What Great Hitters Do

It's two things, really: one heroic, and one unheroic.

Great hitters pick a team up by the scruff of its neck, and haul it along on a winning streak.

That's the heroic.

They also do something very unheroic.

They are merciless with bad pitchers.  They bully them, they destroy them, they play with them like a cat with a broken-winged bird.

You can almost see them licking their chops when they get hold of pitchers like the sort that the Orioles trot out on an almost daily basis—young pitchers, old pitchers, weak pitchers.

Think of Sheffield's bat twitching relentlessly, over and over again.  Think of Reggie looking like some kind of gigantic, alien insect, as I think Roger Angell once described him.  They are raring to go.

They are not...Judge and Stanton, who once again did their disappearing act last night, 1-8 with an entire single and three more strikeouts.  We can forget the M & M Boys race to set the home run record that was forecast for them  At their current pace, they will actually set the all-time, single-season strikeout record, though it will be close.

I'm not sure why this is.  The Yankees' ridiculous hitting manual?  Dare to take the called third strike!  The fact that, maybe, they're pure guess hitters?

They sure as hell don't seem to be up there with a plan.  Oh, I know that New Baseball dictates that they are supposed to bat as high as possible in the lineup, but when's the last time that worked out?  I've never seen so many scoreless, runner-less first innings in my life.

Don't get me wrong.  They're perfectly nice ballplayers, better than most.  Almost too nice, really.

They're the right sort of lug nuts to have.  But while they may be on a Yankees championship team sometime, it is never going to be they who carry the team across the line.