The Long, Long Winter

I missed this on Monday, but Doug Glanville's latest NYT column -- about the silly ways ballplayers kill time, boredom, and money in the offseason -- is worth a read. This part interested me:

The off-season would not be complete without creating the ultimate drill to fix your broken swing. Hit with one eye. Hit blindfolded. Hit with your back to the pitcher. Or maybe kneel on this hand while biting a piece of tree bark, and then swing. The best part about these homemade drills is the special bats or strange machines players usually invent so the drills can be executed correctly. Landfills near major league cities are full of ballplayers’ discarded off-season mock-science contraptions.

It seems like every year there is some dead-of-winter feature about Johnny Ballplayer and his radical new workout regime that sounds an awful lot like what Glanville describes. I've always been a bit skeptical of those stories. They're always about some guy who hit .287 in year one, would work out with live mules, ninjas, and anvils all winter, and then inevitably comes back and hits .287 in year two. I'm happy to see that someone in a position to know is copping to the fact that they're mostly baloney.