Try this logic riddle on for size: hitting a baseball is fun,
therefore batting cages are fun. Rather bored one night, a group of
college students on summer break decide to amuse themselves at the
local batting cages.
I should begin by saying that properly done, a pure hit to
straightaway center feels great off the bat. A smooth, effortless
swing producing line drive after line drive is oddly meditative. Of
all the inane clichés sports broadcasters often use, a hitter
“being in the groove” is always fitting. When
you’re totally focused on doing nothing but “see the
ball, hit the ball,” your mind relaxes to the point where
swinging the bat is effortless.
It’s like, groovy baby.
Still, hitting a baseball is pretty hard to do if you
don’t practice. I can’t imagine how anyone actually
hits major league pitching (although this does not somehow justify
the fact that A-Rod was paid about $180,000 PER HIT this
season).
It follows, naturally, that some people are better than others
at hitting baseballs. But perhaps the more intriguing point is the
fact that there are definitely some people far, far worse than
others. My buddy, whose identity I will keep secret by revealing
only his first (Andrew) and last (Lee) name, is flat out awful at
hitting baseballs. Andrew is a good, solid basketball player but
never played Little League, and his swing was such a disaster zone
that Floridians everywhere started taking collections to help out.
It was so awful, in fact, that under an experiment not in the least
bit scientific, Andrew turned out to be the worst hitter of a
motley group including:
1) subject T-Dubs. A girl who, though naturally right-handed,
batted lefty because “the bat is easier to swoop that way.
It’s heavy.” By swoop, I think she meant swing. And if
you had seen the miming action she did to mimic a swing, you would
know that I’m really stretching the meaning of the word.
2) subject Seantime. A guy who on average only leaves his room
in order to eat, shower, go to the library or … yeah,
that’s about it. He spends 90% of his free time sleeping, and
the other 10% is spent bemoaning the lack of a girlfriend. No
chance that those two are related.
3) subject GameMaster. A guy that dabbled in Little League but
had not officially swung a bat in years. He spends the majority of
his time either figuring out various computer programming languages
or else finding ways to utterly dominate every game known to man. I
don’t think he’s ever lost at Monopoly.
4) myself.
We cashed in some dollars for tokens and got underway in the
Medium cage. As it turned out, the GameMaster turned out to be a
pretty good hitter. He smacked a couple home runs, turned around
and gave out a “Raaaaah!,” which I believe in his
language means, “that turned out better than
expected.”
T-Dubs was wearing sandals at the time, and as the balls whizzed
past her, she was more concerned with making sure that none of the
balls bouncing off the wall behind her would ricochet and hit her
feet than she was concerned with actually hitting them. Therefore,
she spent the majority of her time jumping completely out of the
way of each pitch. However, she quickly figured out that by simply
sticking the bat out beforehand, the ball would hit the bat and
carom away from her feet. This required little effort and produced
solid bunt singles. Basically, she turned into Ichiro for 10
minutes.
Seantime swung through the first 15 pitches he saw. I would
describe his swing as “Tiger-esque,” in that it
involved a lot of knee bending and resulted in the bat performing a
very nice golf motion. However, after a few words of encouragement
and a little coaching, he came through with, incredibly, a solid
double. He actually pulled the ball down the line. Stunned, the
person recording all of this on his video camera (that would be
me), actually stopped laughing for a minute.
But Andrew? Ahh, poor Andrew. After squibbing a few balls off
the end of the bat, Andrew noticed blisters forming on his hands.
That only hampered his performance and eventually we had to move to
the softball cage just so he wouldn’t be a colossal waste of
tokens. It’s almost impossible for me to describe what Andrew
looked like swinging at these pitches, but if you imagine a kid
from the O.C. suddenly transplanted to downtown Harlem trying to
hail a cab, you’ll understand how lost Andrew really was.
Realizing he had no chance to actually hit, he suggested that he
collect some balls and pitch to us himself, then brush us back and
say, “Quit crowding the plate!” like they did in Good
Will Hunting. We didn’t end up doing it for fear of being
thrown out of the place, but that sure was a great scene.
One word: Pedro. E-mail Yuhl at
cyuhl@media.ucla.edu.