Posted by: Jack Mankin (mrbatspeed@aol.com) on Sat Sep 6 23:35:04 2003

>>> First wanted to say that your explanations of key issues in the past two months have been some of your best ever. The picture is getting clearer for me all the time. I have been giving a lot of thought to the issue of the bat not staying on plane during the swing. One of the things I see kids doing is starting their swing on the proper plane, however, they then keep their shoulders fairly level, which tends to flatten out the swing, resulting in a low finish. It strikes me that height of the hands and distance of the hands from the body (thus the initial angle of the plane) as well as upper body posture can have an impact on this. It also occurs to me the back shoulder not rotating under properly can have an impact. (kids are told not to drop their back shoulder) Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.

Thanks, Nick <<<

Hi Nick

I would concur with your observations. I would just add that body lean or shoulder angle, does influence the swing plane. But I find that the direction of force the hands apply to the bat at initiation is the major factor in determining the plane of the swing. If the top-hand holds (or pulls) back as the shoulders start to rotate, the bat-head will accelerate from its launch position on a downward sloping path behind the batter. This results in the path of the bat-head bottoming out and on an up-slope in the contact zone.

When the batter thrusts the hands forward at initiation, the downward path of the bat-head tends to occurs more out in front of the shoulder and it does not bottom-out until after passing down through the zone. --- Of course this happens in varying degrees. If the batter’s initiation is somewhere in-between the two mentioned above, the bat-head might be bottoming out in the contact zone. The bat would then be fairly level with the ground at contact.

Nick, I know some coaches’ favor teaching a batter to lower, or drop, the back-shoulder in preparation for the swing. But in my opinion it can lead to negative results. With a good launch position, the shoulder will naturally rotate to the lower position as the swing proceeds. I have video reviewed the swings of far too many young batters who drop the back-shoulder swing the back-elbow underneath. The elbow outruns the hands and winds up sliding inward past their side to the bellybutton. This produces a very weak swing.

Jack Mankin