Granderson Tweaks His Swing

I was out of the house all day so I missed this yesterday but Curtis Granderson went to hitting coach Kevin Long and asked him to help him change his swing.

In a drastic mid-season move, the Yankees began a “total reformation” of Granderson’s swing. It’s the reason he was kept out of the lineup tonight against Cliff Lee. Long specifically asked Joe Girardi for one more day to work with his center fielder.

“To do something like this, it’s a stretch,” Long said. “But it’s a stretch that I think is not going too far and I think he feels the same way… He’s had length to his swing for a long, long time. He’s been an all-star with length to his swing, but we’ve both decided at this point we want to shorten it as much as we can.”

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“His stance is going to be a lot more square,” Long said. “His hands have changed their position. He’s holding on with two hands. His load to where he gets to contact, we’ve eliminated a lot of movement there. This takes time to do something like this, but we’re going to have five or six complete sessions. He did get into the game yesterday and had what I would call a pretty good at-bat.”

Today, Chad Jennings has these quotes from Granderson:

“I wouldn’t necessarily call it big changes,” Granderson said. “It’s just trying to simply things. Everything I’ve done up to this point is just trying to get to the point I want (to make contact)… and there’s always some moving parts before it. We’re just trying to eliminate some of those moving parts.”
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“I’ve made changes throughout my whole career,” he said. “I’ve been an unorthodox hitter. I’ve been a very routine and picture-perfect hitter as far as what everyone else is doing. And everything in between. Whenever someone says to make a change, I’ve always been a very adaptive player.”

Give Granderson credit for noticing a problem and trying to fix it on the fly. Most players would probably wait until the offseason. Now, let's just hope it works.