Posted by: Coach C () on Thu May 27 06:35:50 2004

I am looking for opinions.
> Should the swing plane be slightly down, level or slightly up???
>

Just for clarification....it should be perpendicular with the spine.

To your question...... on high pitches it will be more down to level and low pitches it will be slightly up. It depends on the height of the ball. Picture a ball coming at your chest.......would you swing up? If you are doing things correctly you would be swinging level to the ball or down even. If the ball is at your toes (not that you would swing at it, but if you did) you would be swinging slightly up. Thus swing plane is controlled by the degree of spine tilt.

And to my original point....the swing plane is perpendicular to the spine. Great hitters......as a rule don't think about swinging up, down or level, but in fact they try to match the plane of the ball with the body. I believe the emphasis on the low strike in baseball and not the high strike has given people the illusion that we should swing slightly up on all pitches. This is not correct for all pitches. The MLB game is over-flowing today with great low ball hitters......ie....slightly up, but these swings would look different to you if they swung at a strike at the letters (they don't call that pitch for a strike though).

Coach C