Posted by: RQL () on Mon Mar 10 09:29:20 2003

http://www.collegesports.com/sports/w-softbl/stories/030303aak.html
> > > > > Tom,fp may be a little different,but she appears to me that she has shifted her weight [upperbody]so much to the front leg that rear leg is extended and it would be difficult to drive the rear knee down and in to drive the rear hip forward.
> > > > _______
> > > > RQL - What disadvantage do you think that has? She has NO PROBLEMS with power so take that out of your mind. She hits the ball plenty hard and plenty far. So is she off balanced for offspeed or does her posture prohibit her from hitting a certain location? I think she is in a pretty good launch position too.
> > > I guess what I see is her upper body set up on the inside of her front thigh instead of her rear thigh and I see a straight rear leg coming up on the toe where there would be more riding up on the front leg.Seems to me when her front heel came down she would have had axis still shifting forward and at best the use of the front leg driving the front hip back for rotation instead of both working against each other.When I see baseball hitters like this I usually see poor hip rotation not enhancing shoulder speed.I do realize girls usually play on 200 foot fence and for their size it is fairly easy to reach if they catch up to ball.The upper body looked fine to me. >>>>>>>I t seems like you all are seeing a lot of things in one frame.Does this player use top hand torque in her swing? From what you see ,can you tell if the pitch is outside or inside?It seems to me that it may be outside if you take into consideration the position of her back elbow.Why is it necessary to be straight up in your stance?As I understand it ,a player can tilt or lean toward the opposite batter's box and as long as the swing plane remains perpendicular to the axis of the spine at contact,she should not lose power.In the games I watch in D1 , it does not seem like an easy task to reach the fence as most of them are 200' only down the line and the distance gets greater as you approach center, averaging about 225'.The majority of bats are -11 to -9 and the weight and COR value of the ball add to the difficulty so that only the big girls begin to make it look easy to hit it out given the linear mechanics that 99% use.Can't a myriad of things go wrong between launch and contact for you to feel that this player has a great swing from looking at one still shot so early in the swing process?Having read the article it is easy to imagine that she is a pretty good player but I couldn't say it for sure unless I had some video to analyze.Your feedback and or corrections are appreciated.
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> Larry-
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> Certainly having a single frame is limiting,but if you had to take a single snapshot,this would be the most informative portion.This would typically be called the "launch" position,but no one's definition is exactly the same.It could be a position or a point in time.My preference is to see what the freeze frame looks like right when the torso starts to drive the handpath,although this is not always easy to tell.This is great form and mechanically a well executed swing.Whether it was the right swing for the pitch(timing/plane) is of course unknown.

Tom,would you say her lower body with a straight rear leg gets her in a powerful position to launch her torso.