The on-deck circle

Remember in Little League, when you made the jump up from the "little kid" leagues to the league where typically one wore a full uniform, got to sit in close-to-real dugouts and, most cool of all, got to spend time in a real on-deck circle awaiting a turn at bat? What made the on-deck circle so cool, for Little Leaguers of old like me, was the weighted bat and the "doughnuts"--the plastic, weighted contraptions which encircled the bat just like the major leaguers'--in the on-deck circle.

In Little League, acting like a major leaguer was half the battle. Not only did we mimic the uniform style of the time with how we wore our socks and bended the bill of our cap, but the routine of major league players was copied in the on-deck circle as well. One of the coolest things was to tamp the ground with the bat, just like the big leaguers, ridding the bat of the weight and thus preparing a Little League batter for battle.

Alas, that whole memory of old was jarred today in reading the Wall Street Journal where a story on the physiology of hitting revealed that weighted bats and doughnuts actually made one's swing slower than the expected snap we figured was a consequence of warming up with something heavier. Coop DeRenne, a physical education instructor at the University of Hawaii, has research which shows that increasing or decreasing the weight of one's bat by 10%-13% decreases bat speed from three to five miles per hour.

Many hitting instructors are apparently aware of this phenomenon yet are reluctant to mess with players' routines. The majority feel that the on-deck circle is the province of the player--that what the player wants to do there takes precedence over coaching or better understanding physiological insights.

What then would DeRenne say to batters, knowing that they are typically hooked on this illusion that weighted acoutrements help them prepare for their next at bat? "I'd tell them, 'Why are you so smart while you train and so dumb in the on-deck circle?'"