Posted by: Phil (philipland@aol.com) on Wed Mar 8 18:10:07 2006

I've found in working on rotation with my son that the role of the right arm is to deliver the bathead relative to the ball's distance from the plate. The right arm's path is not towards the pitcher, but perpindicular to the front of the body (ie towards the verticle plane of the pitched ball). As the shoulders rotate, the arm will appear to move in a direction towards the pitcher when they are actually moving outward away from the body (I think this is the circular hand path referred to here).

In concentrating on shoulder rotation, we got to the point that he was rotating well, but holding his right arm back until his shoulder rotation was almost complete. The swing looked good, and middle in pitches were hit hard, but he had problems with middle out pitches. We've now begun to add the right arm to guide the bathead "out towards" pitches that are away a little earlier during rotation. It seems to be working well, and seems to have added to his power on inside pitches.