re: Spin-off- Favorite all time batting stance

"They used to say Rod Carew had a different stance for every pitcher. That wasn't really true, but he did have different stances. Sometimes he'd crowd the plate, daring pitchers to come inside. Sometimes he'd crouch down lower, especially against power pitchers, shrinking the size of the strike zone. He could hit in all of them, winning seven batting titles, including a .388 mark in 1977, and hitting .300 every season from 1969 to 1983.

If you're too young to remember Carew, he was beautiful to watch, the ultimate finesse player, owning the batter's box like he was conducting the orchestra. The best active comparison would be Ichiro Suzuki, although Carew walked a lot more and was a much better hitter compared to the league averages over their careers; Ichiro's best single-season OPS+ was 130 in 2004; Carew's career mark was 131. That's how good he was at manipulating the baseball: Better over 19 seasons than Ichiro at his peak.

Fred Lynn explained one reason for Carew's success was his ability to bunt. "First, he bunts better than anyone else, even with two strikes," Lynn told Thomas Boswell in 1983. "That distorts the whole infield and creates wider angles for him to hit the ball through. It's like he's always hitting with the infield pulled in. His bunting creates holes."

Carew once said that he'd laugh when he saw an infielder moving two steps to his left. That meant he'd just hit the ball two steps to the infielder's right..."