Posted by: Al_Oha (p3d0n6@hawaii.rr.com) on Thu Jul 24 11:33:33 2008

I think I might have a grasp of torque to venture into suggesting an actual tool that might demonstrate the the concept of THT/BHT. I thought to throw this out to the readers, and to solicit comments and see if I even got close to describing it.

I tell my young players that a secret to an “extra pop” in th e baseball swing comes not only with the arms and hands engaged in a circle path with the rotating hip and shoulder:
It also involves a “crank” involving the wrists.

With this I might show an old hand drill where the offsets in the tool’s shaft drives the augur with countering gyrations in the wrist. I do not have an old drill, but I have used a hand crank to turn a lug bolt on a hydraulic lift for a car’s undercarriage as an actual example. The exercise offers crude muscle memory for hand torque.

The next step is a refinement. I offer an articulated bat: I fashion this by cutting an old wood bat 3-4 inches from the knob, place centered eye screws into either of the cut surface, then link both “eyes”. The top and bottom hands are situated in customary
fashion, with the articulation in between. I then challenge the youngster to execute the same wrist gyration, only this time, maiintaining the alignment in the axis of the bat.

Youngsters will generallyfavor one hand over the other at the start. This results in a “bent” bat when swung. With a bit of practice and discipline, kids will eventually learn that both hands must work in concert to keep the bat’s alignment. Newton’s Law would be applicable here, where an action in one hand results in a reaction in the other. If one hand pulls, the other pushes. If one goes rearward, the other goes forward. If one rotates, the other counter-rotates.

The wrists goes through this gyration from the point of intiation, where a bat is in the near vertical, all the way through ball contact where the bat is in the near horizontal of the swing plane. A swing might realize about 3/4ths of the “crank” cylce, but the activity in the wrists is continous throughout.


I then tie this “crank “principle to the circular hand path. Somewhere in this cycle, the rear elbow engages “the slot”, linking the arms and hands to the power coming from the torso for the circular hand path. Here, I emphasize all the principles Mankin describes in his video, including lead knee straightening with hip rotation, lead shoulder pull, maintaining the “L” in back arm/forearm configuraition, maintain the tight radius with the
arms, etc.