Posted by: BobL () on Tue Jan 9 11:00:36 2007

> Bob. Are you referring to the term "knob to the ball" where the bat trails the hands and the bat snaps through to the point of contact? I can actually remember a couple of times when I executed that resulting in a homerun or deep hit over the outfielder's head. The funny thing is the ball was so far inside, that I used to wonder how I could have hit the ball fair. But it had to because of the fence drill aproach and snapping the bat through the zone.
>
> (Of note (not that you have not seen this before) I happened to view the highlights of the allstar candidates on MLB.COM and Jose Canseco probably illustrated the approach of snapping the bat through the zone as good as anyone. It is interesting to see that he brought his hands in and used the small arc to rapidly wheel the fat part of the bat to the ball.

Hi The Hitting Guru,

I tried to post my views a few days ago relating to certain issues expressed in a rather long post which was accidentally deleted before getting a chance to appear. This had been intended as a response to an earlier misunderstanding of my original post. I find it somewhat difficult as well as time consuming when attempting to express my ideas in the English language and therefore decided not to bother rewriting it again. I would find it a lot easier using “a hands on approach” to explain things. In short, I was referring to a simple verbal cue to elicit a mental approach of turning to swing. I certainly did not mean turn, then swing. None of the elite men fastpitch hitters I have spoken to in the past few years ever thought it meant “turn, then swing”. They seemed to understand exactly what I meant and thought it was a very good verbal cue to fix certain problems that often exist with hitting mechanics. It has been my experience that the turn to swing approach has been successful with hitters in different ways. Some of which include: avoiding committing the bat head to the pitch too early in the swing process which incites various difficulties including making adjustments to different location/speeds. Avoiding what we used to refer to in the old days as swinging too hard which actually meant “swinging too hard, too early” in the swing process. Other cases involved hitters who had a tendency to not turn their back foot enough thus hindering the use of an effective turn. This mental approach seems to help these hitters get their hips and shoulders involved more in the swing. It also seemed to be effective in having the hitter avoid being too aggressive/quick with the bat head too early in the swing. As far as “knob to the ball”, I have seen coaches promote this approach while encouraging the hitters to use some sort of “thumb across the chest” technique. This would result in having the hitter end up with his hands lining up with the front shoulder and the rest of the torso trying to catch up. In order to catch up, the arms/hands had to stop forward motion somewhere in the process or that the hitter could only hit inside pitches using only wrist action, etc. As you have noticed, late in the turn, the bat is pointing towards the catcher prior to that final bat head attack. The hitter is still able to hold back and take the pitch if he so chooses. What is the difference between the verbal cue of having the bat point towards the catcher or the knob point towards the pitcher? Bringing the knob towards the hitting zone in a somewhat circular path might be an effective verbal cue for some hitters. Other verbal cues can be used to further help the hitter with adjustments needed to hit outside pitches as well as inside pitches. On inside pitches, you seem to believe that pulling the hands in a bit helps hitting the inside pitch in fair territory. If that is indeed what you mean then I agree with you. Look where Bonds’ hands are when he hits inside pitches in fair territory. Look at his front arm/elbow bend which helps this process. I'm not really an advocat of the expression "linear". As far as hand path, is this not another way of expressing the action of extending the hands away from the back shoulder? If the head remains more or less still after heel plant, is the back shoulder not turning forward in a circular path? How does the hand path compare to the back shoulder path? Also, should there be a slight linear type movement of the hands during the turn, who cares? Having the hands/back arm go from the launch position to the L position at contact, is that achievable without having some sort of arc instead of a true circular path? Mickey Mantle once went into a horrible slump after having Ted Williams ask him questions related to hitting mechanics. Mental approach...different strokes for different folks?