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Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

—Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, Nobel Prize–winning physiologist credited with discovering vitamin C

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

We’d gone to the wrong hotel. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but we were in the middle of a blizzard. Getting a taxi was next to impossible, as all of them were either full, or covered in powder and spinning in place.

“Can’t we just grab a taxi from here to the hotel?” Jaime, my coach for the day, had asked earlier. Taxis from Pier 40 on the water in Manhattan? Not on a Saturday night with a snowstorm crippling the city.

So we started walking. My date with Everlast would continue. Jogging through Times Square in slush with an 80-pound boxing heavybag across my shoulders it was.

But I didn’t mind. For the first time in my life, I felt like Babe Ruth.

Obsessive Batting Disorder

Jaime Cevallos isn’t normal. Ever since he was a kid, when his classmates were off to prom or driving to house parties hooting and hollering, he was in his front yard, hitting baseballs through a tire hung from a tree branch. He took notes, made changes, and took more notes.

Now Major League Baseball players pay him to look at those notes, because Jaime has figured out how to improve some important numbers. One of them is “slugging percentage.”

Slugging percentage,3 the bread-and-butter of baseball hitter analysis, is the number of bases run, divided by the total number of appearances at the plate. The higher the percentage, the better. The Rain Man of slugging was Babe Ruth, and his 1921 record stood until Barry Bonds and his 20-inch arms came along in 2001.

Tweaking this number is important.

In 303 plate appearances before working with Jaime, Ben Zobrist had three home runs and a .259 slugging percentage. In the 309 plate appearances after working with Jaime, Zobrist hit 17 home runs with a .520 slugging percentage. In 2009, Zobrist won the team MVP award for the Rays, finishing the season with a .297 batting average and 27 home runs.

Going from three home runs to 27 in approximately the same number of at-bats is astounding. In the majors, it’s unheard of.

If only God can make a great hitter, does that make Jaime God?

Or was he just seeing something that other people weren’t?

From God to Granularity

Ted Williams once famously remarked, “Hitting a baseball is the hardest thing to do in sports.” … Jaime Cevallos has made it his life’s mission to conquer the unconquerable.

—Fort Worth Star-Telegram

This leads us to the snowstorm.

I had invited Jaime to demonstrate his goods on a blank canvas: me. He had flown from Dallas, Texas, to land with a boatload of gear (including the heavybag) on the western edge of New York City.

Armed with a radar gun, video camera, laptop, and a slew of baseball bats coated in pine tar, he then set out to turn me into a home run hitter in one session. The setting would be the subarctic batting cages of Pier 40, and each ball would be hit off a tee that put ball height at 35.25 inches to eliminate the variability of pitches.

Perhaps it was the salsa music that pumped in from an adjacent room, where aspiring Dominican pros were playing cards, but after just 45 minutes of molding and training, here were the ball speed results, measured with the radar gun off the bat:

Before instruction (mph): 68, 69, 48, 50, 60, 47, 49, 64, 42, 68, 71, 67, 42

Before-training average: 57.307 mph

After: 58, 61, 52, 63, 54, 65, 75, 76, 70, 78, 65, 61, 70

After-training (first round) average: 65.23 mph

After After (after the second round with Mr. Miyagi): 73, 70, 66, 66, 73, 69, 78, 70, 59, 74, 68, 76, 69

After-training (second round) average: 70.076 mph

I was still no Mark McGwire, but jumping from 57 miles per hour to 70 in off-bat ball speed translates into major distance gains. In terms of home run potential, what does this really mean?

Using a 45% angle incline on each hit, here’s the difference:

For 57.31 mph (84.05 ft./sec.),