Posted by: Jack Mankin (MrBatspeed@aol.com) on Tue Apr 5 12:44:56 2005

>>> I went back an looked at my post to see where I said ‘outside’...? Couldn’t find it..? If you disagree with “inside and on top” then you must favor “outside and under?” How dose Barry Bonds take a 97 mph fastball an inch off the inside black and hit it on a frozen rope fair with no hook into MaCovey cove…I guarantee you its not by being outside and under!

I’ll bet you chunk and hook the golf ball with the outside and around philosophy…any golf pro will tell you that for you to get the ball off the ground you must strike with a descending blow…to maximize spin you must pinch the contact between the ball and a preferably tight lie…same holds true in baseball to maximize backspin on a baseball one must aim one top …in all reality is really only an aiming point…however, to get caught up in attempting to manually lift a ball by aiming underneath will lead to more 0-4’s then you can imagine.

I disagree with what you would like to say you see in the thousands of hitters you have looked at, granted Williams was in favor of a slight uppercut…but I see it as an afterthought…pay close attention to the path the hands a good hitter takes…hands ahead of the barrel, barrel above of the hands, hands working inside the ball, hands stay on top of where the ball is going to be when it enters the hitting zone, great hitters like Williams have the uncanny knack for squaring everything up at contact to deliver the blow, if and when they do slide slightly below its only for a split second just prior to contact, which by no means in my mind would justify committing to a ‘under philosophy.’

Furthermore, you model in your frame by frame is gross…why select a career .270 hitter that has his lifetime BA and HR totals marred by a corked bat a steroids? <<<

Hi Scott

I agree with you that talking about taking the hands “outside” the ball is absurd – no hitters do, which makes “hands working inside the ball” a meaningless term. The same is true for keeping the ‘hands above the ball’ – no hitters take their ‘hands below the ball.’ However, the trajectory of the bat-head does bottom-out below the ball and is on an up-slope at contact. I see no problem with a batter having the correct vision of the actual swing plane.

Therefore, “stay, 'inside and on top' of the baseball” are meaningless terms with rotational transfer mechanics. However, they do make sense with linear principles of “taking the hands straight to the ball” and “swing down at the ball.” Sad to say, those probably are the principles taught to most young hitters, but they certainly are not the mechanics exhibited by the best hitters.

It is interesting that you would ask, “How dose Barry Bonds take a 97 mph fastball an inch off the inside black and hit it on a frozen rope fair with no hook into MaCovey cove.” – Scott, it is Bonds keeping his hands in a “circular path” to contact that allows him to keep the ball from hooking foul.

There are a number of clips of Bonds’ swings at - http://www.youthbaseballcoaching.com/swings.html - If you can find any discrepancies between the mechanics Bonds’ exhibits and the rotational transfer mechanics taught on the “Swing Mechanics” page, please feel free to point out the clip and the discrepancy.

Jack Mankin