What I Learned from Rod Carew's 'Hit to Win' - Part One

As has virtually every baseball fan, I’ve spent much of the last six weeks reading. Unlike Rogers Hornsby’s, my eyes were ruined before I ever picked up a book, so I stopped playing the game at age nine and started reading voraciously about it during the offseason. This year, the offseason just keeps going, so there’s been extra time for that treasured work. Let’s dig in, then, to a decade-old tome on the art and science of hitting by Twins legend Rod Carew.

Firstly, of course, one must know what not to expect from the book. It’s not a perfectly modern perspective. It’s not on the cutting edge of the home-run revolution. There is an entire chapter devoted to what Carew calls “situational hitting,” focused wholly on directional batting aimed at making productive outs to move runners along. Another whole chapter details, in minute detail, the mentality and techniques required to bunt successfully.

The cover shows Carew near the point of contact with a pitch, and diagrams his swing in a parabolic arc that should be familiar to modern fans, with his imaginary bat working uphill through the latter portion of the swing. Within, however, Carew largely espouses keeping the swing flat, and emphasizes both using the opposite field and keeping the ball on the ground. The seven-time batting champion exhorts readers to stay within themselves, usually in the context of resisting the temptation to try for more power than that of which they’re capable.

Mechanically, Carew’s most urgent teaching point is a principle he calls ‘flat hands’, a concept echoed in the Charley Lau school of hitting. The idea is simple and (to a reader in 2020) highly intuitive, almost obvious one: keep the bottom hand above the bat and facing down, and the top hand below the bat and facing upward, for as long as possible. Carew is insistent that the top hand act as a guide, but not the power source of the swing, and that, too, is a principle shared with Lau’s system.

Carew and Lau share a common foil: Ted Williams. While Carew reiterates his respect and admiration for Williams, and mentions having talked hitting with him at length, he underscores two key aspects of hitting about which he and Williams disagree. For one thing, Williams famously believed in the primacy of the top hand—believing that the power in a swing came from that arm. Carew contends that all the power in a swing comes from bat speed (with which Williams would agree), and argues that becoming overly dependent upon the top hand puts a hitter at risk of rolling over and grounding the ball to the pull side too often. Lau disciples, even more insistent on the bottom hand as the key to the swing, would agree there.

Yet, Carew departs from Lau on the other key tenet of that school, the one that most sharply divided Lau from Williams. Whereas Williams was a firm believer in back-foot hitting, believing keeping his weight back was vital to generating power and maintaining stability, Lau’s school took the side of many other hitters who came up later in Williams’s career, and who shifted their weight aggressively to the front foot when hitting—hitters like Henry Aaron and Willie Mays.

Lau’s school decried the old-school mantra of pivoting on the back foot, but keeping the balls of the feet down, encouraging hitters instead to get up onto the toes of their cleats or come off the ground entirely with that foot. Carew, however, traces a middle road between Williams and Lau: he supports the concept of a weight shift, but wants batters to keep their stride controlled and keep their back foot under them. Interestingly, he denies the popular conception that he was prone to moving around the batter’s box frequently, insisting that he would set up with his back foot in the same place (near the plate, at the back of the box) almost every time he stepped in, and merely moved his front foot around to modulate his stance based on situations he was facing.

There’s plenty more that makes Carew’s book interesting, and that might be applicable to current Twins, even if many of them seem to ascribe to very different philosophies than those Carew outlines. We’ll discuss more takeaways from the volume next week.

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