{"id":1442,"date":"2009-03-18T15:02:27","date_gmt":"2009-03-18T22:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/03\/the-batting-stance-guy\/"},"modified":"2009-03-18T15:49:26","modified_gmt":"2009-03-18T22:49:26","slug":"the-batting-stance-guy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/03\/18\/the-batting-stance-guy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Batting Stance Guy"},"content":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

Meet Gar Ryness, the Batting Stance Guy<\/nyt_headline><\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Ann Johansson for The New York Times<\/p>\n

Gar Ryness has become a YouTube star for his imitations of major leaguers\u2019 batting stances. Which three players is he imitating? Answers below.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/nyt_byline><\/span><\/p>\n

By GREG HANLON<\/p>\n

<\/nyt_text><\/p>\n

Gar Ryness said he had the least marketable skill in the United States.<\/p>\n

So when he and two friends took a hand-held camcorder into the backyard of his Los Angeles home last year, he hardly expected he would soon become a YouTube celebrity known as Batting Stance Guy.<\/p>\n

Ryness has a singular talent: an ability to perform comically dead-on impressions of major league baseball hitters upon request. Little Leaguers have been known to try to imitate their favorite ballplayers. Ryness, 35, a married father of two, can do the starting lineups of all 30 teams.<\/p>\n

Views of his YouTube videos number more than a million, and he appeared last year on several teams\u2019 pregame shows. Sony also hired him to perform his impressions while wearing movement-tracking electrodes, helping programmers make the company\u2019s MLB 2009: The Show video game look more realistic. Most recently, Ryness has made appearances on MLB Network\u2019s team preview shows, displaying his encyclopedic knowledge of batters past and present. He has archived his body of work on a Web site,\u00a0battingstanceguy.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Ryness never misses a habitual fidget or gesture, like\u00a0David Wright<\/a>\u2019s ritual of wedging his bat in his armpit while adjusting his batting gloves. He does iconic stances, positioning his derri\u00e8re the way\u00a0Ken Griffey Jr.<\/a>\u00a0does before mimicking Griffey\u2019s graceful swing and follow-through. Ryness even does impressions of batters taking pitches, like\u00a0Derek Jeter<\/a>\u2019s way of sticking his head out and nearly stepping across home plate as he looks an outside pitch into the catcher\u2019s glove.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at NYTimes.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from The New York Times Meet Gar Ryness, the Batting Stance Guy Ann Johansson for The New York Times Gar Ryness has become a YouTube star for his imitations of major leaguers\u2019 batting stances. Which three players is he imitating? Answers below. By GREG HANLON Gar Ryness said he had the least marketable skill in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mirth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}