John Miller, head coach of the Brussels Kangaroos and a reporter for a major American newspaper, is chronicling his team’s 2008 season in a column that will appear every Monday on mister-baseball.com. It is the first of several Mister-Baseball Blogs this year.
In my column this week on the complexity of hitting, I invited coaches to write in their best 5-point summations of the difficult art. The first entry is from Tim McLean, of Philadelphia, PA.
Step 1: Stance and setup: The player needs to be comfortable and balanced. Weight should be about 60/40 with more on the back leg. Both eyes should be on the pitcher, looking in the area of his release point (to pick up the pitch as early as possible). The head needs to remain still, while the hands need some movement (small hand circles) as objects in motion tend to stay in motion.
Step 2: The Load: A short time (fractions of a second) before the pitcher releases the ball (depending on velocity), the hitter should make a positive/negative load. The positive (forward) movement is a short linear step in the direction of the pitcher. The negative (backward) movement takes the hands down (to shoulder level) and back to give them more time to accelerate linearly at the baseball.
Step 3: Knee Drive: To facilitate knee drive, the hitter’s whole front foot must be all the way on the ground (not just the ball of the foot on the ground). Until the front foot is down, the hips are unable to make their rotational movement. If a hitter is getting their foot down late, they are forced to open their shoulder early to get the hands into the hitting zone instead of using their legs. Once the front foot is down, drives their back knee towards the instep of their front foot creating rotational power. *Feel the increased hip rotation gained by driving the back knee forward, versus the old adage “squishing the bug.”
Step 4: Hands Fire: A split second after the back knee drives (almost at the exact same time) the hands fire in a linear path at the baseball. I like to think of the hand movement as pulling the knob of the bat with the bottom hand directly at the ball. Some people like to drive the top hand at the ball, but I think this leads to the barrel dragging (low) and too many lazy fly balls. One must be sure that the hands are starting the upper body movement, not the back elbow. If the back elbow moves forward before the hands it leads to a low barrel and lots of pop-ups to right field.
Step 5: Big Finish: After a player has made contact with the baseball, they continue their finish forward through the ball. Many people misunderstand “rotational” hitting. They confuse the rotation in the hips, as created by knee drive, with a circular or “rotational” swing path. The swing path is an oval not circle. The long finish ensures that the barrel stays in the hitting zone as long as possible, with the greatest amount of time to accelerate. After the barrel drives through the point of contact, it comes up and around to finish above the hitter’s front shoulder, behind his back. The best part of the big finish is watching the well struck back spin line drives fly all over the yard.
Do you have a better idea? Hit me at oldworldpastime@gmail.com