re jose canseco s swing vs in article c jkik zf ucdavis edu ez dale ucdavis edu gary built like villanueva huckabay writes here s my analysis of jose canseco circa sep and jose canseco circa june he s bulked up too much period he needs to lose about pounds not gain more bulk i ve been saying that for at least years now and even the a s conditioning guru told jose he was carrying too much weight and losing some would help his back although i don t for one second believe jose used steroids his back problems are very similar to problems alot of steroid users experience because they are simply carrying too much weight on their frame see jeff bregel ex er as a textbook example and imho jose is too big for his frame his bat speed has absolutely vanished conservatively i d say he s lost of his bat speed and that s a huge amount of speed i can t imagine how to estimate bat speed but its pretty obvious that jose is missing fastballs he used to hit likely due to his back that open stance is killing him note that he acts sort of like brian downing way open to start then closes up as ball is released downing could do this without significant head movement canseco can t also note that canseco doesn t always close his stance the same way sometimes his hips are open sometimes they re fully closed without a good starting point it s hard to make adjustments in your swing i don t know he had an even more open stance when he first came up with the a s and had no problems with it then it might be that pre back problems he was quick enough to cover up any deficiencies the stance caused but now he s lost just enough bat speed that the stance hurts him the old saying if you re hot its a trigger mechanism if you re cold its a hitch first minimize movement before the swing close and widen the stance and severely cut down the stride i take on my swing hopefully this will cut down on the time i need to swing and will allow me to move the bathead more freely the biggest problem imho is he never has found a stance he s comfortable with for more than a few months he changes his stance so much he loses track of where the strike zone is in wednesday s night game he was clearly mad at strike calls on both corners that looked pretty good to me i think he no longer knows where the strike zone really is because he s changed his stance so much i m also a bit concerned that because he s got palmer and gonzalez hitting all the homeruns he ll become competitive swing even harder and screw himself up even worse larussa always said that canseco s famous batting practice homer shows did him more harm than good as they encouraged bad hitting habits russ smith i don t know anything about x s but i know about some o george gervin on being an assistant coach
