Lost Secrets of Hitting

Going for home runs, too many modern players pile up strikeouts instead of making contact with the pitch!
It was a monumental find. While pursuing my lifelong study of the skill of hitting, I discovered some old, dusty 16 mm film footage of the great hitters of yesterday. One was titled, "Hitting Stars of 1943." It featured Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Enos Slaughter, Dixie Walker, Ralph Kiner, Pete Reiser, Joe DiMaggio and at least a dozen others swinging the bat in slow motion.
Another one from the '50s featured a rail thin Hank Aaron, a boyish Mickey Mantle, and slightly older versions of Williams and Musial. Each hitter swung the bat markedly different than today's hitters. To the man, they displayed nearly a flat swing plane, flat wrist-roll and a low - rather than high - finish. This is vastly different from today's hitters' uppercutting arcs and high finishes. I hoarded the films, compiled them into a video and played them over and over.
After a thorough review, I embarked on some research in the Baseball Encyclopedia.
I found that over his 23-year career, Stan Musial struck out just 6.3 percent of the time, a phenomenal statistic for a slugger of 475 home runs. This is even more striking when compared with Ted Williams, generally considered the hitting maestro, who struck out 9.2 percent of his at-bats while slugging 521 home runs.
Through 1998, Mark McGwire had struck out 24.5 percent of his at-bats, Sammy Sosa 25.7 percent. A hypothesis was born. A comparison was required between the old sluggers, who in the films displayed flat, low finish swings, and today's sluggers, who feature massive uppercuts with high finishes in terms of strikeouts and overall hitting efficiency.