Posted on 06/26/2011 9:54:55 PM PDT by Hunton Peck
An otherwise standard 8-3 victory by the New York Yankees over the Colorado Rockies did feature one unusual moment on Saturday afternoon. It's what you see pictured above and in the video below. Two different images of the same Troy Tulowitzki(notes) swing, showing two different points of contact on the baseball. A double-hitzki, if you will, for a basehit to left field.
Tulo was jammed a bit on the fourth inning offering from CC Sabathia(notes). Amazingly, or maybe more so luckily, he was able to almost catch that ball with his bat, holding it in place to make contact again with the end up of the bat. The result was a knuckling line drive just over the head of Alex Rodriguez(notes).
Both broadcast teams described the contact as a broken bat single based on the double-crack sound, but a closer inspection on the video you see below shows it hit the bat twice.
Take a closer look for yourself. And listen for the sound.
Watch the video courtesy of MLB.com:
(Excerpt) Read more at sports.yahoo.com ...
Troy wants to be a Navy SEAL someday, and was just practicing his double-tap technique.
I’m not sure, but it may be that that only applies when the ball bounces in fair territory between hits. Another possibility is that the umps, like the announcers, assumed it was a broken bat at the time.
I think that is only if there is an intentional double hit.
The ‘slow motion’ video is worth it all.
I wouldn’t call that a double tap. It kind of rolled the length of the bat.
In the real-time audio, the two hits can be pretty clearly discerned, I thought.
I just looked at the slo-mo again, and see some daylight between bat and ball between the point where it contacts and then leaves the bat. I think the two points are far enough apart, the first hit was so weak, and his wrists were breaking so fast that the end of the bat caught up with the ball coming off the near-middle of the bat.
Whatever it was, it beat anything I could do. Cool to see!
That was pretty cool.
It looks to me like Tulowitzki was late with the swing. The pitch jammed him and the ball hit closer to the handle where it was mostly deadened. The deadened ball then bounced slightly out and down toward the barrel of the bat where it had near-immediate second contact with the still-in-motion bat. It was just a freak thing that has no doubt happened before, but probably not very often.
(shrug) Nice hit.
Only if it's on two swings. they don't want a batter popping a pitch straight up so that it comes back down into the strike zone and the batter then takes another swing at it while the catcher is trying to catch it for an out. That could get ugly.
“(shrug) Nice hit.”
I think it’s safe to say he’ll take it!
(( ping ))
Check out the slo-mo video at link.
Check out the slo-mo video at link.I've been having a horselaugh over that one. Proves the inviolability of Andujar's Law (named for Joaquin Andujar, pitcher and periodic human time bomb): In baseball there's just one word---you never know.
But it would make for some great excitement~!!
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