The new college baseball bat standards that reduced the exit speed of a batted baseball have reduced batting averages 22 points and increased shutouts by 60.3 percent, according to a recent Fort Worth Star-Telegram report.
In other words, the change has made the game more enjoyable to watch because baseball’s most beautiful plays come on defense and the slower the ball moves, the better chance fielders have of getting to it.
When baseball scores resemble football scores, coaches tend to load their lineups with mashers and take their chances. Not so anymore. Certainly not so with a Kansas University team built on pitching and defense.
And no Jayhawk entertains in more thrilling fashion wearing a glove than junior center fielder Jason Brunansky, who on one highlight is slamming into a center-field wall that knocks the wind out of him but doesn’t knock the ball out of his glove, and on the next is laying out in left-center field, catching a ball the announcer already had deemed a sure extra-base hit.
To those looking out toward center, Brunansky makes the game a more enjoyable experience, but when he has looked out toward center from home plate for most of this season, the number he saw on the scoreboard cruelly slapped him in the face. He started last weekend’s series against Nebraska in Hoglund Ballpark with a .141 batting average.
By the end of the series, he was batting .205. By mid-week, he had learned from hitting coach Jay Uhlman that he had been named Big 12 Player of the Week.
Asked Thursday if he knew his batting average, the 5-foot-10, 192-pound Brunansky said, “No, but I know it’s more than I weigh now.”
Even after going 0-for-5 in Friday night’s 8-3 victory against Missouri, Brunansky still is batting more than he weighs, though not by much (.193).
In the Nebraska series, Brunansky went 7-for-12, scored six runs, doubled, homered and drove in three runs.
“I was really happy for him,” Kansas coach Ritch Price said of Brunansky winning the award. “This game can grind at you, and when you get off to a bad start, the hole gets bigger and bigger and bigger. He’s on the phone every night with his dad, who’s trying to help him work through it mentally. You get buried mentally.”
His father, Tom Brunansky, knows a little bit about the game. Bruno was what scouts call a five-tool prospect. Coaches and managers judge seven tools, with head and heart being the additions. Baseball writers add “good guy” as the eighth. Bruno was an eight-tool guy, who hit 271 home runs and knocked in 919 runs in 14 big-league seasons.
Asked to break himself down as a prospect, the next generation Bruno obliged.
“They’ll probably notice the defense first and stick around for the bat,” said Brunansky, who played regularly as a freshman and sporadically as a sophomore.
He reads the ball off the bat superbly, has great closing speed and will play for as long as his bat lets him.
