With the Home Run Derby last night, todays’ daily hitter will just be a quick recap of that with (hopefully) a lot of swings for you to look at.
My pick was Cody Bellinger and he did well, but once I saw he had to face Judge in the second round I knew it was all over.
Below is a video with first half highlights of all the guys in the home run derby:
(courtesy MLB for the video)
I had trouble getting any video from the derby so I unfortunately will not be able to post it here. I’m sure all of you have seen plenty of it. I do want to talk about a couple different things that happened during the derby. First, my boy Bellinger. During the broadcast the announcers were explaining that Bellinger likes to think of his back elbow as a “running elbow”. What does this mean? His back elbow will start high and then drop down as he launches his swing. You could see that in the video above in his swings. There are a lot of names for it. Slotting the back elbow, barrel run, etc. All of them have a similar meaning. Different cues work for different people.
Another one was the performance of Justin Bour. If you missed his performance in the first round, I feel sorry for you. It is tough to describe so I’ll just leave a little story here: He swings for four straight minutes (with a 30 second break). He hits at least 2 over 440 feet so he gets bonus time. As he gets ready for the bonus time, he is swinging a bat with a donut on it. The man takes hacks for four minutes and then has enough left to swing with a bat weight?! Not to mention the fact that he went crazy after every swing and actually ate a donut during one of his breaks, fed to him by Stanton. As fun as Judge was to watch, a part of me wanted Bour to win just so I could watch him swing again.
Finally, the performance of Judge was off the charts, as many people expected. He hit a ball 513ft, which was pretty cool to see. He made it all look effortless and easy. Some of the balls that he mishit were even getting out. The interesting thing for me now is that a lot of people are going to be talking about his swing and how young kids should emulate it. His swing is extremely efficient. However, someone that’s a little smaller, say a high school kid that weighs 180lbs, will not be able to generate the same amount of force as Judge with as little movement as he has. This was also discussed during the derby. Bellinger is a smaller guy which means he has to put quite a bit more effort into his swings to get the same result the bigger guys get with less effort. It’s not as simple as saying “swing like Judge”. It’s a good reminder that each player has their own unique attributes. We must take that into account when trying to prepare a player to get to that next level.
That’s all for today. I apologize for not having swings from the derby. If I figure out a way to get some I’ll be sure to update it in a post.