How do you adjust to different pitch locations? Throwing your hands tends to be the most natural, but you’ll lack in consistency and power. So how should you teach the correct bat path for adjusting? Coach Lisle talks about the optimal posture for a hitter and how too much hip hinge and tilting has an effect on your ability to adjust.
When I’m in my swing and I get to launch position the way that I get to low balls or high balls has to do with hip hinging and tilt. It has to do with my spine.
I’m going to make contact really high, right here. You’re going to see a little bit of seesaw, and you’re going to see my shoulders and my spine be pretty tall.
Now it’s a low pitch– low and away. I’m going to have the same swing pattern. I’m going to seesaw. I recognize this pitch is low and away, and my spine and my shoulders are going to dictate how I get to this ball here, OK?
Shoulder tilt is the best way to adjust to these pitches.
I can tell you I’ve seen college players that get to launch position. It’s a ball down low, and they take their hands to the ball like this.
They literally take their hands to the ball. You’re going to have players that try to take their hands to the ball on the low pitch. At a college level, or a high school level, when we see hitters like that, we just know that low balls, ground balls. High balls they’re going to hammer.
I would tell you, to add onto that, sometimes we hear about level swing. Hey, keep your swing level. Keep your shoulders level. If you do that and you teach that, you’re going to hammer this pitch all day long. If I just turn, I can hammer this pitch. As soon as you throw me something low, there’s going to be ground ball city all day long.
And so the best way to get to the pitch that is low, in my opinion, is our hip hinge and our shoulders dictate the plane of the pitch. I’m trying to match the plane of the pitch with my shoulders in the sense of how I get different balls.
And for me, the elbows and shoulders and hands aren’t really changing. That’s why we don’t talk about the hands a lot in the Vault, is because the hands really aren’t doing much other than guiding the steering wheel to get to that position, wherever it is.
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