Baseball Swing RSS

Almost all swing coaches out there would say that barring the front arm to start the forward swing is bad.  When you ask them why, they explain something like, "the bat will never square up"  or "you'll get bat drag." I find this funny because actually just the opposite is true.  By having a barred front arm to start the forward swing, the barrel enters the zone much earlier and stays square longer.  Babe Ruth did it.  Ken Griffey Jr. did it.  Their swings were the most beautiful because they were the most effective. Here is Babe Ruth, in my opinion the most underrated...

 The often-forgotten element of Michael Jordan's quest to be a Major League Baseball player was his unfortunate assignment to the most controversial hitting coach of the time, Walt Hriniak.  Hriniak had just been squeezed out of the Boston Red Sox organization because more and more of the front office personal were getting fed up with Hriniak meddling with the younger hitters.  While some players endorsed Hriniak, it seemed more were skeptical.  The decline of Jim Rice, Rich Gedman, and Mike Greenwell under his tutelage, started to give Hriniak a shrinking following, and more and more if you had in a bat in your hands,...

I know you've seen it. That move where hitters artificially hold the angle of the bat with their wrists and arms after contact. It's completely unrealistic to think you're going to be able to do this in a regular, full speed swing. You have to earn this positioning at (what I call) the delivery position. And you earn it by feeling the right movement at the very start of the forward swing. At the start of the forward swing, you want to feel your front arm straight and compressing against your chest.  That way the redirection of the bat happens...

In this video I touch on the misconception of deceleration in the swing. Of course it happens to some extent, after all, we don't continue to rotate like a fan. However, to focus on deceleration in the swing doesn't work. It will make the swing more clunky in the end. I also touch on the faulty practice of teaching big muscle movements in the swing. I am a firm believer that teaching big muscle movements in the swing is a mistake. Again, it leads to clunky swings. No disrespect to Casey Smith. He's got a huge influence on instagram and...

Casting is a move that was implemented by Mel Ott, Roberto Clemente, Albert Belle, and now Ronald Acuna. It works because it gets the barrel into the zone nice and early. And while the barrel isn't traveling as far, it's really not the distance the barrel travels that determines the speed. It's more about the timing of the forward bending of the bat.