Minnesota’s frozen winters gave birth to Bob Dylan’s musical poetry, Prince’s purple rain and Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.
And the left-handed swing of Twins catcher Joe Mauer.
Mauer’s hitting motion — smooth, swift, compact and beautiful to behold — has roots in the basement of a three-bedroom house in St. Paul. That’s where Jake Mauer Jr. gave his three sons — Billy, Jake III and Joe — shelter from snowstorms.
Searching for a way to improve his sons’ batting skills, Mauer rigged a contraption in his garage, then set it up in the basement. The original hitting machine was put together with PVC pipe, a coffee can and cement. The kids hit into a sheet taped to the basement wall.
What started as a homemade device has grown into “Joe Mauer’s QuickSwing Total Hitting System,” one of the best-selling baseball training aids on the market. According to company president Jim Mauer, a cousin of Joe’s, almost 200,000 units have been sold since 2003.
Today’s model, which includes a motorized ball-feeding tube, plus a net designed to capture baseballs, retails for about $109. It’s endorsed by Hall of Famer Paul Molitor, another St. Paul native, who has called Joe Mauer’s swing “the best I have ever seen.”
The concept is simple. A ball fed into one end of the tube drops out the other end and is smacked with a bat. In essence, it’s a version of the hitter’s soft-toss drill that can be performed alone.
“I wanted to come up with something that my kids could use in a confined space in the winter,” Jake Mauer said. “You can only do so much hitting off a batting tee. Hitting balls as they dropped taught them to go right after the ball and improved their hand-eye coordination.”
Jim Mauer, who often made the trek across St. Paul to hang out with his cousins, says the “hitting contraption,” as he called it, was a product just waiting to be designed and marketed. The thing is, none of the Mauers realized it at the time.
“There was a drill that a lot of high schools and colleges do, where the coach stands up on a chair and hangs the ball over the strike zone,” Jim Mauer recalled. “Then he would drop the ball. So this device was really the ball-drop drill, but it’s something kids could do by themselves.”
Hitting a falling baseball is not a piece of cake.
“It’s not as easy as it seems,” Jim Mauer said. “The ball is dropping fast, so your swing has to be short, quiet and quick. This drill is tailor-made for a line-drive contact hitter. It’s not a great home run drill, but I think the problem with a lot of kids today is that they try to hit home runs all the time.”
With their father’s original model, the Mauer boys used a pipe to hit golf balls as they fell out of the tube. It wasn’t an easy feat, but Joe perfected it. He would often come home from high school football practice and take 50 swings.
By the time Joe was a high school senior at Cretin-Derham Hall in St. Paul, his swing was so exact and so quick, he made contact nearly every time he swung. He batted .605 as a senior and stuck out just once in his four-year high school career. He was the No. 1 player selected in baseball’s 2001 draft.
Joe, now 26, took those first hacks in the basement 18 years ago. Since then, he has become an all-star and a batting champion. Mauer hit .347 in 2006, making him the first catcher in American League history to win a batting title. Mauer earned another batting title in 2008, when he hit .328. He ranks second in the American League this season with a .358 average. Not a power hitter most of his career, Mauer has hit 17 homers this year despite missing the first month of the season.
But even his power stroke has stayed true to its Minnesota roots.
“I’d like to say that I had a little something to do with Joe’s success,” his father said with a hearty laugh, “but I have to think his God-given talent had something to do with it.”
Patrick Saunders: 303-954-1428 or psaunders@denverpost.com
