by Bob Gibson
We’re all different.
Reggie Jackson
Keeping my front side closed is what made me a decent hitter. When I got to the plate I’d remind myself to stay closed in order to keep the right front hip in, in order to keep my shoulders square, in order to have proper plate coverage, in order to keep the barrel of the bat in the pay zone for a long time.
I was a good hitter if I could think to keep the ball to the left-field side of the diamond and concentrate on driving it over the shortstop’s head. And I could say one thing to myself—“keep your front side closed”—to make all those other things happen. Or I could say any of the countless variations on the same theme: “stay behind the ball” or “keep your nose behind the ball” or “cover the plate” or “stay square” or “wait for the ball to get on the barrel.”
It all works together. If you keep your front side closed, then your body stays behind your legs, your arms stay behind your body, your hands stay back, your bat stays behind your hands, and when you swing, all that momentum, all that torque, all that power, is brought to bear on the baseball. You could call it timing. It’s also called rotational force, which I generated a lot of.
Rotational force starts with the transfer of weight from back to front, or back foot to front foot. It’s the rhythm of hitting, and that part of it was natural for me. It was my natural coordination, my natural swing. Ted Williams—I wore his number nine when I was with Oakland—once said I was the most natural hitter he’d ever seen. I don’t know about that, but I did come into the game with power. To put that power into play, I had to execute the fundamentals. Stay behind the ball. Keep my front side closed.
Because I was strong, I could hit the ball out of the park without pulling it and also without lifting it. A lot of home-run hitters will uppercut at the ball, but the best hitters don’t do that. It was a lesson I learned from Dick Allen. We had long conversations about hitting. I wasn’t able to duplicate his style, though, because he could keep his hands low and get to the ball with power from that position. My method was to build up force with my rotation. So I held the bat higher. But I still dropped the bat head on the ball, essentially swinging down, like Allen did. Dick’s power was based on natural explosiveness. Mine was based on strength and natural mechanics, which combined to make me explosive.
We both generated it with the gifts we were given, and that’s what Bob Gibson did on the mound. He didn’t have to preoccupy himself with building up a big-time fastball; he had one, just like I had the strength to drive the ball out of the park, any park. But as a hitter, you can squander that power with poor fundamentals and an improper approach.
Bob Gibson
Some things are basic to baseball. The same way a hitter loses his power if he flies open too soon in his approach to the ball, a pitcher has to stay back on the rubber and not bring his weight forward prematurely. If a hitter flies open, there’s nothing left to hit the ball with. If a pitcher doesn’t keep his weight back as he gets into his motion, there’s nothing left to throw the ball with. Same thing.
Of course, that doesn’t make it easy to fix. If a pitcher has to think about mechanics in the heat of a game, he has a problem that particular day.
Reggie Jackson
For a hitter, that’s why it’s important to simplify things. As I teach today with the Yankees, I try to show them the one thing—keeping the front side closed—that almost always will make everything else fall in line.
As you stand at home plate, clear your mind of everything except what you have to do next. I might tug on the shoulder of my shirt to remind me to keep the shoulder in. I might bang on my hip to remind me to keep the hip in. Find your own little ways to focus. Find one thought that will make four or five things happen.
Bob Gibson
He has time, sitting in the dugout and standing in the on-deck circle, to converse with himself about what he has to do in this next swing or two. A pitcher can’t sit back and do that every couple of pitches. We’re out there working. We have to get all that stuff straightened out ahead of time.
Reggie Jackson
No matter how much talking to yourself you do, you still have to recognize the ball coming out of the pitcher’s hand. But again, if I’m staying back with my front side closed, it keeps my head in and my eyes locked on the baseball so that I’m able to read the spin on it. In other words, when I keep myself square it allows me to stay in a position to hit. It allows me to be able to respond whether the ball’s in, up, or down, whether it’s off-speed or whatever.
It’s a lot easier to fall into a rut, or a slump, if you’re constantly looking for a pitch on the inside part of the plate to pull. One of the things that used to mess me up was coming home to Yankee Stadium and wanting to get the ball around to those seats that looked so easy to reach in right field, the ones that Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle had so much fun with. That kind of temptation led to an eagerness that caused me to start pulling off the ball too early. It created a bad habit. That’s why, in batting practice, I’d pick out a sign in right center, draw myself a border that ran right through the second baseman, and make that my foul line. I tried to do the same thing during a game. I’d remind myself, keep your front side in, keep your front side in.
If you’re looking for a pitch away, as opposed to an inside pitch to pull, that makes you stay back on the ball longer, makes you more patient. It keeps your eye on the ball. Sometimes you can actually see the ball too well—so well that you think you can do anything with it. When that happens, you tend to try to hit it where you want it to go, rather than where it’s pitched.
By thinking “hard the other way,” you’re harnessing the movements of your body. Your swing becomes shorter. The eyes don’t travel as far. The bat doesn’t travel as far. With the shorter path, there’s less chance for error. The natural move, for a lefthander, is to start out with the idea of hitting a line drive in the direction of the shortstop and then let the speed of the pitch—and of course the location—move the ball around from there. Don’t let your own predetermination tell you which way to go with the pitch. Let the pitch itself dictate that.
Most of the big home runs I’ve seen Alex Rodriguez hit—and big ones in the context of the game—have been to center field and right center. He’s going to finish with 750 or 800 home runs, and he’d hit even more if he were more interested in staying behind the ball and driving it to right center, his opposite field. A good portion of the time, he does that. His game is hard to right center. But he doesn’t stay on his approach to right center the way Manny Ramirez and Albert Pujols do. For that reason, A-Rod is not quite as good a hitter as those guys. Don’t get me wrong: Nobody has more ability. He’s got great hand-eye coordination and he’s a great talent. He’s the first player in the history of the game to hit at least thirty-five homers in twelve seasons. Those are the facts. It’s also a fact that he gets off his game a little more than Ramirez or Pujols. Think “hard to right center” and let the rest take care of itself. If A-Rod did that more regularly, he’d consistently hit for a higher average and at the same time produce more home runs, the way he did in 2007.
Ryan Howard is another one who hasn’t quite learned to stay behind the ball, and consequently is not as good a hitter as Manny or Pujols. Don’t misunderstand: He’s one of the most productive hitters in the game, and he has the kind of power that can carry a team. All I’m saying is, he’s still young and learning. The talent, the power and the swing will take you a long way, but there’s more to it than that.
Guys who are high-skill-level hitters, like Hank Aaron and Manny Ramirez, are smart hitters. You have to know who’s on the mound, the situation, the score, the count, whether you need the ball in the air or on the ground or to the right side or to the left. Know what your team is trying to do every inning, every day. Learn to think like a manager.
And whatever the count is, or the score, or the situation, stay behind the ball. Keep your front side closed.
Bob Gibson
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br /> When I was a kid in Omaha, my older brother Josh worked with me a lot on my mechanics. Josh coached our baseball teams and basketball teams, and when we weren’t practicing as a team he had me out there by myself all the time, shooting, ballhandling, pitching, hitting, fielding ground balls, whatever. Practice, practice, practice. There was never an excuse to stop practicing.
One time, before a tournament game in Missouri, he hit me a ground ball that bounced up and caught me above the eye and I was bleeding all over the infield. Josh slapped a Band-Aid on it and told me to get back out there. He’d work me so hard he’d have me crying. I told my mom I didn’t want to play for him because he was so mean, and she said, “Honey, you don’t have to play for him if you don’t want to.” But I was right back out there.
Josh was huge on fundamentals. How-to stuff. I can’t say that he had all the mechanics broken down to a science, but his approach to the game certainly made an impression on me. Josh had strong opinions on how to do things—he knew exactly what he wanted—and he drilled into me that there was always a right way and a wrong way. He also made it clear that you’d never master the right way if you didn’t practice, practice, practice. I believe in practice.
Reggie Jackson
Yeah, and I played football for Frank Kush at Arizona State. Talk about a guy who was hell in practice. If you didn’t do things the right way for Frank Kush, you’d be sure to regret it. He would put me through so much—mostly, having big linemen pound on me in one-on-one drills, with the whole team watching—that it brought tears to my eyes. One time it made me run off the field and quit until Charley Taylor, the former ASU player who became a great running back and receiver for the Washington Redskins, came after me and convinced me that I didn’t want to “let that ‘SOB’ win.” But Coach Kush instilled a toughness in me, mental and physical, that I didn’t know I had. He showed me what it took to be a great professional.
Because of that, I’d say he did as much to make me a good baseball player as anybody did—and my baseball coach at ASU was Bobby Winkles. Between those two, I came out of college equipped with the knowledge that any game worth playing is worth playing right.
Bob Gibson
I doubt that there are any big-league pitchers who didn’t play a lot of ball as a kid. It’s not essential that they were pitchers when they were young, but they had to throw the ball a lot.
For the last fifteen years or so, there have been all kinds of theories on why the pitching is so much worse than it used to be. People talk about smaller parks, steroids, the ball being juiced, and all that; and they’re probably right. But you also have to consider that kids these days don’t grow up playing baseball every day all summer long. In this age, if you come across a neighborhood ballfield on a sunny weekday in July, there’s probably nobody on it. It’s too hot. There’s too much other stuff to do. When I was a kid, that was the place to be.
The upshot is that kids aren’t playing as much ball as they used to, which means that they aren’t throwing the ball as much as they used to. You have to throw a lot to build up your arm, and you have to throw a lot to build the hand-eye coordination that leads to control.
At some point, though, a pitcher has to start pitching. Even in the big leagues, there are guys who were converted to pitcher in the minors because they had great arms, but those guys don’t make it to the majors in a month or even a year. Pitching is a muscle-memory thing. You have to develop command, and command comes from repetition. The more you pitch, the better your command—your control—is going to be.
It’s the same as shooting a basketball. Shooters have to shoot a lot. You have to develop that feel, that eye, that touch, that coordination, that consistency. You show me a good shooter and I’ll show you somebody who has taken a whole lot of shots in his life. That’s probably somebody who, as a kid, was on the playground all day shooting the ball, or in the gym at ten o’clock at night shooting the ball. Pitching is no different. You have to put the ball in the pocket, and if you don’t do it a lot you’re not going to be great at it.
Mechanics are important, of course. There are things you can do with your mechanics and your delivery to sharpen up your control. A control pitcher can lose his control by lapsing into bad mechanics. He can improve on his mechanics and get back to where he used to be. But improving your mechanics doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t practice that way. That’s why, even in the major leagues, guys work out in the bullpen.
In the final analysis, the best way to become a better pitcher is by pitching.
Reggie Jackson
And a hitter has to hit. No hitter is so good that he can’t get better by spending time in the cage, or out on the field at three o’clock before a night game, taking swings against a fifty-eight-year-old coach.
That’s when you tend to your mechanics, and that’s the way you guard against bad habits. Slumps will happen because we’re human, but you can sometimes head them off by swinging the bat to stay sharp. The more pitches you see, the better you can tell if a ball is an inch and a half off the plate, or an inch and a half away from your power. There’s a feel you want to develop for keeping your shoulder in. There’s a certain length of stride that fits you, and you want to stay in that groove.
You want it all to become as familiar and natural as possible, because there will be times when you step into the box and everything’s foreign. It’s like you’ve never been there before. Your spikes feel too long, the dirt’s too hard, the ball has shrunk, and the pitcher looks like he’s standing in your lap. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes you feel like a stranger up there. That’s when you have to understand your mechanics.
You want them—you need them—to carry you through those times when nothing feels right, or when you’re mentally dragging and don’t even know it. That’s why it’s imperative to keep them crisp and sound. You might be tired because you’ve played sixty games in a row, with just three or four days off. Maybe you’ve been on the road for a week and a half and it’s wearing on you. Your mechanics might start to slide before you realize it. We didn’t have hitting coaches early in my career, so I’d pick a guy on the bench who didn’t play much and say, “Hey, could you do me a favor? Just watch me as often as you can to see if I’m falling into a bad habit.” Or Joe Rudi or Sal Bando might check me out if they’re hitting behind me and they might say, “Look, your hands are down.”
There’s no shortage of things that can throw off your mechanics. So you need to make them second nature. You need them to be there, solid, automatic—to be part of you, not only as a hedge against slumps and fatigue but so your mind isn’t cluttered with all the technical stuff when you’re trying to concentrate on what’s coming next from that closer who throws ninety-seven miles an hour.
It takes repetition. Practice.
Bob Gibson
Early in a game, a pitcher might have an opportunity to tweak a thing or two, like the length of your stride, as long as it doesn’t preoccupy you so much that it takes your attention away from the batter who’s up there with runners on second and third. But if you shorten your stride for two or three pitches and you’re not getting the results, there’s no more time for that. You’ll have to scratch your little experiment and take it up in the bullpen between starts.
That’s exactly the kind of thing you’d work on in the bullpen. Your control depends a lot on where your front leg lands. If you’re having a hard time getting the ball away from a right-handed hitter, chances are you’re locking yourself out, not opening up your body enough. If you keep throwing it inside, inside, inside, and when you try to go away the ball comes back over the middle, it’s probably because you’re leaving your left foot a couple inches to the right of where it needs to be when you land. So when you’re working in the bullpen, you can draw a mark where your foot comes down. If you land on that mark two or three times and you’re still having a hard time getting the ball outside, draw a new mark a few inches to the left and see if you can make that work witho
ut flying too far open.
Reggie Jackson
A two-or three-inch difference at home plate can be a two-or three-hundred-foot difference when the ball comes down.
I once asked Catfish Hunter, “Catfish, why do you fix your hat every time? When you’re on the mound, you adjust your hat on every pitch.”
He said, “I do that because if my foot is not hitting in the same spot every time, then my hat gets a little cocked. So that’s how I check myself.” When a guy takes his stride and that foot and that spike mark start mating up over and over, he’s right. He’s going to hit that little three-by-five paperback book from sixty feet, six inches.
Bob Gibson
Catfish could monitor himself that way because he had worked it out in the bullpen and knew exactly where his stride had to be.
You can’t be ready without enough practice. And at the same time, you can’t get enough practice to make yourself ready for what you might face in a live game situation.
You might pitch and pitch and pitch in the bullpen and get to the point where your stride is dead-on and your control is impeccable in the bullpen. That’s great, and it improves your skill level, but there’s a little more effort involved when you’re pitching against Willie Stargell or Lance Berkman. All of a sudden, what you were doing in the bullpen might not mean so much because now you’ve got to throw a little harder. Just that ugh!, that grunt, that extra little bit of oomph, will change your mechanics and change the direction of the ball. It will change your location.
