Posted by: Shawn (mariner0324@yahoo.com) on Wed Mar 2 09:38:29 2005

> Does anybody have a suggestion or an idea?

Hitting the riseball is like someone hitting with poor technique. By this I mean if someone swings down at a lower pitch, the bat head would only be in the path of the ball for a brief second. Hitting the riseball is similar to this and that is what makes it a tougher pitch to hit consistently.

The swing and contact must be perfect or else you will just foul the pitch backwards, which is very common on a pitch up in the zone in fastpitch.

I don't believe you get on the plane of the pitch on the rise, you either make solid contact or you don't.

Since the strike zone is from the waist to the knee (that is what the umps call), you must first ask why swing at the rise? It's not a good pitch to swing at for the reason I stated above, the timing must be perfect.

If you do swing at the pitch you must level off the swing. This means level to the ground in this case. You swing to where the pitch is going and not where it's already been (swinging under the pitch, where it's already been). In this sense you catch the ball at a point in the strike zone with a level swing path. There might be some downward trajectory of the swing plane which is fine, but I talk about swinging level.

It's not impossible it just requires that you level off the swing.