Posted by: Corey (coreycrowleyhall@gmail.com) on Tue Apr 14 23:52:23 2009

First time I've ever posted here, I'm really interested in something I recently encountered regarding weight transfer.

I was perusing YouTube recently looking at swing mechanics, and encountered a video by "ParkerTraining" about weight transfer. He was arguing that the batter should effectively throw his weight against a stiff front leg, something that I worked to iron out of my swing when I transitioned from a linear mechanic to a rotational one during high school. But what is interesting here is that this Sparkey Parker fellow who posted the video is obviously a strong devotee to the rotational mechanic, and tears the linear mechanic apart as much on his website (www.backbackback.com) as it gets torn apart on this one. What Parker cues in on, is that a number of great power hitters do throw their weight against a stiff front leg and effectively use that leg as their axis. He criticizes batters who "sit" on their back leg, arguing that it cuts off the rotation of the back hip. I think he makes a fairly strong case, but it seems to me that a number of the best hitters in the game do in fact "sit" on their back leg, such as Albert Pujols, and they don't seem to have any problem generating pop. I guess there are a number of questions this has me wondering about:
1) Am I creating a disagreement between Mankin's approach and Parker's approach where there in fact is none?
2) Don't some great power hitters (Aaron comes to mind) transfer their weight almost entirely onto their front foot?
3) Are these perhaps two equally valid approaches to acheive effectively the same rotational mechanic?
4) Doesn't throwing your weight forward cut off your front side hip rotation just as much (or more) than sitting back cuts off rotation of the back side hip?

I'm really interested in seeing what people think about this, I'm really a devotee to rotational hitting since I discovered batspeed.com while I was in High School and reformed my swing from a linear one to a rotational one, the results were pretty impressive, but I know this Parker guy would tell me that I'm a "sitter" and try to get me to throw my weight forward. And indeed while the overhaul of my mechanics dramatically increased my ability to drive the ball, I never did develope an ability to hit the ball out of the park, I went from a slashing singles/groundball hitter to a gap to gap hitter, maybe Parker's got the missing element, maybe he doesn't, I'm interested in what people think. The video I encountered can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnzAx4PTp_g&NR=1