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Hit Man of Fenway Park

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(page 4 of 7)

He can hardly bear a day without helping somebody hit. In winter he drives the 40 minutes from his home to Fenway Park to work with his hitters in the cage. It is clear what is at stake for the players. Only 25 hits spaced over a long season separate the fair-to-middling .250 hitter from .300; and the potential of a million dollars. They come to the cage hoping to find those 25 hits. For Hriniak, whose salary would remain the same fraction of a player's were he to laze the winter away on a warm bass pond, the rewards would seem more elusive. "If a player says, 'Can you help me?" says Hriniak, "I'll hold nothing back. I'll be there anytime. What that player owes me is work. If he wants to get better; I want to see the results."

Jerry Remy was a 160-pound .260 hitter with the uppercut swing of a bigger man that mostly produced fly-ball outs when he was traded to the Red Sox for the 1978 season. The next winter, teacher and student went to work. "We'd go to a gym in Lexington," Remy said, "and he'd have me kneel and he'd throw tennis balls right at my head, making me swing down, so I'd hit line drives and grounders where we knew my hits would come." During the next three seasons, before injuries took their toll, Remy became an all-star and batted .297, .313, .307. When he made his 1,000th hit, a grounder that scooted through the infield, he quietly doffed his cap to the bullpen, where Hriniak was sitting. This past spring just before retiring, Jerry Remy went to Hriniak and closed a circle that began in a Lexington gym.

"I told him I have three hits that will always stick with me. One was my first hit in the major leagues, another was the base hit in the bottom of the ninth of the playoff game in '78, and the last was when he came to me in Yankee Stadium and asked a favor. He said, 'Get a hit for me,' and I said I didn't know what he meant. And he said, ‘Well, it's the anniversary of the day my father died. I'd like you to get a hit for him.' I got a ground ball hit up the middle. I looked at him and pointed upstairs. He knew what it was for and I knew what it was for. That's one I'll always remember because I knew what it meant for him."

Hriniak does not seem to care what age his hitters are, only that they are serious. In the off-season he holds several week-long hitting schools, and if a youngster shows he's more interested in a good time and rubbing shoulders with the famous players who drop by, Hriniak refunds the money and shows him the door. When someone asks him about his own hitting success, he is quick to point out that once, in the minors, he came to bat 37 straight times without a bit. It was many more years before he learned how to repair a troubled swing, but what he was learning then, he says, was just as valuable. "I learned what it's like to stink. To hear 'Boooo!' I learned that hitting is always a struggle. I learned that hitting is about suffering."

There is a videotape of Walter Hriniak teaching hitting. His face is intense, his no-nonsense voice sharp and clipped as he demystifies the perfect baseball swing, which for nearly a century was thought to be the province of only the gifted few, the "born hitters." When his close friend and mentor Charlie Lau, the famed hitting coach, was stricken with cancer; Hriniak sent him a copy of the tape. There is a hard-nosed edge to the man that doesn't allow self-praise. But perhaps the closest became was when he described what it felt like to see himself there on the screen, bat in hand, teaching. "When I saw that I said, 'That is it. That's you, Walter.' "