Originally posted by: Ynog
The ESPN story talked about the way players stride into pitches.
The showed footage of the greats, Mantle, Williams, etc.
They used to step away from the plate when then swung so that they could easily get out of the way of pitches.
More pitches came inside back then.
But now players step into the plate, and they cannot get out of the way, the best they can do is just turn and take it.
The said that this started in the mid 70's. And the reasoning came from when players started to play the game.
Most kids play with aluminum bats. Well pitchers used to pitch the inside of the plate and what would happen is you
would jam a guy with the ball hitting the thin part of the bat, problem was in the old days this would break the hitters
wooden bat and he would be an easy out. Now with aluminum, it would result in lots of cheap hits. So what do you do?
Pitchers started to pitch outside and the more they started pitching outside. With the ball being outside more batters change
from steping away from the plate, to stepping straight forward to now stepping in. Now when you grow up, learning to pitching
and hitting this way you'll do that in the majors.
So now in the majors these guys are so trained to step in, they cannot get away and what happens is a ball gets away from a pitcher,
and guys end up getting hit in the head.
