Posted by: daw () on Mon Sep 5 22:31:02 2005

I have posted a couple of times.

We began installing these mechanics in earnest with my U14 softball team last Fall, and recently completed our season. Observations that might be helpful:

1. As Yogi Berra said, hitting is 90% mental and the other half physical. Any U14 pitcher watching our team take batting practice last season would be sick to her stomach with fear. Every kid on our team would take ball after ball over the fence, and this with me throwing high-speed from 20 feet. However, a significant number of our players hit below .200 IN GAMES. Lesson: if you don't step into the box with courage, discipline and brains, mechanics are useless. The foundation of good hitting is the set of personal characteristics the hitter brings to the box. Mechanics, while of course very important, are a distant second in terms of results.

2. Among those players who had the appropriate personal characteristics, THT was huge. We video taped all our players before we began work on the mechanics. One "naturally" had THT (unsurprisingly, she was our clean-up batter, a smallish kid we called the "Toy Cannon" for her power out of proportion to her size). The others ranged from "pure" linear to "rotational without THT". Those who "got" THT exploded in bat quickness and power. The leading hitter on our team ended up being a player still eligible for U12, who played with us at U14 A (two years above her age group). Before/after video documented the difference in her swing after we installed these mechanics; this kid (among the smaller on our team) led us in average, slugging, doubles, extra base hits (and, tellingly, walks). Another kid who took to THT, our leadoff hitter and an excellent slapper, was second in doubles and slugging. She took to almost exclusively "power slapping" in the latter half of the season.

3. As players "got" rotational mechanics and THT, we noticed their strides naturally got shorter. Kids who worked the hardest on THT also seemed to naturally "adopt" PLT.

4. We had good results in "simplifying" things by having kids get into their stance with the inward turn already complete (a closed stance goes a long way towards doing this), and the hands back, well toward launch position. At the risk of triggering an "angels on the head of a pin" debate, this would be more like A-Rod than Sosa.

5. In teaching these mechanics to kids who have been taught linear, live bp is critical. In the stress of games, kids who had been launching the ball with rotational mechanics during bp would frequently "revert" to linear, with horrific results. Only repeated exposure to live bp would help these particular kids fully convert to rotational.

daw