Posted by: John D (John@Dresslar.com) on Wed Dec 7 23:18:02 2005

To clarify what's going on here, Mark has cut and paste several back and forth messages on a Baseball-fever.com forum among a recent major league player and several of us about the advantages of rotational mechanics. As noted, his most recent organization, the Angels, teaches "a Directional or Weight shift approach as opposed to really rotating your hips". He argued that many superior big league hitters don't rotate their back foot -- so as to avoid opening their hips too far. He even contended that some of these guys often drew their back foot behind their front foot (say, toward the third base dugout for a righthanded hitter) to avoid overrotating. I responded with clips showing that several of those hitters he referred to -- Glauss, Bagwell and Frank Thomas -- came up onto the tips of their back toes (which explained why the rotation of the back foot wasn't so easy to see), but the rotation nonetheless was still there as shown by the fact that the back instep was facing the pitcher.

So, perhaps the question posed is: what should the back foot be doing in a good batspeed.com swing? I contended that having the back foot not only rotate but free to come off the ground (so long as the front leg was firm enought to prevent lunging) freed the rotational forces of the body which might be impinged if the batter felt constrained to keep the back foot unrotated and on the ground. Any thoughts on how to respond to Mr. Major Leaguer and his back foot arguments?