Ohtani's Generational HITTING Motion - 1
when two side .gif's provide the last 30% of a hitter evaluation

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Q.  What is wrist hinge all about?

A.  Kate Preusser gif-ted us with side slo mo's that cause us to instantly jell a crazy, stupid love for Shohei Ohtani as a hitter.  Click this link into a 2nd window and thanks, Kate.  First-class analysis also.

Tyro or expert alike, y'can all see the Tiger Woods-like wrist hinge that her Bryce Harper .gif boasts -- and then you can see Ohtani quite obviously blow Harper away in the left lane.  Why don't all hitters take this kind of centrifugal force out of their forearm pay window?  (1) They just don't have hands like those two guys.  Griffey is also in Preusser's article, and he's the third lefty you see with this Tiger shtick in the wrists.

(2) It is blinkin' hard to synch that kind of hand action WITH that kind of front hip action.  (Hopefully Moe Dawg can comment on powerless, inaccurate wrist hinge, perhaps with respect to "casting" or "throwing.")  Basically you can organize your body, in sports, around your:

  • Hip motion
  • Shoulder motion
  • Elbow, OR
  • Wrist

I mean, of COURSE a pro athlete uses all these things well, but ... to see some particular aspect of the motion that is 99.98th even compared to other pro's, normally you can see the entire body organized to do it.  Ohtani gets the wrists unsnnnnnnnappped SO late and deep into his swing ... and YET he's launching all that from an unbelievable hip action also.  Like Junior did.  Junior have a generational swing?  Yeah.  Ohtani's is even a little better than Griffey's!

....

In aikido, you do wrist locks on people and you can feel their ligaments.  Once in a while people just have weird ligaments.  I'll guarantee you that Tiger Woods and Shohei Ohtani have something verrrrrry strange about their ligaments and, even more so, their tendons.

Secretariat won the world and later they found out his heart was freakishly large, like 40% large or something.  So it is with guys like this and their tendons.

....

In Kate's second .gif, imagine that ball BLASTed about 700 feet.  I mean, just feeeeeel the energy of it.  Get out of your neck and into your gut as you watch the bat come through the hitting zone, and the ball at contact to the spot out in front about 4 feet.  Feel like it finished about 700 feet?

But that FIRST .gif, batting practice at leisure, it honestly looks to me like the ball should be detonated.  Not trying to make a quip.  My reaction is that the object he's hitting should be destroyed in a splay shot.  You never saw Griffey, even, swing a bat like that.  And, of course, Griffey could not hit the ball as far as Ohtani does, despite being a bigger, more powerful man.

So!  I mean, you could say anybody hitting a ball 500 feet in live games has great centrifugal force.  But you, the erudite SSI Denizen, are hereby alerted that these few tape-measure shots you heard about were not one-off's.  His 500-footers were not a fluke swing-out-of-your-shoes at a pitch in just the right place -- remember when Ichiro used to sit high-in once in a while, clear the knees early, and put more muscle into the throughswing?  

This ain't that.  This is a baseball hitter with a once-per-generation swing.

The problem for us in Seattle is, after he becomes an Oakland A or something.  Ohtani's astounding centrifugual force, maybe the best in baseball history! as Ichiro was the best in history at many things, that is not even the only crazy asset Ohtani has here.

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Comments

1

In golf circles that “hinge” is generally referred to as ”lag.”   Study a slo-mo of Tiger’s swing and notice how when his hands are to the ball, the club’s shaft is parallel to the ground, essentially the butt of the club is pointing directly down the target line.  From ther the club head has to explode into the ball to catch up with the hands it is trailing.  That move isn’t really an unhinging but really a rotational move.  Cano’s swing best replicates that rotational move.  I think you could fairly call him a top hand hitter.

Harper, Ohtani, Griffey all end up with their hands ahead of the plate, but the barrel of the bat still directly behind the plate.  Then the tremendous rotational/“unhinging” speed of the barrel allows it to catch and pass the hands.  I tend to think of “hinge/unhinge” as the sort of movement you make when striking a nail with a hammer. 

But the greater the lag, generally the greater the clubhead/bat speed.  It is a much more explosive move.  Mays, Aaron, Williams, Musial, Killebrew all tended to be hands hitters, in that they kept the hands more within the frame of the body.  The stroke was shorter than a Griffey’s, for example.  By the way, I am interested in Harper’s swing, in that he gets up on his front foot with his back foot off the ground.  Mays and Aaron did that and I find it Old School.  I wrote something about “front foot hitters” a couple of years ago.  

Doc, in golf there is another concept referred to as “X-Factor.”  It is the difference in how “open” the hips are compared to the shoulders, in degrees.   The modern power hitter explodes his hips open, but the shoulders stay much more square until the last moment.  Golf Digest analyzed the swings of the longest hitters a few years ago, for example , Bubba Watson, and found they had the greatest X-Factor. That helps create lag, as well.  Is there an aikido concept that goes with that?

Cano is renowned for his ability to stay inside the ball, but Griffey may have been better.  I think that is where much of his power came from.  As I wat h him swing now, he reminds me of Sergio Garcia.  Both were slighter guys, but generated tremendous power by taking a very inside path to the ball.  “Casting” generally puts you on an outside path, and a less powerful one.  I was a caster.  

2

I always get stuck in that question when I see 'wristy' hitters like Griffey, Ohtani, and even Mike Cameron.  Their approach isn't so much to keep the bat in the zone a long time, as it is to generate maximum possible batspeed at the moment of impact.  This pays off in the power department, but also MECHANICALLY leaves a hitter vulnerable to off-speed stuff IF he doesn't recognize it early enough.

So how is it that such great hitters can employ the 'wristy' swing technique, but that USUALLY it results in piles of K's for lesser (but still great!) players?  If you're not keeping the bat in the zone a long time during the swing, you're creating a vulnerability.  Are the EYES of the great 'wristy' hitters just that much better than those of mere mortal 4 WAR guys like Cammy?  Or is it that the extra power generated by the wrist lag actually does increase K's as it *seems* to me that it should?

Probably not a high-level question, but it's one I get stuck on whenever I think about hitters like this.  As usual, great pice, Doc :-)

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