Dr. John R. Harris
Metal Ropes: Deadball-Era Tactics for Stroking Line Drives With Today’s Alloy Bat
(Independently published Aug. 12, 2019)
John Harris may seem an unlikely source of information about hitting a baseball. Though he taught everything from Latin, Greek, and French to English Composition to Classical and World Literature for three and a half decades, he never found any competent instructor to train him in the fine art of batsmanship during his formative years. Like so many American boys, he played until he surpassed his very modest skill level, then continued to other things….Until he became a father. With a boy on his hands who was fascinated by the game of baseball, he used all his researching savvy to plunge into books, videos, online tutoring—and soon noticed that the lessons being transmitted were neither very detailed nor very inspired. All the “cutting-edge” wisdom appeared to recycle the same clichés, and the message was especially—even exclusively—suited to big, tall boys whose physique generated a lot of bat speed without the help of much technique. A coach couldn’t go far wrong with students like those!But what about fellows with a smaller build? Dr. Harris’s research eventually came to focus on the all-but-forgotten hitters of the so-called Deadball Era (in the first decades of the twentieth century): not just Ty Cobb, but Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie, Edd Roush, and many others. In 2017, he published Hitting Secrets From Baseball’s Graveyard, and a year later he followed with Landing Safeties. Both books contained a wealth of information about how batters of a century ago played the “small ball” game of reaching base over 40 percent of the time, often, while striking out perhaps once a week. The lingering problem in the case of both studies, though, was that such techniques couldn’t be transferred to the contemporary metal bat.Or could they? Metal Ropes quickly took shape as Harris’s experiments finally broke through a conceptual logjam and suggested to him how the metal bat might indeed be adapted to strike sizzling line drives (or “ropes”). These discoveries have come too late to help his own son, whose fate in the hands of a monolithic coaching establishment was fully predictable. The pain of that protracted experience, however, was a powerful motivator for this book, as its final chapter reveals.Metal Ropes advocates essentially three kinds of Old School stroke. One involves the long-striding “Fall Step”, another the highly flexible “Shuffle Step”, a third the dynamic “Hitch-and-Glide”. All three maneuvers are anathema in today’s coaching circles; yet the techniques of which they are composed—gripping the handle in the “knocker knuckles”, shifting weight fully to the front foot, and swinging downward to impart backspin—were all part of yesteryear’s lost gospel. It’s difficult to say that “progress” has discredited that gospel when today’s elite hitters struggle to break .250 against extreme infield shifts. Nevertheless, the establishment is sure to reject these lessons with disdain—and with little time wasted on counter-arguments. Harris would embrace that verdict: it just means that those few who keep an open mind and dare to excavate the past will have less competition for batting titles!
- ISBN
- 1089741588 / 9781089741589
- Weight
- 14.2 oz.
- Dimensions
- 6.0 x 0.6 in.
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