The art of hitting has changed a lot less than the machines we use to measure it. That is the honest takeaway from the piece making the rounds this morning, which unearthed an old debate between Ted Williams, the best hitter who ever lived, and one of his Hall of Fame teammates, then handed that argument to a modern star to see whether the takes still hold up in today's game.
They mostly do. That is the part I love.
Start with the man's credentials, because they are absurd. A .344 career average. A .482 on-base percentage that is still the highest in the history of the sport and shows no sign of being threatened. 521 home runs. Two Triple Crowns. Close to five prime seasons spent in military service instead of a batter's box, and he came back and kept hitting anyway. He also wrote the book, literally: The Science of Hitting, 1970, with the strike zone drawn as a grid of baseballs and a batting average stamped on each one. The sermon underneath all of it was four words long. Get a good pitch.
Votto is the right bridge to the present. Cincinnati's franchise bat for most of two decades, the 2010 National League MVP, a career .409 on-base percentage, and a man who spent years being called selective by people who meant it as an insult. He treated the strike zone the way Williams did, as private property, and he talked about hitting like a professor who had also taken a fastball off the elbow. Two eras, one obsession.
What makes the piece worth your ten minutes is the referee: a current hitter grading a conversation that happened before he was born, in a league where arms come out of the bullpen throwing harder, with more spin and more shapes, than anything Williams saw in a doubleheader. Some of the old advice bends under that. The core of it does not. You cannot hit what you should not swing at.
checked the almanac: on the last day of the 1941 season, Williams could have sat out a doubleheader in Philadelphia and had his average rounded up to .400. He played both games, went 6 for 8, and finished at .406. Nobody has touched .400 since. That is the whole personality in one afternoon.
What I am watching next is the ripple. Williams' old club hosts Arizona at Fenway tonight and Votto's old club hosts St. Louis in Cincinnati, and somewhere in one of those cages a 24 year old is being told to lay off the pitch down and away by a coach quoting a book from 1970.