Baseball Swing RSS

  Today's swing instruction teaches the first part of the swing as a stiff and still movement.  Richard Schenck says you should be "still as a stature."  Why do they say this?  The thinking is that by being still you can be faster from the start of the swing to contact.  Ok, so why do you have to be still though?  Have you ever thought about that?  Can't you be moving while you decide to swing?  Of course you can, and this is a key concept that today's instruction is missing.   Hitters today are remaining completely still and firing quickly from...

People think my approach to the baseball swing is crazy when they first hear it.  After all, I advocate just one drill - the front arm progression.  Typically, swing coaches have thirty to forty drills in their arsenal.  I'm also different in more fundamental ways.  Ask any swing coach what his goal was in starting on his path, and he’ll likely say something like, “I love coaching” or “I’ve always wanted to own my own hitting facility.”  Coaching or owning my own facility was never important to me.  My goal has always been to figure out the baseball swing.  Everything else...

The first question you may want to ask is: why does it matter who the best pound for pound hitters are?  After all, front offices don't pay hitters by the pound, and all that matters is what a hitter can produce at the plate, whether he weighs 180 lbs or 250 lbs.  Baseball isn't boxing.  Weight doesn't matter.  But it does if you are trying to filter out for mechanics.  Let me explain.  If two hitters produce the exact same statistics at the plate but one weighs fifty pounds less than the other, then the lighter hitter is much more likely to...

  I finally finished the video that I believe, in many ways, was the purpose of embarking on my journey to understand the swing in the first place more than twenty years ago.  I always wanted a simple way to relay the feeling of a great swing to someone.   I had tried writing books but it left people with too many questions.  It's hard to convey the feeling and look of movements in books.  So I taught myself a little video editing and spent many hours contemplating what a video would look like if it was going to be effective...

"Keep your hands inside the ball!" How many hitters' swings have been ruined by this teaching? It's really the basis for the entire paradigm under which kids are taught to swing today, and for the past 60 years.  It's not like the sandlot days.  Now we put kids through a system and churn out cookie cutter swings like a factory, and yet nobody checked to make sure the swings we are teaching are actually working better.  From my vantage point, they are not. This is more than just a cry to teach our kids a better swing.  If what I'm...