Article on Buster Olney's Blog - Cal Ripken's Swing

I found this post on Buster Olney's Blog (Link: http://insider.espn.go.com/espn/blog/index?name=olney_buster#20061218) very interesting and a nice little read. You have to be a member of ESPN's Insider to see it, but I am just going to copy and paste the article into the blog.

Buster Olney made some very astute observations about Ripken, as his swing was unorthodox and it often changed from month to month, and season to season. I thought Olney put in a nice, fitting tribute to Ripken and noted all his tanigles that made him such an admired player and human being.

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Through the arc of Pete Rose's swing, he looked a little like Arnold Palmer, a little awkward in his crouch, but with power. Hank Aaron had those incredible wrists; when he turned the right wrist over his left, it was like the treads on a bulldozer turning over, and the ball had no chance.

Of all the hitters to reach 3,000 hits, Paul Molitor may have had the quietest hands, to borrow from the players' lingo, with no wasted movement. Willie Mays's athleticism flowed through all that he did at the plate, so much so that he seemed to be playing at a different speed. George Brett's swing was graceful, with the one-handed finish, and Rod Carew cradled the bat in his hands the way you'd hold an egg, never gripping too tightly before using that waggle like a whiplash when he did swing.

Eddie Murray somehow managed to maintain his right-handed and left-handed swings, one identical to the other, and if Tony Gwynn had five at-bats, he'd usually smash the ball with the barrel of the bat at least four times.

Cal Ripken, who ranks 14th all-time in hits with 3,184, was unlike any other members of the 3,000 hit club. He will be formally elected into the Hall of Fame in the next couple of weeks, and he also may have had the ugliest looking at-bats of the elite hitters.

There was nothing fluid about what he did at the plate, nothing pretty in his swing. He'd tinker with his stance throughout the season, like someone beating up his pillow every night, just to get comfortable at the plate. Sometimes he'd hold the bat almost straight back, like a softball swing, and sometimes he'd stand with his feet closer together, like a cricket player, and sometimes he'd lay the bat flat over his shoulder, flexing his fingers before raising the bat when the pitcher began his delivery. Sometimes he'd set up in a stance with his knees bent almost at a right angle, the way you would if you were milking a cow.

When Ripken swung and missed, he looked the way we all did while playing Wiffleball on Labor Day weekend, flicking his wrists desperately to make contact, his weight sometimes carrying him backwards while his hands flew forward, his midsection jackknifed.

But the man made it work somehow, enough to generate 431 career homers and 1,695 RBI, through consistency. He hit more than 30 only once in his career, when he hit 34 in 1991, and he never had more than 114 RBI in any season. He was more steady than a metronome, of course; a metronome needs to be rewound, and Ripken never did.

He did have some great physical skills: A powerful throwing arm, and hips and legs strong enough to discourage opposing runners from attempting to break up doubleplays. David Howard, the former Royal, once recalled how he slid into Ripken hard on an attempted doubleplay, and it was Howard, not Ripken, who came away gasping for breath. It was like sliding into a fire hydrant, Howard said years later.

But his other extraordinary attribute -- either learned from his father, or inherited from the Ripken gene pool -- was his belief that he could conquer any weakness through practice, through work. A lot of players don't know how to work, and others know how to work but get discouraged and beaten down by failure. Cal was just beginning his decline as a player in the two years I covered him, and yet he always seemed to assume that any slump, particularly with his hitting, could be solved, and it was only a matter of time until he found his answers, through hours spent in a batting cage. It was there that he tried those crazy stances, those experiments, anything he could to get his hands in position to hit, anything for him to feel more at ease at the plate.

Watching Ripken hit was more fascinating, in some respects, than watching great hitters like Molitor and Gwynn and Barry Bonds, because every at-bat was a grind for Cal. Some fans related to Ripken because of the fact that he showed up to work every day, punched the clock. But I always thought that was the extraordinary part of him -- the almost impossible consistency of his effort, more plow horse than human.

The part of Ripken that was Everyman for me -- the part of him that was like the commuter fighting rush-hour traffic and deadlines and office politics and somehow making it all work -- was watching him hit. He took his modest hitting talent and combined that with his imagination and knowledge and exceptional effort, and turned all these small pieces of himself into hits, so many hits.

He's one of the seven names listed on my Hall of Fame ballot, of course.