BP Daily Podcast: Effectively Wild Episode 488: Only the Finest Listener Emails

You guys need to get out and see more games. :-) More accurately, you need to see more pre-game batting practice. I once watched Albert Pujols take a turn in the cage when he had obviously decided he needed to work on hitting behind the runner. (Repeat: this is Albert Pujols we're talking about, and I mean, mid-career Pujols.) Out of a dozen batting-practice pitches, he hit ten line drives into a spot in right field maybe twenty feet square. One of the dozen was a ground ball hit to the same area, and he "missed" on the last one. Stanton isn't Pujols, and batting-practice pitchers aren't major-league game starters, but I still think, based on that exhibition, that guys like Pujols and Stanton would have little difficulty turning a home-run swing into a screaming-liner swing that cuts way back on the homers but still gets lots of hits.