Off the couch, through the back door and out to the cement batter's box with his handprint in the corner, the stocky boy would go.
"Tell me when the game's back on, dad," he'd say as he dashed away.
In the backyard, the boy would take 10, 15, 20 swings at a ball attached to strings and suspended between a metal frame. Then he'd head back inside to watch the Florida Marlins on TV, studying closely to see how he could imitate the swings of Gary Sheffield and Moises Alou during the next commercial break.
Because he loved to do it more than anything else, the boy would hit and hit and hit on the contraption.
After school. Before breakfast and dinner.
"He never stopped," his older brother remembers now.
By middle school, the boy was spending summers hitting baseballs all over the country in the top travel ball tournaments.
Around then, he started working with a hitting coach renowned in South Florida for his success with high school kids. The coach had first turned down a request by the boy's father to teach the boy because he was too young, but then the coach saw the boy swing and said he'd be happy to take him on as pupil.
Still, the boy would head to the back yard to hit the ball between the strings almost every chance he got.
Not until high school and only because Hurricane Wilma sent a tree crashing down on the metal and strings and the baseball and the batter's boxes did Eric Hosmer stop refining his swing on the Tony Gwynn SoloHitter.
