How to Watch Baseball

Power Hitting

Baseball’s Muscle Men

Ralph Kiner, from the photograph printed with his chapter.

By Ralph Kiner,Outfielder, Pittsburgh Pirates

Pages 10–11 · Phillips Petroleum Company, 1953

When Babe Ruth made the home run famous he changed a lot of baseball habits, among them the methods employed by scouts. In combing the bushes for talent they used to look for kids who could run fast and throw hard. But with the advent of the home run era and the lively ball, they added another requisite — driving power.

This driving power is produced by wrist action. The power hitter must have wrists strong enough to enable him to whip the bat into the ball at a speed sufficient to drive it out of the modern ball park.

To travel long distances, to clear fences or carry into the bleachers, a batted ball usually must travel in a high arc. It has to be lifted well into the air. Therefore, most modern home run hitters swing their bats in an upward plane rather than the level plane followed by line-drive hitters. This swinging in an upward plane is known as upper-cutting.

Wrist action and upper-cutting alone, of course, cannot produce home runs. Split-second timing is an indispensable factor. You have noticed that most home run hitters get their homers in clusters and then go several games without hitting any. The answer is simple. Their wrist power and upper-cutting may remain constant, but they cannot maintain their sense of timing over long stretches.

This may trace to one of several reasons. It may be some little thing of which they are unconscious. Their muscles may have become tired from too many double-headers in the hot summer months. Some minor injury to hand or leg may have caused them to alter their swing slightly without realizing it.

Or they may have run into a series of better-than-average control pitchers, who refuse to give them the type of pitch they can hit for distance.

Most long-ball hitters find certain pitches easier to hit for distance than others. Most of them get their home runs on drives which they pull. Few sluggers can drive the ball to the opposite field as well as they can pull it.

This tendency of most long-ball hitters to pull almost every type of pitch is precisely the reason why relatively few of them hit for a high average. The opposition knows they pull almost all their drives to one field and concentrates its defense there. Example: the Boudreau shift to right field against the left-handed pulling of Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox.

Packing the defense in one area this way can’t prevent the slugger from driving the ball out of the park or against the fence. But it does enable the infielders to field grounders and the outfielders to grab flies or liners they would not be able to reach if they had not shifted into one area. And this cuts down the slugger’s batting average.

So the next time a home run hitter comes up,

The Upper-Cut Swing
  1. 1Most modern home run hitters swing their bats in an upward plane rather than the level plane followed by line-drive hitters.
  2. 2To travel long distances, to clear fences or carry into the bleachers, a batted ball usually must travel in a high arc.
  3. 3It has to be lifted well into the air. This swinging in an upward plane is known as upper-cutting.
  4. 4Wrist action and upper-cutting alone, of course, cannot produce home runs. Split-second timing is an indispensable factor.
  5. 5The level swing has already come down. The lifted ball is still carrying.
  6. 6The power hitter must have wrists strong enough to whip the bat into the ball at a speed sufficient to drive it out of the modern ball park.
Adapted from the diagram on page 11: “To drive the ball over the fence, most power hitters usually employ an upper-cut swing. Insert shows wrist action needed for driving power.”