Sunday, May 12, 2013
Washington Post: Kilgore: A Swing of Beauty
(www.washingtonpost.com)
posted 1 week ago by The Yankee Clapper to babe ruth, bryce harper, great baseball players, hitting, washington nationals
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14 comment(s)
Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.”
“They’ve got that exact same swing at contact point,” Schu said later.
The Kid may need to put on some weight.
RTFA. Lots of video & ...
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< 1 2I do think there might be an age cutoff though as far as serving one by yourself. Married couples can of course serve one together later in life.
This. A million times. I've never understood why it matters to so many people (or why it's even interesting to know) what celebs believe or do in their personal time, whether they're athletes, actors, musicians, or even Presidential candidates. It's irrelevant.
Many people are taught many things. That doesn't mean you have to *believe* that crap.
Exactly. It's kinda a pet peeve when people say things like "Mormons aren't allowed to drink alcohol." Of course they're discouraged from doing it, but they're adults and it's a free country. They can do whatever the hell they want. How closely people choose to follow the faith of their upbringing (if at all) is entirely up to them. If Harper doesn't drink, it's cuz he chooses not to, not because his religion "forbids" it.
Details that help us flesh out the personalities of players we enjoy are not irrelevant. Jose Lima's merengue singing ambitions, Glenallen Hill's crippling fear of spiders, RA Dickey's climb of Mount Kilimanjaro, ARod's centaur painting, Pudge Rodriguez's bookshelves full of blank books ... all of these things are interesting, and knowing them heightens my enjoyment of pro baseball.
Isn't Josh Hamilton more interesting because you know his story?
Well if I believe I'm rooting for people rather than laundry, it's going to matter to me. I don't really care what athletes/actors/etc...believe or do in their personal time because I'm content rooting for laundry but if I wanted to truly root for "good guys" then it would matter.
I think Presidential candidates are a different story though. Presumably what someone believes is going to heavily influence their political stance. For example a truly devout Catholic is likely to oppose gay marriage so if a candidate is a devout Catholic and that is going to inform my opinion of this candidate (obviously as part of the larger body of public statements and votes etc...that is part of the candidate's public record).
But why would this hypothetical candidate being Catholic make any difference over a non-Catholic who also opposed gay marriage? It's their opinion itself that matters, not WHY they have that particular opinion, isn't it?
That's because religious affiliation is usually so banal. It's like finding out a player's favorite color.
But, if there was a Zoroastrian player, I would want to know about it. The question of Koufax playing on the sabbath was interesting and added a great deal of detail to his character. Even learning about Chad Curtis' annoying puritan fervor helped me flesh out my image of him in a useful way.
You still seem to be arguing against details. I just watched one of the X-Men movies, and for some reason this was the example that popped into my head: you learn that Magneto's opinion on the human vs mutant struggles is informed by his experience in the Holocaust. Maybe the WHY doesn't matter, maybe it's even irrelevant, but it's interesting and I want to know it.
Agreed, which is why I find the Harper/Mormon thing to be uninteresting and irrelevant.
K, I'll give you that.
Alright then. Different people just find different things interesting, I guess. Does it interest you to find out a player is Catholic? Or Baptist? Or Atheist? It doesn't to me.
I also think people shy away from talking about the players' religion because they don't want to come across as judging them: If you really care about whether Bryce Harper is a Mormon, it must mean you're either anti-Mormon or a Mormon yourself. I think that's the reason a lot of people went out of their way to say they weren't interested in whether Mike Piazza was gay, back when that whole brouhaha was going on.
Personally, I don't think any more or less of Harper because he's a Mormon, but I'm glad to know that about him. I wouldn't think more or less of Piazza if he was gay, either, but I'm interested in whether he is or not.
Not usually, no. (Atheist might be interesting - does MLB have any confirmed atheists?) As I said above, usually the answer to this type of question is boring. My point was that I think you were confusing boring with irrelevant. And I think we are agreed on this subject, because you backed down from the broad declaration you made in #53. Religious details are not necessarily irrelevant, but they are almost always very boring and can be profitably ignored.
And I don't know about the MLB/atheist thing. Law of averages says that of course there must be several, but I can't think of any off the top of my head (and if I had heard of one, I probably wouldn't remember cuz I'd find the info to be boring).
What's the story behind this one? I don't recall hearing it before.
Pudge wouldn't be the first one to do this. From what I understand, its mostly a decorating choice to make an office or study room seem more studious without actually buying a bunch of heavy books. Have you tried to carry a whole box of books? Those shits are heavy, man.
Yeah, a lot of professionally designed "libraries" will have fake or empty books on the shelves, in order to make it look like a library without it being a library. It's not surprising that a baseball player with millions of extra cash would have a designer build in the simulacra of a "study" in that manner. I'd be shocked if many of them have actual libraries - R.A. Dickey being the obvious exception.
I don't think this is happening in ANY alternate universe...
And that's what I like about his response. Instead of saying "My religion won't let me drink," he shows that he understands the reasons for not going out and partying.
74: Is that on Pudge or his decorator?
I would guess two reasons; cost and appearance. Despite being generally uniform books are not perfectly so. A good fake library can probably look a lot better than a real library if that's your primary goal. I would assume (maybe erroneously) that a fake book costs less than a real book.
I don't think Pudge or anyone else doing this looks bad as long as they don't try to pretend they've actually read them. I mean, if Pudge is giving people tours of his home and saying "yup, I've read all these books, I'm a cerebral guy" then he's kind of a jackass. If he admits "yeah, I just like the look" I don't think that's any different than me having a nice Annie Leibowitz photo on my wall. I'm not pretending I took the picture, just that I like the look.
I thought that someone (maybe in that thread PF linked) posted that fake books actually cost more than the kind with words in 'em.
It should be noted that the original claim that Pudge's library was filled with fake books was provided by Pearlman. That may affect how much stock you want to place in reports of Ivan's stack.
I understand the point, but I do think it's kind of different.
That seems plausible. If you're just buying books and you don't care what's in them you can probably buy 10,000 copies of some remaindered book that's otherwise going to be pulped for next to nothing. Which will probably look good from afar if they are hardcovers without dust covers, even if they're all copies of "Dr. Rodriguez's Thirty-Day Risotto Diet".
You could probably get a bunch of random books some library is getting rid of for even cheaper.
Meanwhile the supply of fake books is quite limited and the only people who ever buy them are people decorating mansions, so I doubt there are bargain deals to be had.
I'd imagine studios might buy them for sets. But other than those two purposes, yeah. Not much of a market.
Awesome. I am jealous.
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