Quirks, Jerks - Whatever Works

This the third in a series of articles on The Art of Baseball that will appear monthly. The first installment was on closing (left), the second on brawls.

Mike Fischlin, never prominent during a 10-year major-league career, has faded almost completely from memory since his retirement in 1987. And yet for a brief time in 1982, the journeyman Cleveland infielder was the buzz of baseball.

Opponents gawked, fans taunted, coaches fretted, and all because of a batting stance that would have made Ty Cobb cringe in horror. Acting on a tip from - of all people - super-agent Scott Boras, Fischlin decided to scrap his orthodox upright stance for an ultra-exaggerated crouch, his bat so low that Fischlin appeared to be knocking dirt from his cleats. It was so unorthodox that it remains, to this day, a standard-bearer for weird stances.

"I don't know if I've ever seen anyone hit like that, ever," said Fischlin, who now is an associate of Boras, a former minor-league infielder. "It was very unusual. My bat was almost on the ground. I'd tap it on the back of the dirt as the pitch was coming. But I had my timing down so that my bat came right through the strike zone at the perfect time. It worked for me."

And therein lies the golden rule of batting stances: If it works, it's a keeper - no matter how ridiculous it looks.

The stance can be completely open like Andres Galarraga's, or strikingly closed like Stan Musial's. The hands can be exaggeratedly high like Edgar Martinez's, or comically low like Mickey Tettleton's. The batter can be crouched like Rickey Henderson or fully upright like Alex Rodriguez.

The bat can be pointed threateningly at the pitcher like Rocky Colavito's, or coiled around the hitter's head like Julio Franco's, or held far back and parallel to the ground like Wes Covington's. It can pinwheel like Willie Stargell's, or waggle menacingly like Gary Sheffield's. The elbow can flap like Joe Morgan's, the feet be in constant motion like Hal Morris', or pigeon-toed like Mark McGwire's, or airborne like Mel Ott's.

The package can be classic elegance, like Tony Gwynn, or a discordant mess like Dick McAuliffe.

Ask any hitting coach. The key is not how the stance begins, but how it enables the batter to strike the ball.

"What matters is where you end up when your stride is completed and you get to what Charlie Lau called the launch position," said retired hitting coach Walt Hriniak, a disciple of the influential Lau, former Kansas City Royal hitting coach. "If you get there by holding the bat between your legs, so be it."

Agreed Tony Gwynn, an eight-time batting champion: "Over the years, I've seen a lot of things work for different guys. You've got to learn what works for you and stick with it - even if it looks funny, or it's not what you'd suggest kids do."

Mariner hitting coach Jesse Barfield is happy to integrate the personal quirks of his charges, as long as it enhances their swing.

"The stance is basically an individual thing based on a person's body makeup," Barfield said. "You've got to have a workable stance, but the approach is the most important thing."

That is not to say the batting stance is insignificant. In addition to being a hitter's launching point, it is also his calling card, his autograph, his presentation to the world when all eyes are upon him.

As Thomas Boswell once wrote, "A baseball player's batting stance is his consciously created statue of himself - a self-portrait."

The stance is an indelible part of a player's persona, and his legacy. It's impossible to think of Stan Musial without recalling The Man's coiled posture (which literally became a statue, outside Busch Stadium). Same with Ted Williams, or Hank Aaron, or Joe DiMaggio.

"When I look at Rose, Mays, Aaron - you could go right to this day and they'd be the same," Reds hitting coach Denis Menke said. "You could go to an oldtimer's game and you'd say, `They look exactly like they did years ago.' "

Throughout baseball history, batters have tried every angle, every nuance, every machination, trying to find that perfect blend of power, control and balance.

And, perhaps as a secondary benefit, to look really cool doing it. The Padres' Jim Leyritz may be the master styler of the moment, a mess of angles and attitude. As a recent observer said, "Leyritz stands up there like he's trying to impress the chicks. He's got everything but a pack of cigarettes tucked underneath a rolled-up shirtsleeve."

It has been argued that a player's batting stance is a reflection of his personality. DiMaggio's stance was as regal as the man himself, while Mays in person was edgy and aggressive, just as he was at the plate. Mike Hargrove's obsessive personality was telegraphed by his maddening habit of taking light years to set up in the box, an affectation that earned him the nickname "Human Rain Delay."

Steve Garvey's stance was fastidious and ordered, fitting a man they called "The Senator." You just knew Richie Hebner, an offseason grave digger, would have some quirk in his stance, and sure enough, he'd stand in a crouch and habitually yank the back of his jersey over his neck. Free-swinging Jesus Alou held his bat high, the better to lunge at pitches 4 feet over his head.

The lineage of batting stances shows the century-long continuity of baseball. Ott's famous leg lift from the 1920s, '30s and '40s, revolutionary at the time, begat a whole slew of modern high-steppers, including Alex Rodriguez and Edgar Martinez, and even traveled to another hemisphere to help Sadaharu Oh hit home runs in Japan.

Echoes of Joe Morgan's flap can be seen in Anaheim's Darin Erstad, who carries it one step further by flapping both elbows. Hal Morris gets double-takes for his happy feet, but old-timers remember Tony Oliva doing pretty much the same thing, and Dixie Walker before that. Jim Thome points his bat at the pitcher, just as Colavito did before him, while Ed Sprague is perpetuating the Tettleton stance in Pittsburgh.

Even Arizona's Tony Batista, the current king of bizarre hitting approaches, has a historical antecedent. Batista starts his at-bat with both feet facing the pitcher, a configuration that Padre Coach Davey Lopes calls, "The most unusual stance I've ever seen. It looks like he's talking to the third-base coach."

Unprecedented, right? Well, listen to this description, in a 1951 hitting manual by Yankee great Tommy Heinrich, of a hitter from the 1910s and '20s named Heinie Groh: "Groh faced the pitcher directly, both feet in line with the plate in a completely open stance before stepping forward with his left foot preparatory to hitting."

Some great hitters, like Carl Yastrzemski and Cal Ripken Jr., never stopped their search for the perfect stance, changing their style as frequently as their sanitary socks. Yaz, who got a whole generation of New England youth to hit with hands held high above head, is in the Hall of Fame, with Ripken set to join him - but probably not before indoctrinating another dozen stances.

"Carl was the kind of guy that was always tinkering, trying to get better," said Hriniak, a former Red Sox hitting coach. "As he got older, and was competing with all the young kids, he was willing to try practically anything."

One year, for instance, Yaz tried inverting his bat so the barrel was pointed at the left-field foul pole. But that configuration hardly is worth a mention in the annals of fancy stances. Few modern players look as odd as the Astros' Jeff Bagwell, with his wide stance, pronounced crouch and high bat, but few perform at such a high level, so it doesn't matter that he might be messing up a whole generation of Houston-area youngsters. One special twist to Bagwell's package is that he actually strides backward with his lead foot, going against every tenet of hitting.

"It's been pretty much the same since '94," Bagwell said of his stance, referring to his breakthrough MVP season. "I was basically just trying to spread out and get low so my eyes would stay on the same plane. I didn't even know until I looked at it on the side that my knees bow out and things like that. It's not something I would ever teach anybody. But it's what I got."

With batting stances, function outweighs form, and the most convoluted stance often has a logical method to its madness. The Mariners' Jay Buhner, for instance, opened his stance after the team's optometrist, Dr. Doug Nikitani, discovered that Buhner was severely right-eye dominant. Buhner's markedly low hands were an adjunct of that pose.

"Jay is the complete opposite of Edgar," said Lee Elia, former Mariner hitting coach. "Watch Edgar's hands. He never drops them. Jay opened his stance because it controls his eyes better, and he dropped his hands to get them going. But he always gets them up there in time."

Vision concerns were also the reason for the switch to an exaggerated open stance by Galarraga and, a decade earlier, the Angels' Brian Downing.

Batista's wide-open stance wasn't born of sight problems, but rather frustration. In the winter of 1997, while playing in the Caribbean World Series in Venezuela, he decided to try the radical stance for one at-bat while mired in a horrible slump. He got a base hit that time, and the next four times, and hasn't switched yet.

"I know it's weird," he said earlier this season. "But I see the ball better with both eyes facing the pitcher. I can pick up what kind of pitch is coming easier. It's almost like I am a fan sitting in the stands, being able to see the pitch with both eyes."

Morgan's elbow flap came about after a Houston teammate, Nellie Fox, advised him to hit line drives rather than go for the long ball at the cavernous Astrodome. Morgan, a left-handed hitter, knew from golfing that keeping his right elbow in caused the ball to lift in the air. To remind himself to elevate the elbow, he began flapping it, and it become a habit.

Morris' foot movement - he often seems to be walking in place as the pitcher winds up - goes against popular wisdom, which preaches that the less motion in a stance, the better. But he uses the rhythm to help him time the pitch, and he's achieved a career .300 average with that method.

"As long as you're stopped when the pitcher throws the ball, it doesn't matter what you do," Morris said. "There's a lot of different methods for triggers that guys have, and that's mine."

Garth Iorg, a utility player with Toronto in the 1980s, was distinctive for having a pronounced backward lean, all his weight riding on his back leg. But Iorg didn't realize at first how just distinctive he was.

"I thought I looked like everyone else," he said. "I remember I saw a picture of myself on SportsCenter, and I said, `Wow, that's me!' George Brett, Rod Carew and Cecil Cooper hit somewhat like that, but I took it to a whole other level."

He developed the stance, he said, in the minor leagues while working out with teammate Willie Upshaw, and brought it with him when he was called up to Toronto.

"A lot of times, guys are afraid to try new things," he said. "So many guys want to look like the top of a trophy. Everyone wants to look like Ken Griffey Jr., and there's only one Griffey."

And only one Fischlin, as he cheerfully acknowledges. "I don't know if anyone picked up on the Mike Fischlin swing," he said.

Fischlin's conversion to his offbeat stance came after Boras concluded that his client (and former teammate) wasn't strong enough to hit from an upright position. After adopting the crouch and low bat, Fischlin hit .268 that year, a major improvement for the .220 lifetime hitter.

"I seemed to stay back better and create more bat speed," he said. "I got a lot of people commenting on it. They'd go down in an imitation of the stance every time they'd see me, making fun of me. I didn't care. Whatever kept me in the lineup."

Fischlin played semi-regularly at shortstop that year but lost his job the following season with the arrival of rookie Julio Franco, who has his own chapter in batting-stance lore. Franco once said he knew he'd wrapped the bat too far around his neck when he could see the end of the barrel - but anything short of that was fair game.

"Take a look at Julio's stance, how he had his bat in a corkscrew," Hriniak said. "You'd think he had poor fundamentals, but if you slow him down in slow motion, he's very, very sound. When his front foot hits the ground, he's in ideal position."

At the 1973 All-Star Game, Lau used a high-speed camera to analyze the hitters, and concluded in his book, "The Art of Hitting .300," that "regardless of his personal style or where he started his swing, every hitter in both leagues had the bat in the same position when his front foot touched down to complete the stride."

"I have that tape," Hriniak said. "Charlie gave it to me before he died. It's amazing. Every good hitter ends up in the same place. It's the same thing they've found out about golfers."

Elia did almost the same exercise, splicing photos of such disparate hitters as Mike Schmidt, Babe Ruth, Frank Thomas and Hank Aaron. "Put all those guys together," he said, "and at the point of impact, you're almost looking at the same thing."

How to arrive at that spot remains the challenge, which is why fans will continue to see an eclectic array of crouches, twitches, angles and arcs, alternately dissonant and harmonious.

In the end, a batter would much rather look rather silly, like Bagwell, if it means hitting like Bagwell, than emulate the stance, and results, of, say, Ollie Brown, whom former major-league pitcher Jim Kaat remembered as having the most technically pure and visually impressive stance of his era. But Brown didn't hit that well.

"I don't care what you look like, I look at results," Bagwell said. "The main thing is, you've got to get in that hitting position before the ball arrives. As long as you do that, you can stand on your head." ------------------------------- Classic hitting stances

1. Stan Musial: Every kid of the 1950s tried to emulate Musial's crouch, famously described as looking "like a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming." Musial was coiled and ready for action.

2. Babe Ruth: His stance has been embedded in our minds through newsreels, so it's easy to forget how radical it was for its time - feet close together for maximum stride, bat gripped at the knob, his back almost facing the pitcher. He invented the power stance.

3. Pete Rose: No player ever looked more certain of getting a hit. With his crouch, perfect balance and look of intense concentration, Rose always seemed capable of handling any pitch, any location, any speed.

4. Ken Griffey Jr.: Mariner Manager Jim Lefebvre took his first look at the 18-year-old Griffey's swing and said, "It is beautiful. There's no other way to describe it." A decade and nearly 400 homers later, that description still stands.

5. Rod Carew: Silky smooth, his hands so quiet that it lulled the pitcher to sleep. Carew was such a hitting savant that he would adjust his stance for pitchers and situations.

BIZZARE hitting stances

1. Dick McAuliffe: The Detroit Tiger second baseman of the 1960s and '70s was hardly a superstar, but he was the Babe Ruth of odd stances. The .247 lifetime hitter did just about everything against the book, from his exaggerated, open stance to his high leg kick to the bat wrapped around his head, parallel to the ground. Brazenly iconoclastic.

2. Tony Batista: No modern player gets more bug-eyed reaction than Arizona's Batista, who actually starts out with both feet fully facing the pitcher - an open stance taken to ridiculous extremes. As the pitch comes, he closes up, just adding to the bizarre image. As one observer said of Batista's approach, "He looks like he lost a bet." But not his power - Batista hit 18 homers last year in fewer than 300 at-bats.

3. Julio Franco: No one could possibly hit like this - torso twisted, elbows raised, bat cocked so far over his head that he's staring at the end of the barrel. He looks like he's playing Twister. All Franco did with this eyesore style was win a batting title and bang out more than 2,000 hits.

4. John Wockenfuss: "That guy Watchenfutch," as he was known to Oriole Manager Earl Weaver, actually had dueling idiosyncrasies. The former Tiger catcher of the 1970s would twist his body around so far that he was pointing back at the catcher, his feet turned in, toes touching. As if that weren't weird enough, he would constantly "flute" the bat handle with his fingers like a virtuoso in the New York Philharmonic.

5. Stan Lopata: Imagine the open stance of Andres Galarraga and the crouch of Rickey Henderson, embodied in the burly 215-pound frame of the National League's first bespectacled catcher, and you have Lopata, who played with the Phillies and Braves from 1948 through '60. ------------------------------- What they're saying

Jeff Bagwell, Astros: "I grew up watching Carl Yastrzemski, and he changed his stance every year. Look at Cal Ripken, and he always has something different. It's what's comfortable to you. You don't have to try to be Tony Gwynn or Ken Griffey Jr. or whatever. Obviously, I'd love to hit like John Olerud, who appears to make no effort at all."

Hal Morris, Reds: "Julio Franco always amazed me how he was able to hit with his bat like that. The other thing he does, when he holds his bat, he's got two fingers hanging off the bottom of the bat. He's just got tremendous strength."

Edgar Martinez, Mariners: "There's many players I've admired. They look like they're always level, and their results are always good. Junior, Alex (Rodriguez), Kirby Puckett, (Don) Mattingly, Wade Boggs, Tony Gwynn. They're almost flawless. You know they work all the time and are aware of what they're doing."

Jesse Barfield, Mariner hitting coach: A teammate of mine, Garth Iorg, I don't know how he ever hit. He had a stance where everything was on his back. I've never seen anything like it. But he ended up being a pretty decent hitter. George Brett had a signature stance, laying back and rocking back. That was awesome."

Russ Davis, Mariners: Bagwell sort of sits down, but he's so strong he's able to do that. Hal Morris never is set in the batter's box and always kind of walks into the ball, it looks like. Of course, Griffey has the ultimate home-run swing. Everyone would love to have that swing."

Lee Elia, former Mariner hitting coach: "With Junior and Edgar and now Alex, you're looking at three pretty good approaches to hitting. They all have real good balance, and they're short enough in their approach to have real good bat speed through the hitting area. I've been on four major-league clubs and had the pleasure of being on the field with Hall of Famers like Schmidt, Rose, Mattingly and Sandberg, and you won't ever see a better threesome than with the Seattle club. It's like a hitting course in itself."

Denis Menke, Reds hitting coach: "Tony Gwynn has as compact a stance as anybody, and he always seems like he's ready to hit, which basically he is. Right now, Tony Phillips probably has the most drastic stance, what he does with his hands. If you told somebody to try to do that, he couldn't do it. Tony can do it because he's gained confidence in what he can do."

Walt Hriniak, former hitting coach: "I think Frank Thomas was the best all-around hitter I ever saw. I'd take Wade Boggs in his prime if I had to get a hit to save my life, but if I was starting a team, I'd build it around Frank Thomas."

Dave Lopes, Padre coach: "When I used to watch Rod Carew hit, it was like he was going to fall asleep, and just before he put his hands in the cocked position, he'd attack the baseball. But everything prior to that, he was probably the most relaxed hitter I ever saw. No one was as smooth as Rod Carew."

Tony Gwynn, Padres. "Andres Galarraga really jumps out at you, because he's wide open. But he makes it work. Since he's gone to it, he's just been a terror. It's given him a clear picture of the ball. Second would be Tony Batista of Arizona. It's similar only he closes up before the ball gets there. Hal Morris has what I call happy feet. They're moving when he's in the windup. He'll shuffle, he'll move in the box. Sometimes he just picks his feet up and down. Then Sean Casey, he's got both feet turned toward the catcher and he does his thing before each pitch, pulls his jersey or something. I haven't figured that part out yet. But they make it work." ------------------------------- EDGAR AT BAT

With his high hands, pointed elbows and wrapped bat, Edgar Martinez's stance may appear disjointed, but there is both artistry and efficiency - and two batting titles - behind it. As Mariner hitting coach Jesse Barfield says, "I would teach that at a clinic." Here are some of the key elements:

Hands: This is the key to it all. Martinez says that it's easier to move his hands down to meet the ball than it would be to move them up from a lower position.

Knees: Martinez often appears slightly knock-kneed and pigeon-toed, which adds to his balance.

Feet: "The feet are important to me. When I stride, I want my feet to land pretty much even. If I position my feet at the beginning, it can help my results at the end," Martinez said.

Bat: A modified version of the style popularized by Julio Franco, his wrapped bat is a matter of comfort and explosiveness.

Adjustments: Martinez will subtly adjust his stance depending on the opposing pitcher and how he's being pitched. "We know through the years a small movement can change your whole swing," he said.