Posted by: al_Oha (p3d0n6@hawaii.rr.com) on Tue Jul 22 10:47:52 2008

David,

With all due respects to your ball playing experience, your observations may be intuitively correct. However, I do not see how laces lining up towards the pitcher defines linear hitting, and in the same breath, any turning at the hips characterizes rotational hitting. Your statement seems to imply that great players are hybrids of both.

Your explanation references anecdotal observation my coaches in Little League use to impress on their young players. I would like to see your conclusions broken down in frame-by-frame analysis, as Jack Mankin has studiously done over the years, to formalize that point.

The feeling I have is that your conclusion may not be necessarily evidence-based, and that the concepts of "linear" and "rotational" have not been completely elaborated in your mind.

Spend some time at this forum, and you might learn a few things. Jack Mankin had a recent post with regards to the rotational mechanics and the hitting zone: See his post in this thread: "hand path and plate coverage with rotational mechanics".

Your statement that "hands stay long through the baseball (or linear), creating a big hitting zone", may be a myth in an old paradigm.



> Whats up Jacek,
> My name is David. I like your take on this. A rotational swing and a linear swing both have their pros and cons. In my opinion, having only one or the other is not optimizing a hitters full potential. I think ideally, a hitter should try to have both a linear swing and a rotational swing. Although the hands should rotate. This pulls the hitter off the ball and the their best shots are hit foul. I've been played in the minors for 6 years and i saw a lot of hitters who were both linear and rotaional. Hittes like Manny, and A-Rod and those guys are linear and rotational hitters. You can tell that they are linear by their back foot.
The laces on their shoe are faced up and forward toward the pitcher. The back foot is up on its toe and maybe even slides a little forwad. However, their hips rotate in a "rotational
hitting" manner. Their hands stay long through the baseball (or linear), creating a big hitting zone. So ideally, I believe a hitter should be both.
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> David J. Keesee
> Chief Executive Officer
> All Aspects Baseball
> www.allaspectsbaseball.com
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> > Does a circular hand path and rotational mechanics lead to the bat barrel taking a circular (or elliptical) path ACROSS the flight of the ball? If so, this would mean that it is more difficult for a rotational hitter to make solid contact than a linear hitter. It seems that a linear hand path would have the barrel taking a path ALONG the flight of the pitch.
> >
> > This could indicate a tradeoff between power (rotational) and amount of time that the barrel stays in the zone (linear).