The Key to Powerful Leg Use: The Hands

Before pitchers began to come set even with no runners on base, hitters had a wealth of windmilling activity upon which to key their own long recoils and potent strides. Once a pitcher lifts his forward leg, he can’t normally do very much to change the time involved in the rest of his delivery. Satchel Paige was one of the few exceptions: his ability to balance over his back leg for perhaps several seconds before driving home was the essence of his “hesitation pitch”. You can understand how devastating this pause must have been if you reflect that typical hitters of the day were gathering their own weight over the back leg about the same time as the pitcher. A hitter who can “hesitate” over the rear leg for several seconds is about as rare as a hurler who can do the same.

So in general, we may say that sluggers of the thirties, forties, and fifties were almost touching their forward foot to their back one as the pitcher executed a high leg kick, then launching forward at about the same moment (maybe a split second after) the pitcher started home. In many respects, the hitter’s movements were a mirror-image of the pitcher’s. This was nowhere more true than in the stride of Mel Ott, whose spectacular balancing act over his rear leg as the forward one kicked high in the air was not unlike Juan Marichal’s wind-up. Other sluggers dispensed with the kick and settled for a recoil into a crouch followed by a huge stride, often taking them the length of the batter’s box. Lou Gehrig, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, and Frank Thomas (the Caucasian player who was a Pirates superstar before the tight-fisted Branch Rickey chased him off) spring to mind.

Is this enlistment of power from the lower body gone forever now that pitching from the stretch is almost universal? Japanese players, who cut their teeth looking at leisurely deliveries like Hideo Nomo’s and Daiske Matsuzaka’s, still generate tremendous drive from their legs—but they also have to make major adjustments if they enter American baseball (as Ichiro did, chastening a high leg kick into a modest recoil). Yet I think there remains one way to harness lower-body power—a way that allows the hitter to recoil early and then stay balanced on one foot, like Satchel, for as long as he needs to. It involves (or would involve, if anyone employed it) using a better-proportioned bat than today’s and—much more importantly--extending the top hand farther back than the bottom one during the “cock” or “load”. If the bottom hand goes farther back, as it does with most hitters, then the bat rides up and cannot counterpoise the front side’s weight. If the top hand leads the way to the rear, however, then the bat more or less flattens out between the rear shoulder and the waist, and the hitter can wait and wait while Nomo or Luis Tiant twists around—or, alternatively, he can set up rearward early and wait for a contemporary flame-thrower to burst out of the set position.

Stan Musial hit this way. He was ridiculed for it, of course… but he was also able to regroup after a career-low .255 average in 1959 and hit .288 in his final year (1961), and I’m convinced that he did so by gathering his balance a little earlier to compensate for quicker deliveries. Old photos suggest that Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker also carried their top hand farther back than their bottom, though they lifted their forward leg rather than coiled back with the forward toe to the ground. Thicker-handled bats must surely have made the balancing act easier. Cobb’s bat was a mere 34” long (modest by his day’s standard), and Musial’s was about the same; but both instruments were notably more balanced, less severely tapered, than today’s typical stick.

It’s an idea that stands ready to be tried again, for anyone who has the nerve to face smirks around the batting cage. Just remember that success tends to wipe away mocking smiles in a hurry.