UP, UP AND A-WAY

he looked at heat maps for the location and type of pitches that he most frequently turned into his most productive ball in play: a ball in the air to rightcenter field, his pull side.

Tell a hitter to hit the ball in the air and all sorts of bad things happen. The back shoulder drops. So does the elbow. The barrel of the bat spends less time in the hitting zone. Pop-ups, groundouts and whiffs ensue. So the Pirates focus on the process rather than the results: creating the type of contact that results in desirable launch angles. Palm of the top hand up, palm of the bottom hand down, short to the ball.

“It’s being behind the baseball,” Livesey said. “It gets back to being in that good hitting position, being behind the baseball, and the swing path. Most guys it generally starts down to the ball but then you have finish up, you get on a plane with the ball. When you hit the back of the ball slightly underneath the ball, you get backspin.”

The process of hitting a ball in the air also requires a batter to choose a pitch he can do something with, typically one higher in the strike zone.

“One thing that it does do is it narrows your focus, because you have a plan up there,” Jaso said. “In order to get the ball in the air, you have an approach, you have a plan, and that focus is narrowed. I think that just, you just happen to square up the ball because of that. It has nothing to do with actually hitting the ball in the air, it’s just going to happen.”

Jaso focused more on getting the ball in the air at the end of last season. After hitting .198 with a .565 OPS through June and July, Jaso hit .307 with a .982 OPS in the final two months of the season.

“I don’t know if that did just make me narrow my focus in or what, flatten out my swing. I don’t know. I can’t really tell you,” Jaso said. “But I did have that approach at the end of the year, and I did start hitting better.”