Getting Eric Byrnes Back on Track

(Photo from Byrnes' MLB web page. No photo credit given. Whoever took it, thank you!)

OK, for weeks I have been promising (or threatening, as you consider the case to be) to post a big article on Eric Byrnes’ batting stance. Well, it’s morphed into something a whole lot bigger than big. As my colleagues in Radioland know, short is not my long suit.

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what was ailing Eric Byrnes at the plate in 2005. This is the first part (of five) of the first of two articles, segmented for online reading convenience, on Eric Byrnes’ batting difficulties. This article deals with the mental aspect of solving these problems. I will address the actual batting stance issues in the second article. This article and the one to come are based on my observations of Byrnes, especially in the second half of the 2005 season. That’s when he joined the Baltimore Orioles and I got a subscription to MLB.TV.

WARNING: If you don’t like offense, in which case you should probably be a soccer fan, or if you get bored reading about the minutiae of improving a hitter’s chances, or you’re just plain against armchair psychology, please skip all this. If you really like pitching, I’ve got a nice (and much shorter) piece on A’s closer and 2005 AL Rookie of the Year Huston Street that you might find interesting. Check the November archives.

FURTHER WARNING: If you don't like Eric Byrnes, now is definitely the time to leave. In fact, if you don't like Eric Byrnes, you've wandered into the wrong blog.

If you know Eric Byrnes, please tell him this is here. And if you ARE Eric Byrnes, hello, thanks for stopping by, please read this, keep an open mind, and give the suggestions a try. Something(s) might work. You don’t come across as the type of person who would sit in front of a computer or anything else for long, so read it in bits and come back a bunch of times. Peace on earth might be a pipe dream, but your batting .300 in 2006 is not. (Assuming we have a 2006 baseball season, but that’s a whole ‘nuther article altogether, about things like bird flu, Peak Oil and such that I wouldn’t publish on the Byrnesblog).

A technical note: I am uploading these segments so that the most recent entry is actually this one. You can just read down as you would a book. Otherwise, you would end up reading it backwards, which messes up the sequence.

First, the obvious question: What makes me think I have any answers for Byrnes when experienced baseball professionals like Orioles hitting instructor Terry Crowley couldn’t get him turned around last year?

Well, I started going to baseball games and reading about baseball long before Byrnes was even born, so I do know a thing or two about the game. I have also personally experienced competitive sports and stage performance, so I understand something about the mental pressures of performance, even though I have never done anything remotely as impressive as being in the AL playoffs, which Byrnes has done.

But the idea that a fat, 50-year-old female journalist, whose ball field experience is mostly limited to a very small, barely-remembered amount of intramural grade school softball in the 60s, has anything to say that would help a major league hitter goes back to the mid-80’s when I lived briefly in Indianapolis and worked as a paralegal for a Social Security Disability attorney. One day, one of his clients, an older man who had already won his disability benefits, brought in his three brothers. He was hoping the attorney could win benefits for them as well. The youngest of them was 42. All had multiple chronic medical problems from years of brutal physical labor. They had worked this way because they were all very poorly educated. They could be termed functionally illiterate, i.e. able to sign their names, read basic road signs, such as "stop" and "yield" when they drove, but not much else. I did client intake, and in hearing their stories, I discovered that they were all dyslexic.

Unfortunately, in rural Indiana when these men were growing up, no one understood what dyslexia was or how to compensate for it. These guys were simply written off as stupid, and so that’s what they themselves came to believe they were. They were left to do brute physical labor in terrible conditions, and it had ruined their health. But by the mid-80’s, dyslexia was talked about more, and people like me read about it and knew the tell-tale signs.

I told the attorney what I had discovered, and showed him the simple written test I had conducted with one of the brothers (simply copying the words and numbers on his cigarette pack, just as he saw them). I was disturbed that a paralegal had seen in two hours what doctors and social workers had been missing in years of appointments. The attorney told me that sometimes lawyers and paralegals are in a position to spot something that doctors or social workers miss. That experience has always stayed with me. Being a paralegal and later a journalist means that the powers of observation are my stock-in-trade.

Thanks to the Internet, I have been able to turn those powers of observation on Eric Byrnes. I sat at my desk in Oakland, or at my workstation at KPFA-FM in Berkeley, watching him on my computer, with no other agenda but that I was rooting for him to succeed and asking myself why he was having so much trouble in 2005, after a career year offensively in 2004. I watched him like a hawk every chance I got, listened to what the announcers were saying, and kept notes on my Eric Byrnes Pitch Count Reports, which quickly developed into something much more detailed than the title would suggest.

And I had certain advantages in studying him. I was not in a situation where I was required to compare him to others, or decide whether or not he fit in. I’d already decided that Eric Byrnes is my player no matter what his batting average is; the challenge was to see whether I could spot whatever it was that was keeping him from having the season he and his organization wanted him to have. I was not charged with watching the others on the team for signs of trouble, even though others had also slumped. In other words, my baseball-watching attention was not, perforce, divided. So I thought that, perhaps, I could see what the experts and what Byrnes himself, caught in this frustrating quandary, could not. Some people, especially the ones who don’t really think much of Eric Byrnes—and I have encountered some of those--may think me a fool for trying to point out solutions to his difficulties at the plate. I don’t care what they think. All I know that I do not think Eric Byrnes should be written off as those guys in Indiana were written off by people who could not or would not see the root of their troubles.

Kéllia Ramares
Oakland, CA