camoflage the "cheating" against mediocre offspeed stuff.)
I don't imagine that Richie Sexson has lost his ability to see a curve ball out of the pitcher's hand, so we must be talking about reflexive speed. Scouts will, strangely, talk about young confused hitters as having "an inexplicable loss of batspeed this year" ….
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JEFF CLEMENT is a strange guy to accuse of terrible batspeed, considering he hit .275/.370/.497 at the toughest pitcher's park in the PCL. The 61/88 eye ratio was pretty sweet, too.
Performance aside, or the scouts here.we did watch the guy on tape and it's clear what the disconnect was.
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Clement obviously never had a problem with throughspeed. That's beyond dispute, since he's been hitting them 400 feet throughout his minors career.
And you can hardly judge his perceptive speed, less than 1,000 AB's as a pro, considering he's been commanded to work mostly on his defense.
What the scouts were undoubtedly talking about, is that once in a while Jeff Clement swings weirdly behind a fastball. (Other times, he whips the bat around and pulls a real good fastball — which is the only reason he was able to SLG .500 at Tacoma.)
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IMHO, Clement does this because he is the anti-cheater at the plate.
Nearly every pro hitter goes up to the plate with two Prime Directives: don't blow any kisses to any boys in the stands, and don't get caught three feet behind a fastball. Not in that order.
Pro hitters are absurdly ego-sensitive, which is whence all the beanball wars when somebody "shows you up" on the baseball diamond. …. well, swinging three feet behind a fastball is showing yourself up, time and again.
Except Clement. He's studying the pitches, change curve fastball forkball, and he's reading them, and then he's swinging.
Raul Ibanez goes up there "cheating," cheating in the normal ML sense NOT the "slow batspeed" cheating sense. Like any major leaguer, he defends fastball first. If he gets a hit that's fine, but Job One is being on time for the fastball, even if it's just to fly out. You read me right. ML hitters care more about looking good on a fastball, than they care about getting on base.
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Scouts reading this will smile wryly …. until they remember Jamie Moyer's confession. "The only reason I have a career," Jamie once said, "is because major league hitters can't stand to have a fastball thrown by them."
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Jeff Clement has been going up to the plate unworried about whether anybody throws a fastball by him. He figures: IT'S ONLY ONE STRIKE. Stuff happens.
Racquetball players take a backhand grip to return serve. They're not supposed to lean left, though. Mediocre players do. ML players "lean left" against fastballs. Clement doesn't, usually.
We finally did see him from the CF camera, and on some tape, and it confirmed what we had surmised earlier. Wanted to hang on till we knew for a fact, though.
Of COURSE Clement can turn around a FB, as anybody familiar with the PCL shoulda known better. But he DOES look weird sometimes — since he's not cheating to defend FB's
Jack Tatum once said, show him a wide receiver who will run slant patterns and take the shots? He will be effective. Tatum couldn't stop a receiver who was willing to pay the price, he freely admitted. But he also bragged, you could count those guys on one hand…
A hitter who goes up there with the idea of winning first, and looking good second? I'm down with that.
Cheers,
Dr D
But the scouts are going to read something like that on Clement and tell the pitchers: "Clement isn't going to cheat on the fastball, so don't try throwing slop to him on the first pitch" and guess what...Clement is going to be behind 0-1 a lot because he's taking that first fastball.
He'll need to adjust and try to guess at least a LITTLE when the fastball might be coming...if he doesn't start guessing a LITTLE, he'll never hit consistently in the majors.
Great point Matt (and great post Dr.D).
Here is where Edgar was so great. He'd gladly watch a pitcher groove FB strike one to get a look at the pitcher's delivery and get his one good eye : ) accustomed to reading the pitch. But he'd punish that pitch often enough that pitchers just could not feel comfortable doing it.
Edgar would occasionally look flat silly swinging behind a FB. I recall reading that this was sometimes due to his eye condition. But it could also be he was just fooled by a pitcher, or he guessed wrong.
Matt is right about batters guessing... It's like counting cards in blackjack. If pitcher x in situation Y is going to throw a fastball 90% of the time, you'd better be looking fastball.
I'm with Matt also that much of Clement's problems last year were due to his knee. Looking forward to seeing how he develops in 09.
Great write-up on Clement's approach as a hitter. It really is rare to see this approach outside of the extreme TTO guys, and even many/most of them fall into the trap of cheating fastball too often.
Jack Cust is another guy who looks like he simply does not care how his AB looks. We've seen him turn around inside fastballs in the mid/high-nineties for 430' moonshots, and we've seen him take breaking balls away over the left field wall. He strikes out so much because he really is looking to destroy every pitch, and his recognition is great. He *never* goes up there thinking "Well, it's two strikes now, so I guess I'd better shorten up and look to punch a single up the middle." He uses the same swing on every pitch. He just doesn't care if he misses - irregardless of pitch type.