May 08, 2008 05:50 am
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By just about any measure, Kelley Pfleegor was a successful softball player by the winter of 2006-07.
She had already played on five Milton Little League teams that had won state titles. Three of those teams had advanced to the Little League World Series, and the 2006 squad brought home the Senior Division world title.
Pfleegor was an integral member of all of those teams, and she was on pace to grab a starting spot on Milton's defending District 4 championship team the following spring.
Nevertheless, Pfleegor did something extraordinary that winter: She decided that she was no longer going to be a right-handed hitter.
Pfleegor, a fleet outfielder who will catch next year for the Black Panthers following Jordan Frederick's graduation, turned herself into a slap hitter. Slap hitters are almost always leadoff batters. They line up on the left side and, basically, do the equivalent of putting down a drag bunt on every at-bat. If a player is fast enough, they're out of the box a split second after making contact.
"I don't think I've hit right-handed for a year and a half," Pfleegor says. "For as long as I've been doing it, (slap hitting) has come pretty natural to me."
It would certainly appear so. Through Milton's first 14 games this year, Pfleegor was hitting .500. She was a Daily Item and Susquehanna Valley League first-team all-star last year as a sophomore, when she hit .333 and had a .500 on-base percentage.
"I suggested (slap hitting) to her when she was in junior high," Black Panthers coach Bill Keefer says. "In the fall, I always open up the gym for junior high kids. ... Just goofing around one day, I had her batting left-handed, and she did a great job.
"She was always a good ball player right-handed, but she struck out way too much. We experimented with it a little bit ... and said, Look, you're left-handed the rest of your career, and that's just the way it is."
Slap hitting isn't an easy endeavor: It's a totally different style of hitting, especially for former right-handers.
"It can be kind of tricky," Pfleegor says. "It takes a while to get your footwork down and contact down."
Yes, the footwork is the key. Just like a boxer or a matador, footwork is key to a slap hitter's success.
"You have to cross your feet over as you're making contact with the ball," Pfleegor says.
Milton plays winter ball at the sports dome in Muncy, where Pfleegor put on a hitting clinic prior to the current high school season.
"They didn't get her out hardly at all," Keefer says. "With that carpet, she would hit the ball and it would go straight into the carpet and hop up in the air. By the time they caught it, she was across first base."
Pfleegor's play has caught the attention of some Division II and Division III coaches. She's a speedy fielder and has the arm to be a catcher.
But of course, it's her slap-hitting skills that will probably make her most marketable to college coaches.
"(Slap hitting) doesn't have to be pretty," Keefer says. "All (her) job is is to get on. I've told her, I'll keep track of your batting average, but I don't care what it is. I only care about your on-base percentage.' Because the more she gets on, the more we score."
POSTSEASON ON DECK: The District 4 playoffs begin the week of Monday, May 19. Games played through Saturday, May 17, will count toward seeding.
n Sports reporter Todd Stanford covers high school softball for The Daily Item. E-mail comments to tstanford@dailyitem.com.
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