It’s only panache if you end up on base. If you ground out like he did you’re just a distracting douchebag.
As theatrical as he is, he ought to know that you don’t get on base by staring at your hit’s trajectory. You get on base by fucking running as soon as the ball leaves your bat. You should have already taken at least one and a half steps before your bat even hits the ground.
Also, you waste a lot of time and swinging power with a half-cocked wide stance.
Sure, he’s an expert gymnast/bat-chaku practitioner. But he’s got a lot to learn about hitting.
I’d totally bean that guy.
Also, does it really take that long to score a goal in baseball?
The dude’s bat twirling rhythmic gymnastics routine made his at-bat last about three times longer than necessary.
If I had done that kind of thing my coach would have just made me a pitcher and then have me ride the bench so I don’t waste everyone’s time.
After all the twirling and stuff, he keeps his bat so far forward while he waits for the pitch. It’s so weird.
It’s half-cocking, and is a bad habit they train out of kids in any decent little league program. If you look closely, when he swings, he pulls the bat back then swings. This both wastes precious time as the ball hutles toward the plate, adds to mental load, and makes the swing much less powerful. Also notice his stance. It’s far too wide. When it’s that wide he can’t take a sufficient step to follow through with the hips and take advantage of the power in his core.
Basically he shows all the hallmarks of an immature batter.
I knew I’d see all kinds of comments about the batter’s poor batting posture in here.
What I wanted to comment about was the very excellent rendition of ‘We Will Rock You’. I’m glad that even Japanese High School teams recognize how appropriate that song is for sports.
Wow, I didn’t realise there was some much technique to playing Rounders.
That is what I was expecting 
Now I feel like an asshole for criticizing a kid for being immature.
I hope he at least enjoys showboating at the plate.
Not knowing the team or the league, I can only guess whether his teammates and coach are impressed with his bat twirling skills, or pissed off that he spends his entire practice choreographing a special dance, rather than honing his ability to hit a ball with a stick.
Someone needs to motion capture him and put the cap into a big mecha basobalmon.
Jesus, that is wide. I didn’t even look at his feet, I’m not surprised they’re horrible.
Somehow I just saw a teenaged boy bouncing around from an overload of testosterone and goofy kid fun. And somewhere in the stands some little teenage girl might think she could help him score a home run . Games within games
He’s in the batter’s box and doesn’t appear to call time… why doesn’t the pitcher just throw the ball while he’s doing all this…?
I dunno, I can recognise that he didn’t have a textbook winner stance - he missed something and didn’t slam whatever he was supposed to into the fields,
but if I were in the stands, that guy playing the game would have made me both pay attention, and slightly more interested in, what otherwise I would not give a shit about.
Sport is performance - otherwise it would not be spectated or broadcast.
Good performance is better than crap, lacklustre or predictable performance.
Are you not entertained!?
I was.
Because for some reason I don’t understand, the umpire wasn’t holding the pitcher back. You seem him watch the batter’s antics and then when he’s done, it signals the pitcher to go ahead.
In every league I ever played in, the umpire would have either told the batter to get a move on or signalled the pitcher to pitch as soon as the batter stepped in the box and called it a strike if it was even CLOSE to the strike zone.
Heck, in the US, high school rules have changed in a lot of places to say the batter can’t completely leave the batters box between pitches unless it’s a dead ball (i.e., foul ball, stolen base followed by timeout, etc).
This kid would have annoyed the CRAP out of everyone trying to actually PLAY the game around here!
I’m sure there’s a certain amount of ‘just bat already!’ towards his antics. But I get the impression that he’s somewhat of a team mascot, the band was playing ‘We Will Rock You’ just for that batter and stopped the moment he returned to the dugout.
That’s why I said that I don’t know the team or league. I was allowing myself the cognitive humility to be schooled by someone else’s observation. I can’t find anything wrong with it, so I’ll grant it as valid as any other part of my memory.
Music and sports can go so well together.
I love it when field producers and directors pick the shots to include plenty of commercial cutaways of the team bands playing… Getting to be an adjudicator for that type of musical competition as well.
