Loved the way he whipped that bat through the strike zone. A signature swing if there ever was one.If you think about it, Ken Griffey, Jr. became the player everyone once thought Darryl Strawberry might become, before the crush of overheated expectations and the furies of his childhood turned into substance abuse, injuries, and a truckload of might-have-beens for Strawberry. These two had the most picturesque swings I've seen in a lifetime of watching baseball, and I'm old enough to have seen Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Willie McCovey (who had a pretty swing himself), Ernie Banks, Mike Schmidt (who may have been the most underappreciated Hall of Famer of them all and probably should be in the conversation about the greatest all-around player of the post-World War II generations), Willie Stargell (who had one of the ugliest swings I ever saw, but damn if it didn't work wonders), Frank Howard (they didn't call him Capital Punishment for nothing), Eddie Mathews, Dick Allen (who admits today that had he not mishandled the very real racism he faced in his early seasons he just might have been a Hall of Famer), Ron Santo (who does deserve to be in the Hall of Fame), Reggie Jackson, and Billy Williams in their primes.
If you were going to engineer a textbook swing, Ken Griffey, Jr. might be your model.
Of course, people perform rather splendidly even if their swings are the kind that would send a coach to the rye bottle. God only knows how often the story was told how John McGraw was so petrified about some nimrod in the minors possibly ruining Mel Ott's unorthodox swing that he kept Ott next to him on the bench to learn the game for a couple of seasons before turning him loose to become the National League's home run king. I imagine people in the Cardinal organisation had the same fears about someone potentially ruining Stan Musial.
Or, on the other side of the plate, just imagine if someone in the Giants organisation had been fool enough to think that someone needed to teach "legitimate" pitching technique to Juan Marichal . . .
It seems like baseball swings are taught these days and there is very little personal variation with the swing itself. It’s all pretty formulaic. I would point to Charlie Lau when he was hitting guru for the KC Royals during the George Brett era as the man that standardized hitting.
How many players do we see now with a slightly opened stance; short, or non-existent stride; compact swing; and a top-hand release? Just about everybody does it that way now.
Junior just generated so much bat speed that if he got square on the ball it was going to go a long way. Different kind of power since he was a long skinny kid. And yet you couldn’t really tie him up by pitching inside.