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SHIPPED (PERFORMANCE) HOW TO BUILD THE * PERFECT BATTER Since the beginning of baseball, scouts and managers have regarded the hunt for great sluggers as an almost mystical search. But it’s just dawning on the game that the future Ruths and Bondses and Pujolses will be discovered by rational scientists—and soon even steroids will seem quaint by Nate Penn The perfect swings: on a sweltering summer afternoon in 1921, Babe Ruth * top row, Mickey belted a home run deep into the bleachers at the Polo Grounds, Mantle, Barry Bonds, then took a car down Broadway to a laboratory at Columbia Reggie Jackson, Carl Yastrzemski; bottom University, where two grad students in the department of row, Willie Mays, Mike psychology prodded and poked at him for three hours in an Schmidt, Albert Pujols, attempt to figure out why he could hit so many more home Hank Aaron. runs than any other person on the planet. ››› CLOCKWISEGETTY FROMIMAGES; TOP LEFT:RICH PILLING/MLBGETTY IMAGES; PHOTOS JED JACOBSOHN/GETTYVIA GETTY IMAGES; IMAGES; MICHAEL NATIONAL ZAGARIS/MLB BASEBALL PHOTOS HALL VIA OF GETTY FAME LIBRARY/MLBIMAGES; TONY PHOTOS TOMSIC/MLB VIA GETTY PHOTOS IMAGES; VIA GETTY RICH IMAGESPILLING/MLB PHOTOS VIA GETTY IMAGES; 292.GQ.COM.SEP.06 SEP Performance lo;39.indd 292 7/25/06 12:19:28 PM 0906-GQ-CB01 (PERFORMANCE) powers. The question that a few people in The researchers’ equipment was state-of-the-art, and outside of the game are asking is: Can circa 1921: a Hipp chronoscope, which they attached we create lab tests to assess an amateur to the Babe’s bat to calculate its speed; a kymograph, ballplayer’s innate abilities—his power, his eyesight, his reaction time, his psychologi- which they connected to tubing strung on his torso cal fitness—and predict whether or not he’ll in order to record the rate of his breathing; and a succeed in the majors? And the answer is yeah, without a doubt. So how much longer tachistoscope (a sort of slide projector with a shutter before the rest of baseball catches on? like a camera’s), with which they measured how fast his eyes reacted to stimuli. In all, they ran the in the 240-millisecond* * * interval be- Babe through eight tests on six different scientific tween the pitcher’s release of a ninety- apparatuses, and the results, published in Popular mile-per-hour fastball and the batter’s initiation of his swing, a lot has to happen. Science, were “a revelation” that showed Ruth’s The batter must see the pitch (one hundred “coordination of eye, brain, nerve system, and milliseconds), process its trajectory and velocity (seventy-five milliseconds), de- muscle [to be] practically perfect.” Even The New cide whether and how to swing (fifty mil- York Times got in on the excitement, touting the liseconds), and initiate that swing (fifteen milliseconds). The hoped-for result of this Ruth experiments on its front page of September 11, sequence of fleeting neurological and phys- 1921: ruth supernormal, so he hits homers. ical impulses is the striking of a 7.3-centi- meter-wide spinning ball 2.65 centimeters Today the Popular Science account reads below dead center at an upward angle of as a slightly laughable mixture of hero 9.132947254385321 degrees—these being worship, hype, and sham science. But the the optimal parameters for hitting a home magazine did make one suggestion that, run, according to a 2003 paper published in eighty-five years later, is more relevant than the American Journal of Physics. ever. “If baseball-club owners…submit can- And here’s a further complication: The didates to the comprehensive tests under- ball loses 5 percent of its velocity as it ap- gone by Ruth,” the author wrote, “[they can] proaches the plate. And one more: “The discover whether or not other Ruths exist.” rate of slowing down is not uniform,” says It’s a future baseball has yet to embrace, Mont Hubbard, director of the Sports Bio- but for reasons both of public relations and mechanics Laboratory at UC-Davis. Due economics, the game can’t really wait much to a physical phenomenon called the drag longer. The PR issue is obvious. Baseball crisis, the ball, released from the pitcher’s needs its sluggers, but it needs them to hit hand, initially escapes drag for about a home runs that aren’t steroid fueled. And tenth of a second. “So it looks like it’s com- the economic rationale, while it lacks the ing at you really fast,” Hubbard explains to tawdry intrigue of ballplayers sticking me, “and then like it runs into some honey. needles in their asses, is more compelling That’s going to throw the batter o≠.” still. Even now, in the post-Moneyball era of So why are some batters so much less general managing, baseball teams are fairly thrown o≠ than others? The first and easiest astonishing in their ability—and willing- part of the explanation has to do with hitting ness—to squander huge piles of cash. Major mechanics. “Take Ichiro Suzuki and Mickey league clubs collectively pay out about $160 The October 1921 issue of Popular Science. Mantle,” Don Slaught, the Detroit Tigers’ million annually on amateur players and * hitting coach, says to me over the phone. an additional $550 million, or $18.33 mil- become scouts and coaches,” says Brad To illustrate the point he’s about to make, lion per team, on development. More than Kullman, until recently the assistant GM Slaught connects his computer in Detroit to half of the priciest picks fizzle out—more of the Cincinnati Reds. “There tends to be mine in New York and clicks his mouse. Sud- than half—but this, for most teams, is just a closed-mindedness to new information. denly, the two men appear side by side on the cost of doing business. Syd Thrift, the That’s what keeps you stuck on the tread- my screen: the slugger Mantle in his wide, pioneering former general manager of the mill of mediocrity.” flat-footed stance, powerful and balanced, Baltimore Orioles and Pittsburgh Pirates, Marcus Elliott, a Harvard M.D. who trains and the burner Ichiro, knock-kneed, bat at holds back nothing in his assessment of pro athletes at P3: Peak Performance Proj- his ear, his weight resting on his back leg so modern-day baseball executives: “Every- ect in Santa Barbara, California, puts it even that only his front toe touches the ground. body thinks they’re ahead,” he says, “and more bluntly: “In terms of testing and condi- For years Slaught has been stockpiling foot- they’re so far behind it’s pitiful. They say, tioning, baseball today is in the Dark Ages. age, all captured from the same angle, of ‘Everything’s under control.’ You have a In fact, the Babe Ruth testing was more ap- virtually every great hitter in the game. I sit $200 million payroll under control?” propriate and more intensive than anything staring at my computer as, in increments of Baseball needs to adopt an unsentimen- any professional team is doing right now.” seventeen milliseconds, Ichiro and Mantle tal, scientific approach to player evaluation This is the story of an approach to talent initiate their swings. It’s astonishing and a and training. But this is the very thing that evaluation that, like “moneyball,” o≠ers a little eerie: Over a series of steps that lasts so many baseball guys, faithful to the stale way for smart but poor teams to gain ground only a quarter of a second and is normally myths of divining talent, have rejected for on rich and complacent ones—a story of a invisible to the naked eye, the swing me- years. “Many people in baseball get drafted new approach to the game facing enormous chanics of the two men—the positioning of COPYRIGHT 1921 TIME4MEDIA, INC. outREPRINTED WITH of PERMISSION. high ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. school, become players, then resistance from entrenched front-o∞ce their feet, legs, hips, trunks, shoulders, arms, SEP.06.GQ.COM.297 SEP Performance lo;39.indd 297 7/25/06 12:19:30 PM 0906-GQ-CB02 (PERFORMANCE) heads—are revealed to be identical. “What that bat speed alone, despite what many players, probably only Barry Bonds’s head do all the best hitters do that makes them analysts tend to say, tells us pretty much moves less.) As the pitcher goes into his better than the rest of us?” Slaught asks, and nothing about performance. windup, the majority of hitters raise their then answers his own question. “Everyone In Detroit, Slaught clicks his mouse front leg, using it as a sort of fulcrum and prepares di≠erently,” he says, “but they all again and suddenly, in four quadrants of planting it just before contact in order to swing virtually the same way.” my computer screen, I’m watching video transfer energy to the ball. But Pujols, without I bring up the subject of Albert Pujols, of, respectively, Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, raising his front leg, achieves the same end. who at this point in the summer, just be- Vladimir Guerrero, and Ivan Rodriguez. As How he does it hinges on the latest devel- fore an injury sidelined him, was threaten- the players move their bats forward, four opments in the young field of baseball bio- ing Barry Bonds’s single-season home-run pitches enter the various frames. Slaught mechanics. Baseball, says Marcus Elliott, record. Surely Pujols must personify the freezes the image of Pujols and draws a is unusual among the major sports for its qualities that make a hitter great.