Posted by: jwbbslo (jwbbslo@charter.net) on Thu Jan 3 09:02:21 2008

Jimmy,
Call it what you want.I want guys agressively thinking hit on every pitch. The swing thought is"hit,hit,hit" and they stop on balls as opposed to "is it a strike" swing thought.

Your point about how hitters get to 2 K's is well taken but,no matter how hard you battle with two strikes, the results are going to be bad with 2K averages right around .200 in the ML. I'm all about process over outcome,but I want to develop hitters with large competency zones rather than the "keyhole" size zones we are seeing all too often in our younger developing players.

As far as strike outs are concerned, I'd rather see a guy punch out with a more aggressive approach than that weak "put the ball in play; at least I didn't strike out" approach.

As far as all that practice is concerned, much of it is a waste of time because it is so far below game speed. We hit way too much off T's, slow front toss, & 60mph batting practice. The game is fast & we practice slow. This game needs to be practice at or above game speed more often. You get what you emphasize.Too much stroke development time leads to hitters who look good failing. More hitters fail because of bad timing than bad mechanics. What do we focus on in practice? Mechanics 90+% of the time. At every suceeding level of our game it gets faster & the players get stronger. The speed is not always absolute speed. It is often created by the pitcher's ability to locate & change speeds. The relative overall speed based on the pitchers ability to manipulate your focus is often what speeds up the game.IMO we need to spend more development time teaching our hitters how to time pitches. Is part of this related to mechanics? Of course. The majority is related to having more specifity in our training process.Speed up the process & learn how to time an aticipate various speed pitches depending on the game situation tendencies.

JW