SWB's Hitting Coach Discusses AJax

Tyler Kepner recently wrote this feature story on Yankees top prospect Austin Jackson. Along with the article comes this blog post (hat-tip to Was Watching dot com) about Jackson that includes many good quotes from Scranton/Wilkes-Barre hitting coach Butch Wynegar. I suggest you read both in full, but for now here's some of the Wynegar quotes:

“I don’t know if he’s ever going to have 30-home run power, but I could see him having 15 or 20 at least,” said the Scranton hitting coach Butch Wynegar, a former Yankees catcher. “But it’s going to take time. It’s more mechanical issues that I’m very leery about bringing out to him now. I want to make sure he keeps that right-centerfield approach. There’s a right way to pull the ball and a wrong way.”

Jackson has a tendency to drift forward in his stance, rushing in an attempt to add power or hit the ball harder. Effectively, though, that robs him of power by shifting his weight too soon. With Wynegar, he has worked hard to keep his weight back and let the ball travel a split-second more before contact.

“Right now his whole approach is the other way,” Wynegar said. “I’ve seen him take balls in on the black and hit a line drive back up the middle — which, for a young hitter, it’s outstanding that he can do that. I don’t want him to lose that. That’s what can make him a .300 hitter. Spinning off the ball is not going to make him a .300 hitter. It’s gradual, it is.”

“In all honesty, I don’t care if he hits a home run or not,” Wynegar said. “For me as a hitting coach, everything revolves around his approach at the plate, controlling his stride, controlling his load, and being consistent with it, repeating it at-bat after at-bat, and understanding those little subtle adjustments during a game. I’d rather see him learn that here than go to New York and try to learn that on the big stage up there.”

I knew Wynegar had played for the Minnesota Twins, and I asked if he overlapped with Kirby Puckett. He did not, but Wynegar played against Puckett, and he knew what I was getting at. Puckett hit no home runs in 583 at-bats as a rookie in 1984, but two years later, he ripped 31 on his way to a Hall of Fame career.

“That’s a good comparison, right there,” Wynegar said. “I remember when I was traded to New York and we played the Twins, Kirby was leading off at that time. He was an inside-out hitter and he was not the hitter that he became. I think that’s a good analogy. Kirby learned how to sit on pitches and all of a sudden got stronger. I totally agree.”

Wynegar had some more quotes in the feature piece as well:

“There’s nothing about Austin — defense, arm, base running, nothing — that gives me any doubts that he’s going to be a good player one day,” said the Class AAA hitting coach Butch Wynegar. “I just hope nothing happens at the big-league level where they yank him out of here premature. I’d love to see him stay here all year, see what kind of year he has and go from there. Because he’s not there yet.”

Jackson knows he needs work, but is ready whenever he gets the call:

“I think that I still have a lot more things I need to improve on and learn before I’m called on to be a part of it up there,” Jackson said. “You don’t want to be up there and have things get exposed. You want to be ready and you want to be able to make an impact when you go up there.

“I just leave it to them. I don’t know too much about people’s contracts or what the situation is with that. I know once it’s my time and they feel that I’m ready, I’m going to show them I’m capable of playing up there.”

Right now Jackson is hitting .349/.425/.440 with 23 RBI, 10 doubles, and 11 steals, but he's still striking out too much - 49 times in 47 games so far. The Yanks are probably going to want to see him start striking out less before they even start thinking about calling him up. I think he'll spend most of the season in Triple-A and then get called up when the major league rosters expand to 40 in September. Until then let the kid develop at his own pace, because from everything I've heard, read, or seen, the kid is going to be a hell of a ballplayer one day.