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Hit Man of Fenway Park

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(page 2 of 7)

But up close, here in the cage, he is 43 years old and shows wear and tear. The muscles are shot in his shoulder and he cannot play catch without pain; his fingers are scarred where baseballs have split them open; a scar runs across the left eyelid where a surgeon sewed it shut for two months after an accident in which a teammate was killed driving off the road on Walter Hriniak's 21st birthday. He arches slightly to the right tossing the balls underhanded, as soft as to a child, and as the batter swings -- twack! -- he quickly rocks back. An observer flinches as the balls fly towards him. The hitting coach does not, though only a few years ago he retreated a split-second too slow and the ball shattered his elbow like a bullet.

The batter is the catcher from Worcester, Rich Gedn. Lately he's been struggling, swinging off--balance, lunging at the baseball, and the more he struggles the harder everything gets. "I keep trying to pound a square peg through a round hole," Gedman says. What Hriniak wants this day is for Gedman to relax. "But that's not easy, is it?" he says later. "He knows he's not swinging good. There's 40,000 people watching and there's no place to hide. If you say, 'relax,' what happens? Sure, he tenses up more. And you cannot hit a baseball when you're tense."

For a while they just stand together talking. Hriniak pauses, searching for the image he wants. He finds it.

"Rich, when you step, come out soft, like you're stepping on an egg. Soft." They do this now, the tosses, the swings, until the bag is empty and they bend to the floor, flicking the balls back into the bag like dropped apples, and begin again. "Step on an egg." Slowly the swings begin to please the hitter, and the tension begins to uncoil. They refill the bag again and the sweat soaks through Gedman's shirt. They have worked like this since 1982, when Gedman asked for Hriniak's help; he obliged by dismantling Gedman's swing as if it were a broken-down engine, and over the years it has been reassembled, piece by piece, here in the cage.

They have been through a lot together and they are friends, but there have been times when Hriniak has shouted, "If you don't want to listen to me, get out of here!" and there are other times when not a word need pass between them, like two old gardeners working side by side. Twack. Twack. Twack. "You get a guy in here and he thinks he's just working on his mechanics," says Hriniak, "but you're working on his head at the same time, so when tough times come he's got some ammunition. You're making him stronger, you're making him dedicated, you're making him make a commitment to excellence or whatever you want to call it -- and not too many people want to make that commitment, do they? It's scary, but that's what it takes.

In the cage you learn how to survive." Later Gedman will say, "No matter how bad I'm going, Walter always has me come out of the cage feeling I'll be okay." Dwight Evans steps in. The canvas bag swells with baseballs. Empties and fills. Empties and fills. A tidal change of baseballs every ten minutes. Tony Armas... Marty Barrett... Bill Buckner... The game is still five hours away. The day of the hitting coach has just begun.

Within the narrow world of baseball, Walter Hriniak has narrowed his even further, to the, 17-inch width of home plate. He calls the battle between the pitcher and the batter "the only game going on" and adds, "It's a lot deeper than people realize." When his hitters go to bat, his eyes, deep green and steady, lock in like a sniper's. Sometimes before a ball is pitched, he can sense when a player is about to go into a slump just by the way he moves around in the box. When a ball is hit, he alone does not immediately follow its flight, preferring to memorize every detail of a batter's swing, including the moment just after impact. Something critical happens in a swing then," he says, and I'd miss it if I watched the ball."