Junior's perfect opportunity

Sporting News, The, March 30, 1998 by Steve Marantz, Jim Street

As he enters the prime of his baseball life, KEN GRIFFEY JR. can take his game to a dizzying level or settle for mere excellence

"All my life in pro baseball, people have said, `He can be better.' There's always a `but' at the end of anything I've accomplished. You get tired of people saying, `He hit 49 home runs, but he could do more.'"

--Ken Griffey Jr., after winning the 1997 A.L. MPV Award

But. He is among the best players in baseball, the American League MVP and a Gold Glove center fielder. He hit 56 home runs with 147 RBIs last year. You want him on your team--who wouldn't? But.

He swings a "perfect" swing imperfectly. Born and bred to win a Triple Crown, his .304 batting average last year wasn't even close to the league leaders. Challenging Roger Maris' season home run record of 61, Griffey became pun-conscious and slumped. Predestined for World Series glory, he was 2-for-15 with no home runs and two RBIs in the Mariners' first-round playoff loss to the Orioles.

Junior could be better. The Mona Lisa could use brightening, Pavarotti's high F-sharp could be smoother and Haagen-Dazs chocolate swirl could be easier to scoop. No doubt Junior feels nitpicked, but greatness nit-picks the great.

Though he wears his hat backward, he is measured against those whose pants went on two legs at a time--Ruth, Gehrig, Williams, Musial, Aaron, Mantle and Mays. He could become the Michael Jordan of baseball by taking it up a notch. Or he could remain the Drew Bledsoe of baseball by staying merely excellent A player gets just one prime. At 28, entering his 10th season, Junior's prime is now.

"What is Junior's best year?" father Ken Griffey Sr. asks rhetorically. "Nobody knows. Junior doesn't know."

Opinions are free, however. Royals vice president George Brett, a three-time batting champion, says Griffey could win the first Triple Crown since Carl Yastrzemski in 1967 (.326, 44 HRs, 121 RBIs).

"Sure, he could do it," says Brett, who occasionally works with Royals hitters. "He could hit for power and average. But to do that he's got to stop trying to muscle the ball."

Hold that thought, first things first. Deconstructing Griffey starts with his swing, a marvelous engine of efficiency and destruction. Mariners designated hitter Edgar Martinez, regarded as one of baseball's finest pure hitters, describes it as "perfect."

"It's so smooth," Martinez says. "He's balanced and his head stays on the ball. His hands go back when he starts to swing. He's got quick hands, a short stride, quick hips and he gets good extension all the time. I believe Junior's swing is perfect, I really do."

Blue jays righthander Roger Clemens notes that Griffey's swing generally is a slight uppercut. "His swing path stays through the hitting zone a long time," Clemens says. Griffey's edge, Clemens adds, is that he sees how the ball comes out of a pitcher's hand. "He has a great eye."

"Traditional" is a description applied by Mariners hitting coach Jesse Barfield. In textbook manner, Griffey keeps his hands back until the last instant, Barfield says, enabling him to react to late movement on a pitch and preventing him from being caught "out front" or ahead of a pitch. Griffey extends on pitches away and around the middle, Barfield says, and sometimes--but not always--shortens his swing on pitches in. His left heel comes off the ground, and he releases his top hand on follow-through, as do 85 percent of the best hitters.

The swing seems to be permanently grooved. When Griffey came into camp in February, four days after catchers and pitchers, all players participated in a soft-toss hitting drill. The object was to hit the ball, thrown from a side angle, on a line to the back wall of the batting cage.

"Junior beat everybody with 13-of-15," Barfield says. "It takes most guys two or three days to get that down, and he had just gotten here. He hadn't been swinging at all. That's a Natural."

The man who put a bat in junior's hands when he was 3, Ken Sr., designed his swing to be short and quick. "The fastball inside is a pitcher's bread-and-butter pitch," says Griffey Sr., now the Reds' hitting coach. "I gave him a technique to get to that pitch. It's hitting on top of the ball, like chopping wood. Not necessarily doing it, but thinking it. Junior's swing is not as long as most of the power hitters. It's short and fluid. He can get from point A to point B quicker than anybody."

Is Griffey's swing perfect? Aesthetically, perhaps. Relative to most players, yes. But in an absolute (and nit-picking) sense, no.

At the Frank Carey Hitting School in North Reading, Mass., instructors point to a poster of Griffey launching a swing with his right arm "locked out" in theory, a flaw making him vulnerable to an inside pitch. Youngsters are taught that Griffey gets away with it because of his extraordinarily quick hip pivot and bat speed, but that most hitters can't be effective that way, certainly not 11-year-olds.

Barfield agrees that in keeping his hands back an extra instant before fully extending, Griffey leaves an inside hole. Hard throwers--Detroit lefthander Justin Thompson is one--exploit the flaw by pounding Griffey inside or high. "He has a loop in his swing, up and in, if you've got a good fastball," Yankees advance scout Bob Didier says.