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Hit Man of Fenway Park

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(page 3 of 7)

"He sees things nobody else does," says Wade Boggs, perhaps the finest hitter of our time. He compares his eyes to a microscope, able to spot and correct the slightest flaw, the tiniest alteration in his near--perfect swing. At the end of last season, when Boggs was honored as the most valuable Red Sox player for hitting a remarkable .368, he stood on a podium and told the banquet audience, "The man who should receive this is up there," and he pointed to the balcony where Hriniak sat.

A teammate recalls last September when a few kids from Pawtucket were brought up for a look. "He was working with someone in the cage," he said, "but out of a corner of his eye he's watching this kid, Mike Greenwell, taking some swings. The kid had hit only .256 at Pawtucket, but Walter saw something. All of a sudden he's got Greenwell and he's moving him around the plate and he starts doing his flip drills with him. He just went crazy with him. The kid was drooling and I swear could hardly walk afterwards he was so exhausted. But everything off his bat was hit hard. Afterwards, Greenwell said to me, 'Is that guy always like that?' And Mike Greenwell went out and for the next two weeks just killed the ball. He hit four home runs and after each one he'd come into the dugout shaking his head and you could hear him saying, 'Oh, man!'"

Often when players are traded from Boston they say what they will miss most is leaving Hriniak's tutelage, for no other feat in sports imposes such bleak odds as does hitting. The ball arrives in four-tenths of a second or faster. It may rise or sink or dart in or out, depending on its spin. If a ball is hit at all, nine fielders await. Hriniak likes to say of .300 hitters, "They're successful, but they're not consistently successful. They fail seven out of ten times." What the hitters seek from their coach is a way to even up those odds a little. For doing just that (the Red Sox have led the majors in nearly every hitting category the past several seasons), a baseball writer called Hriniak "in many ways the most important member of the team."

On the rare occasions that his thoughts stray from home plate, it takes but a chance remark to bring them winging back. Not long ago a dinner companion was startled when Hriniak thrust aside a water glass, a coffee cup, and a half-full plate of fish and chips. He folded his napkin into a rough facsimile of home plate. He took his knife, a pat of butter still pressed to its tip, and waved it across the napkin. Unmistakably he was at bat. Just beyond the fish and chips loomed Fenway's Green Monster. A lesson began.

"Now we've got a right-handed pitcher to a right-handed hitter;" he said earnestly. "The pitcher's going to keep the ball low and away, right? Low and away, he figures he won't get hurt. So how many out of 120 pitches will be middle of the plate to the outside? At least 80 to 90 percent. So what sense does it make for a right-handed hitter to look for the ball inside to pull? Not much. But what happens if you whistle that outside pitch to right field a couple of times? The pitcher's going to say, 'Holy cow, that guy's nailing my best pitch to right field. I better pitch him inside because he's looking outside. Now you as the hitter, now you look inside. And you try to hit the home run. A pitcher knows he's got the guy who's always pulling. But the other guy, well, he gives him nightmares. That's what I try to teach. Use the whole field. Give those pitchers nightmares!"