Walt Hriniak stands with his elbows on the frame of the batting cage, his hands pressed to the sides of his face, and with squinty eyes, his hat pulled low, watches Sammy Sosa hit. An ancient yellow fielder’s glove is rolled and stuck in his back pocket, the way an absentminded professor might treat a stack of graded exams. He rises, moves a couple steps to his right, and squats, looking at the swing from a different angle. As Sosa lunges at a low pitch, it cracks off the bat, the sound echoing off the grandstand as the ball flies into right field. He ends up with the bat in his left hand, crooked back and behind his head, while he looks intently at the ground in front of home plate, like a man who’s just dropped some change into the gutter and is using an umbrella for balance as he stoops to pick it up. When Hriniak speaks, he speaks in clipped phrases, saying, “Hands down,” or, “Same way, like in a game,” or, “Don’t get too up and down with your legs.” Sosa swings, lines one into right field, and, when only silence follows the crack of the bat, he bounces slightly at the knees and says, “Let me know,” then looks out again at the pitcher.
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Hriniak is baseball’s reigning batting guru, a disciple of Charlie Lau, the hitting instructor for the 1983 division-winning White Sox. Both were light-hitting journeyman catchers, with .250 lifetime batting averages in limited play. Hriniak’s major league career, in fact, was very limited–a total of 47 games and 99 at bats over two seasons in the late 60s. Yet both he and Lau were, in their own ways, studious and thoughtful, and over the decade that they’ve taught their unique method of hitting, from Kansas City to Boston to Chicago and beyond, they’ve dramatically altered the game.
Charlie Lau was a friendly, outgoing person who died from cancer in 1984; his death, many people believe, contributed greatly to the premature descent of the 1983 team. (It certainly contributed to the early retirement of Greg Luzinski and the several-season slump of Ron Kittle.) Hriniak is dour and distant. Standing around the batting cage, squinting out at the field, his presence has a forbidding quality, and I must admit there were times, standing nearby, when I was reminded of my freshman-level philosophy class, which took place in a room immediately after a graduate seminar. The professor from that course would linger on with his students at the front of the room as we’d file in and sit down. They’d be talking about whether this desk or that chair were really there; we certainly didn’t exist for them, we were beyond consideration. Hriniak has the same intent quality as that professor and those students; nothing exists for him except the batting cage and the batter. If the rock music on the public-address system gets too loud for him–say, during the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter”–he simply presses his hands against his cheeks, a favorite pose of his, and slips his index fingers into his ears. He is not known to give good interviews, although he did make time earlier this season for the syndicated This Week in Baseball, and I think it’s this reticence–and not the team’s lower batting average this year–that has brought the frequent criticism he’s been subjected to in the media. (When rookie Robin Ventura struggled early in the season, Hriniak drew more criticism than Ventura himself.) Hriniak simply doesn’t like to waste his time talking to people unable to understand or use his knowledge. He can leave the batting cage, walk wide around a group of reporters, sit down in the dugout, and, with his shoulders hunched and his straw blond hair sticking out from under his cap, take up a pose more like a scarecrow than a college professor (although both might share that absent gaze).
The Cubs’ Joe Altobelli couldn’t be more different from Hriniak, as a coach and as a person. He is friendly, with a quick smile, and eminently approachable near the batting cage. He has no system, but is more of a problem solver. “There’s always gonna be somebody who needs help,” he says, “and I think the basic thing is when the player is ready to listen, and to try to figure out what the player’s strengths are with the bat. Don’t try to get him to do something that he isn’t capable of doing.”
