Landing Safeties: How Ballplayers of Shorter Stature Can Post Lofty Averages at the Plate (Paperback)

This unique hitting manual has a complicated history. Dr. Harris wrote HITTING SECRETS FROM BASEBALL'S GRAVEYARD as a salute to great Deadball Era batsmen like Cobb, Speaker, and Wagner after investing twenty years of off-and-on research in the project. The techniques he unearthed from first-hand accounts, old photos, and much experimental reverse-engineering stunned him to a point that he found himself wanting to recommend their revival. LANDING SAFETIES fulfills that wish. This volume is a straight-up, unapologetic set of techniques for hitting low line drives so as to increase your chances of reaching base. The modern hitting game has become almost the exclusive province of tall body types employing styles that generate "big flies"-so much so that, halfway through the Major League season, you find regular starters still struggling to reach .200 against radical shifts and multiple Big League clubs averaging nine strikeouts per contest. Left-on-base numbers are also soaring as runners-in-scoring-position averages plunge. As the period's name says bluntly, balls didn't travel well in the Deadball Era. Hitters therefore developed techniques to drive the unlively ball through or over the infield: that was the "percentage" move. It still is, especially for shorter players who will never be able to compete at "long ball" with teammates a foot taller than they. Equipped with the techniques laid out in this book, those same players of the shorter (and often more athletic) body type will be forcing the coach to choose between a giant who homers every third game while striking out twice each game, on the one hand, and a more compact fellow who bats around .400. With almost a hundred black-and-white images, this book represents the Old School approach very graphically. Photos of yesteryear's stars are stirred in with Harris's modeling positions himself for which few or no photos exist (usually because they are mid-swing shots that earlier cameras couldn't capture). The results should be very useful to young players-girls as well as boys-who eagerly seek a way to out-perform their larger, more attention-getting rivals.NEW TO THE SECOND EDITION: a step-by-step, fully illustrated breakdown of Tris Speaker's dynamic load into the pitch from a "shuffle-step"; a full chapter on approach, emphasizing the importance of opposite-field and up-the-middle hitting; and two angles featuring frozen-frame analysis of how well front-foot hitting with the Old School downward stroke covers the zone when compared to more recent swing paradigms.