SI.com - How to Homer
- Thread starter weeba
- Start date
At the risk of Roethlisberging, the phrase "long form journalism" has a wonderful double meaning for this piece.
Great story. Time to rekindle that thread asking "Could you hit one out of Fenway", where if I recall about 75% of posters said yes. Hahaha. That guy is in much better shape than the average 45 year old though.
Man that was a wonderful read. First thing I thought about was the thread here as well. I definitely never would have a shot, but this article makes me think that basically no one else on here would either. Maybe with the training, but... good luck with that.
Very good read and just goes to show you how hard this game really is. These players make a home run look so simple and yet it is one of the hardest things to do in all of sports.
This guy also taught himself to dunk a few years ago, ran a 3:30 marathon on his first try, played semi-pro football, and was strength and conditioning coach for college players. He is not your average message-board jockey. He is definitely not pro-athlete level, but probably one of the most athletic non-pros you'd meet. That it took him that long pretty much proves to me I have no shot.
Yeah, this guy is clearly in way better shape than like 90% of the general population. I'm 23 and pretty strong and have played baseball and there's no way I'd be able to even come close to hitting it out. It was absolutely a great read, but he shouldn't diminish the shape he's in.
Given hitting instruction, several months to practice live BP and a session of a couple hundred swings with a consistent and familiar BP pitcher, anyone with a good baseline of strength and reasonable athleticism has a decent chance of running into at least one and knocking it out. Hitting a baseball is the "hardest thing in sports" because of the difficulty of hitting pitchers trying to get you out, not because it's so amazingly difficult to hit 65mph BP meatballs. If you just plucked random posters off the couch and sent them into the BP session, then sure, your timing is going to be totally off and most people are woefully out of shape so probably lucky to get one out of the infield....but if you took people who know what the inside of a weight room looks like and they get to take ten thousand swings in preparation? I think there are at least a few people here who could crawl out of their basements and pull that off.
He's 90% in his age group, maybe, but he's in better shape than closer to 99.999 % of the general population.
Anyone who can jog a 5k without walking more than a few times is at or above 60% of the general pop.
Broadly speaking this conversation is focusing far too much on athleticism and not nearly enough on technique. The key is the instruction he got - look how much time is spent up top on basically just his back elbow position. If you don't have elite talents the right technique matters much more than how sub-elite your talents are, and you've got no chance of even coming close without the extra 20% that technical perfection brings.
Forget elite talents and technical perfection--swing an aluminum bat and the ball JUMPS.
I'd love to see big league guys play HR Derby with them.
Here's a 12 year old hitting one 340 feet (about 1:55 in)
When the Sox came to San Diego in 2007 Ortiz took part of BP with aluminum bat. A quick google search shows that he did this from time to time. This one is fro 2014.
This exercise would have been a lot easier with an aluminum bat, especially one of the really hopped up ones.