Posted by: david olmstead (dave.olmstead@ladwp.com) on Tue Jun 28 20:29:50 2005

I must first apologize for being so presumptuous as to have a legitimate opinion on the matter of baseball/softball swing plane. I am only a dad of a high school girl who used to play softball. I have read many of the books on hitting, beginning of course with ted williams and charley lau, and continuing through the hybrid swing theories of guys like mike schmidt, charley lau jr., dusty baker, et al. i have watched a lot of college softball on the tube, when available, and watch espn highlights not for the scores but for technique. i thoroughly enjoy the theory of hitting and appreciate all your input on swing plane, especially since i've never really seen it discussed or defined in a softball/baseball sense. my thought on swing plane is taken from golfer ben hogan's book "five lessons" where he defines it as a sheet of glass running from the ball and resting on the tops of the shoulders and continuing on into space. a swing is on plane when the shoulders sweep across the bottom of the sheet of glass. the plane then becomes contingent upon the height of the golfer, distance from the ball, and length of club, etc. typically, a player's swing plane for a shorter club (i.e. 9-iron) would appear more upright than the same player's swing plane for the longer driver, for example. also, a shorter player would tend to have a flatter swing plane than a taller player, although both would be swinging on plane so long as they maintained this sheet of glass analogy. i think this same swing plane exists, more or less, for the softball/baseball swing as well. take a look at softball/baseball highlight pictures from the center field camera, and using the catcher's mitt to determine the location of the ball, you should notice at contact, more often than not, the shoulders angled such that you can draw a line along the tops of the shoulders almost directly into the catcher's mitt. also, swinging on plane can be tested by running a string from the pitcher's hand to the catcher's mitt, assuming that, for theory sake, the ball travels on this ground-parallel path. swinging on plane as ben hogan suggests, and with the hands in a more or less palm up/palm down fashion, the barrel of the bat will travel onlong the string line from somewhere behind the hitter to somewhere out in front of where one would ideally hit the ball, allowing at least theoretically, the ball to be struck along a longer zone. the hands continue to extend out fully toward the pitcher in this palm up/palm down fashion until they must turn over and return to a high finish. charley lau, of course, preached allowing the top hand coming off the bat to facilitate this full, high finish. as for barry bonds holding his hands lower, it seems the major league strike zone tops out at slightly above the belt, considerably lower than during my baseball-loving days of sandy koufax et al of the mid 60's. as an analogy, imagine where prize fighters would hold their gloves if there was no hitting above the belt instead of below the belt. anyway, thanks for allowing me my little soap box and look forward to any comments, good or bad. dave