Coach Walt Hriniak urged Frank Thomas to homer on the last of a series of pitches during batting practice last Saturday. “Wherever it’s pitched,” he said, meaning to right if outside and to left if inside. The ball came in low and over the plate and Thomas pounced on it. There was not only the solid crack of bat meeting ball but a hissing quality to the sound, as if whatever moisture remained in the grain of the wood were being pressed out the pores of the bat. The ball went up in a high arc and just kept carrying. The wind was blowing in over the left field bleachers but the ball was oblivious to it–oblivious to gravity, it seemed. It landed with a flat, dull, delayed smack on the aisle at the back of the bleachers.
That seems to have changed. Both are having career years. Thomas, in fact, is having one of the greatest seasons in baseball history. Through the weekend, he was competing for the triple crown (last achieved by Carl Yastrzemski in 1967), leading the league in hitting, at .366, tied for the league lead in homers, 36, and tied for third in runs batted in, 95, behind leader Albert Belle’s 98. (Belle, however, has since begun to serve his seven-game suspension for being caught using a corked bat against the White Sox.) What’s more, Thomas was in pursuit of Babe Ruth’s record 170 walks in a season, while trying to become only the fifth player to finish a year with an on-base average of .500 (joining Ruth, Rogers Hornsby, Ted Williams, and Mickey Mantle), and only the third to hit 20 homers, drive in 100 runs, score 100 times, and bat .300 in four straight seasons (joining Williams and Lou Gehrig). His 36 homers were tied for the league lead with Griffey, and put both in pursuit of Roger Maris’s record 61, one of the most hallowed marks in baseball. Matt Williams, of the San Francisco Giants, has answered the challenge with 40 home runs in the National League.
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Thomas pays little attention to aesthetic concerns. His swing is much less pretty but also much more efficient than even Griffey’s. He holds his hands high and close to his head, then swings the bat sharply down across the plate. That swing is the foundation of Hriniak’s coaching method: to bring the bat as rapidly as possible into contact with the baseball, generating maximum bat speed and letting the bat carry into the distinctive follow-through. However, the style has never been practiced with the talent Thomas brings to it.
That staked Jack McDowell to a lead, and he was more than up to protecting it. He seems to have slightly altered his stance and streamlined his motion of late. He now holds his pitching arm in close to his body as he awaits the catcher’s sign, in the manner of someone who has been injured. And in a way he had been. The Toronto Blue Jays roughed him up in the playoffs last year, when there were reports McDowell was tipping his pitches (a possible cause for the new stance), and those troubles carried through the early part of this season. He was 2-7 through May. Since then, however, he has been his usual self–no, better than his usual self. Where he used to perform a high-wire act even when he was pitching well–walking guys, allowing plenty of hits, going deep into the count with every batter, and routinely pitching out of jams–he now has all the directness of an ascetic monk on the mound.
“We’re preparing for the 12th and that’s it,” he added. “Time is running out.”
