“Hitting is timing”……”Get ready sooner”……”Get your foot down early”

You’ve heard these, right?

Timing is a critical component to good hitting, so this edition of Mailbag gives a pair of reference points to help gauge your timing.

Here is the question I received:

 

I have a quick baseball question if you don’t mind helping me. I just got back to school off of summer baseball and I am way in front of all the pitching, I was thinking if I should move up to a 34 inch bat to try and slow my hands down a bit. I have been trying to wait back and go the other way but that leads me to trying to inside out everything and getting jammed on pitches that I should be hitting into the gaps.

Slow the hands down?  No way!  Most guys wish that their hands are too fast or that they have too much bat speed.  Having the ability to unload the swing with power is a great asset to have.

Inside-outing the ball to go the other way?  Now that’s just another way of changing the way you unload or swing the bat (in a bad way).

If the issue is consistently being out in front on all types of pitching, that suggests a timing issue that is related to the PRE-swing move (or the load) rather than the actual swing (the unload).

Loaded and Ready on time at Release

Here was my response:

Read more…

“…Bob had posted some clips of Ricky and Paul did an evaluation pointing out some bat lag/drag problems

Going along with this motor learning idea that the body begins to figure out ways to accomplish the specific goals you set for it, I was hoping that doing the ‘pure reaction’ mode would force Ricky to eliminate some of that wasted movement in effort to get quicker

You can see the result in the clip

On the left is the ‘pure reaction’ setting where the player sets up to just unload (just turn) as soon as he sees one flashing light from the trigger unit. On the right is a typical tee swing from a couple of weeks ago

by my count, there is about a 2 frame difference – or ricky’s bat starts moving significantly to the ball about 2 frames later in the reaction swing on the left

and again, this was the first set of swings this player had taken doing reaction training”