Once upon a time, a sportswriter criticized the batters of the New York Knickerbockers for upper-cutting the ball. “No club,” he wrote, “strikes with greater power, but from their habit of striking high, they give too many chances for such excellent clubs as the Gotham and Eagle.”

The strictly amateur New York Knickerbockers, founded in 1845, were one of the earliest known baseball clubs. The above quotation is from Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a national sports weekly; it was written in 1856.

It may be that he was right, that outfield defense had improved to the point that too many of the Knickerbocker power hitters’ long fly balls were being turned into outs. (These were the days before outfield fences).

Another possibility is that the Knickerbockers had figured out what Babe Ruth figured out in the 1920s, what Ted Williams preached in the 1940s, and what major league hitters have re-rediscovered today, that the way to produce runs in baseball is not to hit down on the ball—as high school coaches told me, my father, and my grandfather to do—but to drive it in the air as far as possible.

Because that works.