Issues → July/August 2007 → Feature Stories →

Hit Man of Fenway Park

COMMENT

SINGLE PAGE

EMAIL

PRINT

SHARE:

(page 5 of 7)

Walter Hriniak does not smile easily; rarely does be seem to relax. Part is the nature of the man, part the reality of his task, when nearly every night some of his players will fail miserably "They'll never know how bad I feel," he said. "They'll never know how bad I really feel. That belongs to me. I don't want them to know … I don't want them to know how good I feel inside when they do good, either."

He does not drink, but sometimes he'll sip Cokes in a hotel bar until 2 or 3 a.m. unable to sleep. After tough games on the road, he often leaves the bus and takes off alone, walking fast, putting distance between his feelings and the hitters until, many blocks away, he calms down and returns. "The only time I can really feel good," he says, "is when every player gets two hits. That's not gonna happen too often though, is it? You know when I relax? I'll get to the ballpark at one in the afternoon. It's nice and peaceful. I'll go sit in the stands. I'll go sit in the bullpen. I'll sit on the bench in the dugout and look out and there's no one there. It's nice.

To most fans the concerns of Walter Hriniak seem almost to belong to a different game from the one they knew when a coach on the sidelines hollered, "Keep your eye on the ball!" He is, he says, mechanically inept, barely able to change a tire, yet he sees each batter's swing as a complex series of movements and reactions, all within milliseconds of each other; each movement dependent on the other. A slight misstep along the way and the swing collapses like a stack of dominoes.

All the fans see, though, is that weak groundball to third. About yesterday's game he can tell you little more than the score, but the swings of his hitters remain as clear as crystal, almost as if he could pick them up and hold them like puzzle pieces spilled onto a floor. Once a visitor asked him to recall the swings of his batsmen. The game was long over; the score already forgotten, for this was in the spring and the scores did not matter. Yet without a pause he turned his eye backward.

"First guy was Dwight Evans. Swung at three fastballs out of the strike zone. He looked over at me and I motioned to him to keep his head down. Next pitch he jumped out and jammed himself…Wade Boggs hit the second pitch, a sinker; down and away, to the shortstop. His top hand rolled over. He didn't get extended … Buckner tried to pull a low, outside sinker and hit to the third baseman. Should've just taken the ball to left field…" When he finished going through the lineup he shrugged, almost apologetically, for he dislikes calling attention to himself. "Concentration," he said at last. "It's the best talent I've got. Some of these guys have taken a million swings with me. A million. They all know what to do. But they get bogged down. So I keep searching for a way to unlock the door. I always figure if I think hard enough, if I look hard enough, I'll find that one little thing to keep them going."

When Walter Hriniak is finished in the cage, perhaps an hour and a half after he began, he picks up his black fielder's glove and his canvas bag full of baseballs and walks to the one spot on earth he loves more than home plate -- the pitcher's mound during batting practice. Old-timers in Natick still speak of the strength in his throwing arm. "You could hear a football hum when he threw it," one said. Before he was a hitting coach, be made a reputation, first with the Montreal Expos, later with the Red Sox, as the best batting practice pitcher in baseball.