I am up among the stars. I am talking to a Hall of Fame second baseman about a Hall of Fame second baseman. I am speaking to Ryne Sandberg about Rogers Hornsby.

I take out my phone and show Sandberg a short film clip of Hornsby as he demonstrates his stance and stride. Hornsby stood where few hitters do, in the far back corner of the box, as far away from the pitcher and plate as allowed.

“How does he hit the outside pitch?” Sandberg asks as soon as he sees the clip. “How does he hit something on the outside corner?

“When you’re that far off the plate, you really give the pitcher a spot out there. I don’t know how much different the pitching is today than back then, but there is a spotted fastball down and away, which is a go-to pitch for pitchers when they need to make a pitch and not give up any damage.

“That’s my first impression looking at that — how would he hit that pitch?”

Sandberg, like most hitters, stood a lot closer to the plate than Hornsby. Once he learned to pull balls over the fence, he became one of the best hitters at his position since Hornsby. With the Cubs in 1982-97, Sandberg hit 282 homers and drove in more than 1,000 runs.

“In my stance,” Sandberg said, “I had the plate right in front of me, and I didn’t vary too much up or back.”

We are sitting in the visitors dugout at Comerica Park, about 4 hours before a Tigers-Phillies game. Sandberg was the third-base coach for the Phillies. In the game to come that evening, the Phillies would face Miguel Cabrera, who has put himself among the best right-handed hitters since Hornsby.

The heart of Hornsby’s career came from 1920 through the early 1930s, primarily with the St. Louis Cardinals. He died in 1963, when Sandberg was 3.

“Did you hear his name a lot when you played?” I asked Sandberg about Hornsby. “Or is he just out there on some mountaintop and no one really knows a lot about him?”

“Kind of out there,” Sandberg said. “I don’t remember seeing a lot of video of him or even investigating it that much because he was so far ahead of me. It was somewhat ancient to me.”

Manuel's experience

Charlie Manuel brings us perhaps as close to Hornsby as anyone now can. Three quarters of a century ago, in one charmed spring, Hornsby talked a lot of hitting with the young Ted Williams. Decades later, Williams talked a lot of hitting with the young Charlie Manuel.

“Ted told me, ‘Everything I talk about with hitting, Rogers Hornsby told me,’ ” Manuel said. “He said Hornsby taught him everything he knew.”

When we spoke, Manuel, 69, was in his final weeks as Phillies manager, a post in which he compiled more wins than anyone ever had. (Sandberg would succeed him.) Before he became a manager, he was a hitting coach, and he still talks about hitting with a savant’s passion. I spoke with him about Hornsby the day before I talked with Sandberg.

“That’s a good way to hit,” Manuel said, having examined the video on my phone and seen where Hornsby stood in the right-handed box. “He’s looking to hit it from left-center to the line in rightfield. That’s a good way to hit behind runners and things.”

■ MORE LOWE: Raul Ibanez matches Ted Williams’ mark on Saturday night

In his memoir, Hornsby said, “I originally stood in the middle of the box, close to the plate. Later on I found this wasn’t the best way for me. I stood as far back in the box as the law allowed, figuring I’d have more time to see the pitch break or come over the plate.”

Hornsby didn’t stride straight toward the pitcher, as most hitters do. He strode at an angle, toward the plate as well as toward the pitcher.

I told Manuel I’m asking him about Hornsby because Cabrera is closing in on his third straight American League batting title. If he gets it, he’ll become the first right-handed hitter in either league to win three straight batting titles since Hornsby.

“How about that?” Manuel said. “That would be big-time.”

Despite hitting .227 for the first 2½ weeks of September, Cabrera still held a seemingly comfortable 17-point lead over the Angels’ Mike Trout in the batting race as this weekend arrived and 10 days remained in the season. Trout was hitting .330, which is what Cabrera hit to edge him by four points for the batting title last year. But Cabrera, despite having lost hits because of his inability to run full speed, was up at .347 for this season, which if maintained would be a career high.

Trout also hits right-handed. Anytime a right-handed hitter wins the batting title, that’s noteworthy. Right-handed batters face two significant disadvantages compared to their left-handed counterparts.

Most hitters would rather hit a ball that breaks toward them rather than away from them. Most pitchers are right-handed, and so right-handed hitters see far more curves and sliders that break away from them than do left-handed hitters. This might explain why most of the beautiful, classic swings are by left-handed batters — they don’t need a swing to perpetually fight off the breaking ball as right-handed hitters do.

It is more convenient to try to pull the ball than to hit it to the opposite field. This creates the other big advantage for left-handed hitters. Whenever the first baseman leaves his standard position and stands at the bag to hold on a runner, the left-handed hitter gains a bigger hole than usual to pull the ball through. The equivalent advantage for a right-handed hitter would be to have a third baseman stand on third base holding on a runner while a pitch is thrown — something that never happens.

When I brought this up to Cabrera, he said, “I think left-handed hitters have an advantage. Most of the greatest hitters of all time are left-handed.”

I asked Cabrera which of these two advantages he would rather have — the breaking balls usually coming toward him, or the increased hole to pull the ball through. “The bigger hole,” he said.

Every time you see a third baseman take a step or two toward shortstop to field a smash by Cabrera and throw him out, imagine how many more hits Cabrera would have if he were a left-handed hitter and could pull singles through the hole created when the first baseman is holding on a runner.

Praise for Hornsby

A book about Hornsby that came out in 1962 proclaims in its subtitle that he was the best right-handed hitter in baseball history. The author of this book was Rogers Hornsby.

He was merely reporting a conviction that has been widely held since he played. One hitting authority — perhaps the best hitting authority of all — said he thinks Hornsby might have underestimated himself with the “best right-handed” qualifier.

“There probably has never been what you would call a ‘complete hitter,’ ” Ted Williams wrote in his perpetually cited 1971 book, “The Science of Hitting.”

Williams said Babe Ruth struck out too much and Ty Cobb didn’t hit for power.

“Of all the hitters I saw — if I had to name one guy — I suppose it would be Rogers Hornsby,” Williams wrote. “Hornsby was the closest to the complete hitter — style, power, smartness, everything.”

Williams, who batted left-handed, didn’t mention that many people consider him the best hitter ever. He won one fewer batting title than Hornsby (seven to six) but two more home-run titles (four to two). For a combination of average and power, Williams is unsurpassed.

But perhaps Hornsby had something to do with that.

“Ted Williams said he used to take a lot of batting practice,” Manuel said. “But Hornsby demanded that he take more.”

Williams told Manuel that all that batting practice allowed him to learn how to grip the bat so he’d have more quickness and power.

The year before he joined the Red Sox, Williams was on the minor league team in Minneapolis. Hornsby was a coach for that team in spring training.

In Vienna in 1787, the teenaged Beethoven might have spent time studying with the regal Mozart. The details aren’t clear. But we know the comparable baseball rendezvous took place. In 1938, the young Ted Williams spent a training camp with Rogers Hornsby.

“I’ll never forget as a kid in camp with the Minneapolis team at Daytona Beach, standing around the batting cage or in the lobby of the hotel, picking Hornsby’s brains for everything I could,” Williams wrote.

At the time, Hornsby was 41 and several years beyond his final full season as a player.

“He’d stay out there with me every day after practice and we’d have hitting contests, just the two of us,” Williams wrote. “That old rascal would just keep zinging those line drives.”

One night this August, Cabrera got to know Hornsby in his own way. He said he had heard of him and would like to know what he did.

I rattled off the essentials: Hornsby had the highest lifetime average ever for a right-handed hitter — .358. He won the Triple Crown twice. He won the batting title seven times, including six in a row. In one five-year stretch, he hit .402.

Cabrera listened, then processed this information for several seconds. Then he said, “That’s amazing, what he did.”

Asked which of Hornsby’s feats amazed him the most, Cabrera said, “Six straight batting titles. That is the most amazing to me.”

Cabrera continues to build a case that he could be the best right-handed hitter since Hornsby. He has the batting titles and last year’s Triple Crown. The opposition speaks of him with awe, as if they have never seen anyone like him.

The hit that makes Cabrera a repeat batting champion isn’t the long home run. It’s the ground ball that when hit by almost any other hitter would always be an out, but that off the bat of Cabrera actually seems to gather speed as it gets closer to the infielder and thus eludes his reach by a foot or two.

Describing this phenomenon, Cleveland second baseman Jason Kipnis said, “The ball is realizing how hard it was hit.”

Other baseballs once felt the same way. In 1971, baseball historian Bob Broeg wrote, “No one, right-handed or left-handed, ever hit the ball consistently harder than Hornsby.”

Cabrera is like Hornsby

“Rogers Hornsby was hitting the ball from left-center over to right, using about three-fourths of the field,” Manuel said, gazing out at the Comerica Park outfield as our conversation progressed.

A moment later, thinking about how Hornsby hit, Manuel said, “Cabrera is like that a lot. You can’t shift on them. That is what makes the field wider, bigger. They are hitting balls in the whole range.”

Manuel didn’t see Hornsby play in person. He signed his first pro contract 50 years ago, in the same year that Hornsby died. But he has learned and deduced how Hornsby went about hitting.

Cabrera stands close to the plate, but is known above all for his opposite-field power to right-center. He landed a homer in June into the fish tank behind the right-centerfield fence at the indoor park in Tampa Bay. Manager Jim Leyland says Cabrera has the best power he has ever seen to the opposite field.

“Williams would have liked watching Cabrera,” Manuel said. “Williams was a pull hitter. He was stubborn. But he’ll tell you that stubbornness probably cost him some hits. I know he’s said that he would have hit .400 more than once if he’d used his whole field.”

To wrap up my conversation with Manuel, I said, “Over a five-year span, Hornsby hit .402. Is there anything you would most want to know about him?”

Manuel said: “When you say he hit .400 for five years, that’s almost unbelievable consistency. He must have been a guy who could really stay focused and concentrate on what he was trying to do. That’s off the charts.”

I told Manuel what Giants manager John McGraw said before the 1921 World Series, when his team was about to play the Yankees of Babe Ruth, who that season hit a record 59 homers, breaking his record of 54 from the year before. McGraw said of Ruth, “We’ve already dealt with Rogers Hornsby, and he’s better.”

Then, a few weeks later, I suggested to Cabrera that he could do things that no right-handed hitter since Hornsby had done. He reacted with the same word he did about Hornsby’s feats: amazing.

“But I can’t think about that right now,” he said. “There is a long way to go. I have to focus on what I can do day-by-day and see what happens.”

The legacy

A few days after I spoke to Sandberg and Manuel in the visitors dugout at Comerica, I talked there with Davey Johnson, the manager of the Washington Nationals. Johnson co-holds a record with Hornsby: most homers in a season by a second baseman, 42.

Hornsby set the mark in 1922. Johnson tied it with Atlanta in 1973. Johnson hit 43 homers that year, but as he points out, one came as a pinch-hitter. So he really didn’t break Hornsby’s record.

“I would rather be tied with him than ahead of him, because he was a great one,” Johnson said.

Johnson, 70, is in what has been announced as his final year as Nationals manager. He, like Manuel, has logged a half-century in the game. I asked him the same thing about Hornsby that I asked Manuel — what does a player have to do to hit .400 for five years?

“You’ve got to hit the ball hard a lot of times,” Johnson said.

There it is again, perhaps the foremost Hornsby legacy, and perhaps the developing Cabrera legacy. He simply hits the ball harder more often than anyone else of his era.

Johnson and I talked about Hornsby’s stance and stride.

“The one thing about standing off the plate and striding in, that’s the way you keep your hips cocked,” Johnson said.

And then I learned that Johnson got to know Williams, in the same way Manuel did. He was a young player in the AL who drew Williams’ attention when Williams managed the Washington Senators.

“Ted also strode into the ball,” Johnson said. “I had a tendency to stride straight, or a little bit in the bucket (away from the ball), and I had a tendency to lose my hip cock until I figured it out.

“All those guys who stride in, it’s much easier to keep your hips cocked until the last minute. Hornsby was real good at that, so he could really turn.”

As I spoke to these National Leaguers in an American League park, I was reminded of a story about Hornsby from late in his career. After he achieved all of his glory in the National League, he wound up, at 37, as player-manager of the St. Louis Browns of the AL in 1933. In August of that season, with his team down a run in the bottom of the ninth and the bases empty, he sent himself up to pinch-hit against the Yankees.

The story goes that as Hornsby got ready to hit, one or more players on the world-champion Yankees said condescendingly, “So this is the famous Mr. Hornsby of the National League.”

The pitcher was New York ace Lefty Gomez. Hornsby hit the ball so hard the other way that it landed in the rightfield seats for the game-tying homer.

As he completed his home-run trot and stepped on the plate, he looked at the Yankees dugout and said, “Yes, that was the great National League hitter, Mr. Hornsby.”

Now it’s 80 years later, and when Miguel Cabrera gets in the box, the American League is watching perhaps the best right-handed hitter since the famous Mr. Hornsby.

Contact John Lowe: jlowe@freepress.com . Follow him on Twitter @freeptigers.