.............

=== Mike Carp Crawls Out of the Coffin ===

Has an unusually dynamic swing load when he's seeing the ball good.  It reminds you of Junior's swing trigger.

Check the position of Carp's head , and look in picture #3 at the coiling effect of his entire body, especially the closing distance between his knee and his front shoulder.    And it's as if he's jumping down into the path of the baseball...

 .......................

That's the basic idea, but it looks way better live.  You can get a sense of of the acceleration into the coil, a ready-to-pounce effect that Ken Griffey Jr. used to key his own swing.  When Junior was swinging great - like when he hit homers in 8 straight games ... you could see it in the dynamism of his coil as the pitch came in.

Here's a contrasting example from May 3.  His head stays higher, the bat waggle is less crisp and travels a shorter distance, and generally the coil is just not nearly as decisive, nor as well-sync'ed with the incoming energy.

Today Carp was visibly seeing the ball well.

..............

Don't tell anybody, but Carp's plate discipline stats are miiiiiiles better in 2012 than they were in 2011 -- he's swinging at very few balls, wayyyyy below average, and his swing-and-miss percentage is also way down.

Carp, after 2011, only needed to get his EYE back up to 0.40 or so in order to become a consistent 25+, 90+ RBI man in the majors.  He's a forgotten man right now, but he pulls the ball in the air with authority and he is showing signs of adding back in the EYE that he always had in the minors.

.

=== UNC Kid ===

In tournament chess, in the upper sections, we set ourselves a difficult, if not impossible, goal.  TRY TO PLAY EXACTLY THE SAME WAY AGAINST THE STRONGEST AND WEAKEST PLAYERS.

If you're not sure why that's so important, and/or you're not sure why it is so blinkin' hard to do, remind us to write a post on it something.  Can you play basketball exactly the same way against your 300-lb. uncle and against the local high school star?

So easy to get greedy against the weakies, to win with less focus and effort, and to develop bad habits.  So easy to assume that the Big Man On Campus will not give you opportunities, and to assume that it won't do you any good to keep pressing for them.  You almost have to hypnotize yourself to keep those creeping subconscious impressions out.  ... actually, I'm not really very good at it, though I've worked at it for a long time.

I thought that Kyle Seager's swings, the last two days in NYY, were exactly the same swings that he took against the Twins.  Slap me silly I love this kid.

.

=== Beane Count ===

It's a funny thing.  Coming into the year, we thought our Big Four were Ackley, Carp, Smoak and Montero.  In reality it has been Seager, Ichiro, Jaso and Montero, whose OPS+ respectively are 130, 109, 132 and 103.  That's the benefit of a Beane-style 9-to-make-6 type of lineup situation.  The odds were in the Mariners' favor that some hitters were going to come through.

But supposing that Ichiro, Seager and Montero do plug in, and you've got your poor man's MOTO, and then (say) Carp and Ackley start lighting it up when the weather gets warm?

Saunders' OPS+ on the year is 113.  Liddi's is 111.  It's a young team.

BABVA,

Dr D