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Gabriel commented on Giancarlo Stanton Monster Homerun Sunday Versus the Cubs:
“Amazing home run. Few players in baseball can hit that ball so hard and far. Can't wait for Stanton to earn freedom from the glorified AAA team Marlins and play for a real MLB club.”
Now that the teaching of baseball fundamentals has become so mechanized at such a young age, weird batting stanceswent the way of bell-bottomed jeans. So hopefully they'll make a comeback someday, because strange stances are awesome.
Coastal Carolina baseball player Alex Buccilli is certainly making a good case for the weird batting stance. Buccilli is tearing up the internet these days because of his goofball stance (video below), but there's a pretty good story behind it.
But first, the stance. Buccilli knows it's weird. And he gets made fun of for it. A lot. By opponents, and his own teammates.
Though Buccilli is getting a lot of nationwide attention recently, his teammates have been seeing the stance for awhile.
"We’ve been making fun of that since the fall," said his teammate Rich Witten. "It’s old news to us by now. We see guys on the other team laughing at it and people in the stands laughing at it. We almost forget he does it by now and then we get reminded when we see everybody laughing at him. Whatever makes him feel good. As long as he keeps that up, I don’t think anybody’s got any complaints about it."
Buccilli, apparently, is feeling pretty good with it. He's got the third highest batting average on Coastal Carolina team at .313, and through 36 games he has three home runs, eight doubles and 20 RBIs.
For more reasons than the weird stance, Alex Buccilli's success in the Coastal Carolina baseball program is a big surprise. He's that guy. You know, the one who doesn't look very good, but just never goes away.
“If you ask him, I swear to you we had to have at least five, maybe six minimum come-to-Jesus talks where I just [had] to be completely honest to the kid 1,000 percent where he stands," said Coastal Carolina baseball coach Gary Gilmore, who tried to convince Buccilli that there was no way there'd be a roster spot for him
"When you evaluate him on his running speed and his arm strength and his overall hitting ability he had shown us in practice, it was going to be a push for him to make it and I was being honest to him," Gilmore said.
Perhaps the batting stance helped Buccilli stick around -- he developed while working with a sports psychologist, and they strategized on how Buccilli could better focus on one pitch at a time.
Here's video of at Buccilli at bat (sadly, he strikes out). It's pretty weird:
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