Posted by: Jack Mankin (MrBatspeed@aol.com) on Tue Oct 11 21:14:05 2005

>>> When you swing, should you always be focusing on keeping your hands close to your body? If you do this, and also watch the ball hit the bat, will your hands automatically extend to an outside pitch? <<<

Hi Mike

Concentrating on keeping the hands close to the body produces similar results attained from the “keep your hands inside the ball” cue. Although both linear and rotational transfer mechanics may keep the hands close and inside the ball, they use very different concepts to accomplish it.

Linear mechanics keep the hands inside the ball by the batter allowing the lead-elbow to bend while extending the hands toward the pitcher. (see clip http://webpages.charter.net/nickkio/HandstoBall/Linear05.mpg )
To reach the outside pitch, the batter extends the hands more in the direction of first base. In either case, the resulting path of the hands is much straighter than the hand-path of a batter using rotational transfer mechanics.

With rotational mechanics, the batter keeps the lead-arm fairly straight from initiation to contact. How wide a path the hands take is governed by how far the lead-shoulder has rotated by contact. Note in this Griffey Jr clip - http://www.youthbaseballcoaching.com/mpg/griffey_ken.mpeg -, that although he keeps his lead-arm fairly straight, full rotation of his lead-shoulder swung his hands around a tight circular path. – Less shoulder rotation would allow his lead-arm to cast away from the chest into a wider path for outside pitches.

Average hitters can keep the hands in close and inside the ball. However, the best hitters' mechanics gain added bat speed from the pendulum effect generated by a circular hand-path.

Jack Mankin