I'd always wondered about velocity off the bat when watching Edgar hit. It never *seemed* to me like he was hitting the ball HARDER than the other cleanup hitters -- if anything, the opposite seemed true. His home runs were *never* 500 foot jobs, and he *never* ripped screaming rockets into the seats that failed to get higher than ~30 feet in the air like Giambi, Bonds, Thome, Thomas, Man-Ram used to do.
All of Edgar's shots were artistic, though, in ways I never saw replicated. There was no brutality to his approach; he was a surgeon slicing shots neatly at the gaps or flicking them over the right field wall with ten or twenty feet to spare. I know it sounds stupid, and is probably disprovable somehow, but I *always* felt that Edgar was using FAR more finesse and precision than his contemporaries, who relied more on brute strength (McGwire, Thomas, Giambi, Bagwell) or butter-smooth mechanics and incomparable batspeed (Griffey, A-Rod, Palmeiro, Pujols).
The only guy I saw whose approach looked like it might have been in the same blueprint was Bonds, but Bonds' results were wildly different. Whereas Edgar (seemingly) hit to the situation, lifting deep fly balls for sac flies far more often than other hitters seemed capable of doing, or poking ground balls to the right side when a single base was all we needed, Bonds' eye was so ridiculously good that he could pounce on ALL pullable pitches with ruthless efficiency -- and then he *looked* like a brute because everything was a 450 foot shot down the right field line (you know what I mean...).
So the idea that Robbie's batspeed/velo is fine doesn't do a *lot* to improve my outlook on his season; it seems to me that it's a good start, but if it was possible (as Edgar seemed to demonstrate that it was) I'd prefer my hitters slice the situation and opponent apart with a scalpel than they try bludgeoning their way through every brick wall with a sledgehammer.
Still, it's cool to see JackZ give a public endorsement of the most struggling player on the squad.