In
baseball, a hitter who
chokes up on the bat and tries to slap the ball past the
infielders. The slap hitter hopes to increase the number of hits he gets but the tradeoff is that most of these hits will only be
singles. Slap hitters tend to "go with the pitch", hitting outside pitches to the opposite field, and are usually aggressive at the plate and thus draw few
walks. Good slap hitters will have a high
batting average but very few
home runs. Slap hitting was most common during the
dead ball era.
Ty Cobb was the epitome of a slap hitter, while Tony Gwynn was a modern master. Ichiro is the current slap hitter extraordinare.