If there is even an ounce of truth to what I’m saying, it calls for a complete overhaul of how things have been done in baseball swing instruction. And if they’ve been off track for so long, what will happen when it finally gets its act together and starts teaching a swing that really works? That’s impossible to know at this time. All I can tell you is that the game will be different. Imagine knowing, with 100% certainty, what a great swing looks like. Imagine all the confusion gone, and it being as certain as two plus two.
People get easily attached to certain ideologies, and it becomes hard for them to accept any idea that resides outside of it. Doing so would mean they wasted a good deal of time and effort, and nobody wants to admit that. This is why any new idea is often met with skepticism and ridicule. I’m prepared. After all, if I was writing a book of ideas that most people agreed with, there’d be no need to write a book in my opinion.
It’s time for something new and it’s time for something better. But, make no mistake about it, I never set out to be a contrarian. Being a contrarian was just an unexpected result. What I really was after was simply an understanding of the swing. After all, it’s only a one second movement for goodness sakes. It should be able to be figured out.
I was extremely curious about the baseball swing even at a young age, and as I grew older it confused me as to why others didn’t seem just as curious, given that the baseball swing is probably the most valuable single movement in the world. Early on in my journey, when I would work alongside hitting coaches at the college and pro level, I was often amazed at how little they seemed to even care about the swing. Here I was showing them their players’ game swings on video, and they seemed barely interested.
I was also surprised to see that there was almost no real swing instruction even taking place at these higher levels. They just let them go with whatever swing they happened
to come in with. There were only cursory cliches that everyone hears around the batting cages and that help nobody, things like, “keep your head down, bud,” and a pat
on the butt as he leaves the cage. I’d be there saying to myself, “That’s it? Isn’t this high- level baseball? Where’s the in-depth video analysis?” I just knew these coaches were leaving so much on the table. This was just how it was done, and once a system gets momentum in baseball, it’s going to take a big force to stop it.
As a young player, I had always assumed that somebody somewhere had the answers to the swing. But being around these coaches convinced me that this assumption was wrong. When I showed up at these higher levels, the coaches had nothing to say about the swing that I hadn’t heard for years from my little league coaches, high school coaches, college coaches, and from the various books I had read about the swing.
You may be inclined to think it’s much different today, that now everything is so advanced and the coaches are on top of all the video and have the swing all figured out. Not true at all. In fact it’s worse today, because now there’s too much teaching of the swing, but nobody teaching it started off with a curiosity, so their understanding of the swing is off. They started teaching because they saw a chance to make money, not because they genuinely had a curiosity for the swing. Therefore their instruction is based on erroneous beliefs and therefore is making players’ swings more and more stiff and robotic.
For me, the most enlightening tool I’ve ever had was video. Despite the ubiquity of video these days, coaches still don’t really seem to be all that curious about what it has to teach us. They all seem to have only casually examined it. For the first ten years of my career, I was always looking at video. I couldn’t get enough. It was how I learned what I now know about the swing. I didn’t teach, because I didn’t yet know what I was talking about. First I wanted to learn what the video had to say. Without that experience, I wouldn’t be writing this. Other coaches, to me, seemed to have skipped this step, and gone straight to teaching.
The extent I used to have to go just to get one player’s swing on my computer back in the early 2000s was pretty grueling compared to now. I used to have to physically go to a Major League Baseball game. And to make matters worse, I had to sneak my video camcorder in. That’s right, back then they didn’t want anyone filming at the games. Nowadays everyone has a camera on their phone and they wouldn’t dare try to control it. I had to continue moving around the stadium because the ushers kept telling me I couldn’t film, and so I’d get kicked out of one section and have to go to another. Talk about a pain in the ass. But hey, I wanted to figure out the swing, and nothing was going to stop me. And since I never saw anyone else being as crazy-passionate about the swing as I was being, I figured I’d get information that others weren’t getting.
Around 2002, capturing swings started to get a little easier. I bought a bunch of different wires and plugins to where I could capture swings shown on television, so I didn’t have to actually go to the games. But I had to be ready to click record or I’d miss it. I’d sit there and watch the whole game and just hope they showed a swing from the front angle. If they did, I had to move fast. Now you can get any swing you want with a simple Google search. And still the general knowledge about the swing, in my opinion, is not much better than it was in the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
When I first started my journey, I, like you, sought the answers from experts, those who I figured had been studying the swing for years and had it figured out, and I would have been more than willing to exalt the teachings of another had I come across an already existing method that worked. In fact this is what I fully expected would happen. I just wanted to understand the swing, and I didn’t care how I came to it. Unbelievably, I never came across such a method. The more I sought the help of others, the more I realized they had nothing for me, and that most of them didn’t even seem to be all that
interested about the swing. I think a lot of people need to find. way to make a living, and that’s ok. I don’t want to criticize them. We all have to find something that makes us money. That’s just not what the swing was for me. The swing was my personal mission and I would never dishonor it like that. Over time, I realized that I had to figure out the swing for myself. I wasn’t going to find the answer from others. And that’s what I set out to do.
One of the most important things I hope you will get from this book is that it just doesn’t need to be as hard as the coaches make it out to be out there in the baseball swing instruction community. They have a lot of theory but they don’t wrap it up into a single action you can do to reap the benefits. It ends up just being a bunch of theory and nothing you can do with it. Ultimately it’s because they haven’t done the necessary homework. Mainly, they haven’t studied the video enough.
Another thing that you have to do to understand the swing is to swing yourself. I find, upon questioning so many swing coaches over the years, that almost all of them don’t even take swings themselves anymore. The first ten years of my career I was examining video and taking swings constantly. Had I not taken swings and examined video, I would still be under the assumption that conventional instruction is on the right track.
As for the idea that you have to spend a lot of money to make yourself a great hitter, I am vehemently against that notion. In fact, I think spending a lot of money is often a distraction. Ever notice that the greatest hitters were often the ones who grew up with simple and even crude equipment - a broomstick or their dad’s heavy wooden bat, waterlogged baseballs, raggedy gloves. Most of them also never got instruction on the swing, or had the chance to play on baseball fields with nice white lines on them. With such rudimentary equipment, it’s often the game - their game - that matters more. While your competition is researching what to buy next, you can work on what really matters - developing the skills that help you become a better hitter, not developing your skills as a consumer of products.
I have dedicated my life to finding the truth behind the baseball swing, and all of my work has culminated in a simple hack: Swing with your font arm. Swinging with just your lead arm works because it’s a quick and easy way to feel, what I refer to as, a “Lead-Arm Dominant” swing, and being Lead-Arm Dominant is the main difference in the greatest hitters. What exactly is a Lead-Arm Dominant swing? It’s one that, is more in line with what your swing would look like when swinging with the lead arm only, as opposed to a “Back-Arm Dominant” (or “BAD”) swing which is more in line with what the swing tends to look like if you swing with the back arm only.
A Lead-Arm Dominant swing creates a completely different structure to the swing, and produces much better results, particularly substantially more power, because it utilizes more of our body to hit the ball, and our bodies are where a majority of mass and strength reside. A Lead-Arm Dominant swing also allows the arms and wrists to relax and function more as a whip, as opposed to a Back-Arm Dominant swing in which the arms and wrists are going to be more tense, which ultimately results in slower bat-speed, and less of the body controlling the action.
A Lead-Arm Dominant swing leaves clues on video, especially at the start of the forward swing; the hands will be lower and more “behind” the hitter, trailing the rotating torso (I call this “hand depth”), and the barrel flattened out more. The lead arm is often straighter, but not always. And at contact the hitter will tend to be more connected.
In a Back-Arm Dominant swing, which most hitters lean toward, especially these days, the hands tend to come more in front of the chest and then push outward, leading to less connection at contact. Interestingly, conventional swing instruction has advocated for this inferior Back-Arm Dominant swing. They call it “staying inside the ball.” It’s a pushy, powerless swing. Meanwhile, they condemn the Lead- Arm Dominant swing and call it “spinning off the ball.”
(Purchase the eBook to read the rest of the book.)
