What you need to know about this slim book is that it is a byproduct of the life story Underwood set out to write with Williams. In an early conversation, Williams insisted there be an entire section devoted to what he had learned about hitting. One reason why he remains one of the best hitters who ever played baseball—along with his prodigious natural skills and his inner demons—is that hitting was to him more important than anything else in life. Even during the off-season, there was always a bat within reach. He seems to have thought of hitting night and day.
As so often, one of the elements of his excellence was attention to detail. The first photo of him in the book shows him standing next to a player he is coaching. The first thing I noticed was that I could see the label on the barrel of the bat he’s holding. A no-no, I thought. I was taught to have the label facing up as I swung, for it was placed to show how the grains of the wood ran, thus minimizing the likelihood of bat breakage. That part was right, but it worked equally well if the label faced down, and that’s how Williams held it, so there would be one less distraction to his eye.
Williams is appropriately aware that he might come across sounding like yet another old fart griping about how much better the game was in his day. In fact, the book surprised me by not being overly dogmatic. He concentrates on the mental part of an at-bat. I had heard he was big on taking the first pitch, but that only applied to his first time up in a game; in that at-bat, he wanted to see as many pitches as he could from a pitcher to compare it with what he remembered (and he did remember) from previous times facing him. Does his fastball have extra zip today? Is he having trouble getting his curve over?
He is surprisingly flexible on some of the physical aspects, such as stance. Young players should experiment, find a stance they are comfortable with. He also encourages batters to recognize what type of player he or she is and work within that. He is dogmatic on one point: weight shift alone won’t generate power, it must be combined with hip rotation.
Most memorable is his analysis of the strike zone and stressing the importance of choosing your pitch. The book has a chart with 77 baseballs filling his strike zone. Written on each is his batting average on a pitch located there. I had seen the chart before and was happy to learn while reading the book that these are not meant to apply to everyone. This was his analysis of his strike zone. Each batter has to analyze his or her own.
For all the helpfulness of the advice and information this book contains, none of it takes away from one thing Williams is dogmatic about: hitting a baseball is the single most difficult skill in all of sport. That being the case, a batter needs all the help he or she can get; there’s a great deal to find here. ( )

For young and inexperienced players, Ted Williams’ name may no longer hold the magic it did when I was growing up and playing baseball. But most of us "old-timers" will still remember that Williams was the last professional ball player (in the MLB) to hit over .400 for a full season. So when my Little League aged son was struggling a bit at the plate a season ago, I broke out my copy of Williams’ The Science of Hitting to look for some kernel of wisdom that would help my son get out of his slump.

But, the first line in the book is an admonition that today’s best hitters fail more than they succeed “...even if you're a .300 hitter...you are going to fail at your job seven out of ten times." This statement is at once encouraging as well as discouraging. That is hitting in a nutshell (triumphant in success yet unbelievably humbling and potentially discouraging in failure) and any good player will need to remember that success as a ball player is measured a bit differently.

The admonition out of the way, William’s book splits the topic of hitting up into two basic parts--first, the physical mechanics involved in hitting; second, the mental duel taking place between the batter and pitcher.

Much of what is written in the book is the result of Williams’s conversations with great hitters of the past. As a result, much of the advice in the book is shared in the form of readable anecdotes, which make the book easy to read and enjoyable for baseball aficionados as well -- where else are you going to learn about Harry Heillman's philosophy of hitting?

One of the primary keys to Teddy Ballgame’s success was his swing. The best “old-time” hitters (and Williams was certainly one of them) had a nearly a flat swing plane, flat wrist-roll and a low, rather than high finish. Most of today's hitters' display an upper cutting arc and high finish to their swings. Yet, in the “dead ball” the old-timers managed to wrack up nearly as many homeruns but had much higher batting averages and strike-out to hit ratios. This ended up being the clincher for me. I noticed immediately that my son had started trying to uppercut the ball so he could hit more homeruns (after hitting his one in his first at-bat of the season).

We started working on having him hit line drives and sure enough he raised his average from .175 to .403 by the end of the season. Then this season he kept the swing we worked on and ended up hitting .390+, but also leading the league in home runs, finishing with 22 (including 6 in the post-season).

The other thing that Williams writes (which is often misinterpreted) is that he'd never swing at a pitch he hadn't seen before. Often time people will swear (incorrectly) that Williams never swung at a pitcher's first pitch. Williams was, if nothing else, a student of the game. He intently studied pitchers watching them warm up, watching them from the on-deck circle and mentally replaying previous at-bats in his head. When he stepped into the batters box he had a game plan and he had a good understanding of what a pitcher threw and when. My son used this part of Williams' game as well and it was fun to watch him "studying" the opposing pitchers.

Thank you Ted Williams! My son, whose name is Theodore William by the way, earned the nickname "Teddy Ballgame" from his coaches and teammates as well.

Williams text in The Science of Hitting is accompanied by the wonderful pen and ink illustrations of Robert E. Cupp. These drawings and other explanatory photographs to help illustrate the points Williams is trying to make and really enhance the book.

If you are a player, coach or just a parent wanting to help your son or daughter improve their game, this book is a must have! ( )