I’ve been watching closely what the Padres are doing to get Brian Giles back to hitting as well as he has in previous years. His average is over .300 lifetime but only about .160 as of this writing. Note that even though I am talking about a specific player, it can apply to many, if not most MLB players.
Ordinarily this would not be something that I normally do since most hitters will go through a slump and then come out of it without a major disruption in their hitting abilities. However, I was intrigued with this player mainly because of what I read in regard to how he was working “to get his groove back.”
About one to two weeks ago when he was entrenched in his slump, he “swatted batting practice pitches nearly 4 hours before the rest of the Padres took their practice cuts. Watching intently where manager Bud Black and hitting coach Jim Lefebvre. He did this “to develop feel.”
According to Giles I “just want to get a certain feel to get comfortable. I feel OK. It takes two or three or four good days of good batting practice where you know what adjustments to make.” There was no report however, as to whether he ever got the “feel”. Most likely he did not since he is still in the slump and has not shown any signs of breaking out.
Today, in an effort to get Giles “untracked” he was moved up to the leadoff spot. The reason for it was “to give Brian a different perspective” I certainly hope this will help him but I have some serious reservations.
My reservations are based on the fact that the Padres ( and it could be any other MLB team) do not do any film analysis nor do they have a library of his swing over the years. If they did, it would be relatively easy to see what he is doing differently in his swing and then make the necessary adjustments.
Having coaches watch him swing means absolutely nothing in relation to swing analysis. The reason for this, as I have stated in many other blogs, is that it is impossible for the human eye to see what occurs in the swing. You can see the before and after movements but not the heart of the swing — where success or failure of the swing depends.
The science to do this is presently available and easily accessible. In fact it is very cheap in relation to what they are paying the player to produce hits. But once again it is a classic example of teams buying extremely expensive players and then not having the support available to monitor and care for them.
This analytical work cannot be done by the players or coaches since they are not qualified nor are they usually very interested. For example Giles was quoted as saying “I don’t like looking at tape too much. I get frustrated looking at film.” Most likely it is due to his lack of knowledge of what all the joint actions are responsible for in the swing or of what constitutres an effective swing. Thsi is understandable since they have never been exposed to this information.
Perhaps when the team gets sufficiently perturbed with his inability to start hitting well again they will get serious about doing something that is more objective than merely hoping and wishing that he will soon break out of his slump.
In essence MLB teams are still practicing baseball the way it was practiced at the turn of the 20th century. They are not even looking at what other countries are doing to produce some of the players that MLB is very happy to buy. Instead they are spending millions of dollars in foreign countries that don’t have baseball in the hope that they will find a few good players. It just does not make sense.