Posted by: Jack Mankin (MrBatspeed@aol.com) on Wed Apr 11 00:07:49 2001

>>>greetings
should one bend the back knee more and lower the body to hit the low pitch or should you lower the the hands and bat head? also is it better to have the stride foot toe pointing straight at the pitcher on contact or to the first baseman (blocked)?.is it normal to have the stride foot ankle roll over on the swing finish? <<<

Hi Bob

Most batters will have their rotational axis leaning slightly over the plate. This axis allows the raising and lowering of the lead arm to set a swing plane that will cover most of the high/low range of the strike zone. Even Ken Griffey Jr who swings from a fairly erect axis can still reach outside low pitches by lowering his swing plane and allowing the lead arm to cast out more. What you do not want is to have the axis lean more over the plate. This will place more weight on the toes, which limits hip rotation.

The “blocking” of the lead foot was encouraged to keep the batter from opening the hips to soon. Old batting theories wanted the hips and shoulder held closed as hands were thrust forward. If the batter initiate the swing after a good inward-turn, I see no problem with the lead foot rotating toward the pitcher as the swing progresses.

The “rolling over” of the lead-foot is most often caused by the batter keeping to much weight over the back-leg during rotation. This results in having the axis of rotation to be more around the back-hip instead of the spine. Having the body rotating around the back-hip means the front-side is swinging away from the plate, which causes the lead-foot to roll over. --- Have him practice getting the lead-side more involved is generating rotation as I described in the “bug squashing” post below.

Jack Mankin