Being a big fan of all of Bob Uecker’s work, I could probably recite every line of every Major League movie. While reading Adam McCalvy’s updates yesterday, I came across this tidbit and immediately thought of the first movie:
Brewers manager Ken Macha said Carlos Gomez has been tweaking his swing to produce more ground balls. The key for the speedy center fielder is keeping his lead elbow low, and thus keeping the bat head from dropping down.“Yesterday’s batting practice, I thought he swung the bat as well as he has this spring,” Macha said. “We want him to get it on the ground, but I don’t want him to conscious about it. … A lot of the balls he hit in batting practice were hard and low.”
Ken Macha standing there with Carlos Gomez telling him to hit the ball on the ground of course reminded me of Lou Brown and Willie Mays Hayes in Major League — “Gomez, every time you pop one up, you owe me 20 push ups.”
I tried to find a version of it on YouTube, but all I’ve got is a non-English version. The scene is at 1:46 for those who are still interested.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNAOaD5kT9k&w=320&h=265]
We’ll see how well this works out, but I imagine Macha isn’t the first manager to tell Gomez to keep it on the ground. Personally, I’m just hoping Macha falls out of love with the idea of batting Gomez second, like he has so many times already this spring.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
