Posted by: HillMar () on Sun Aug 29 10:48:42 2010

> I am a junior varsity pitcher and while it is true that Barry, Sammy, and Babe Ruth made great careers out of rotational hitting I personally love to pitch against the teams that teach rotational hitting. A fastball with good plane and a good breaking pitch working both sides of the plate is all that you need with a team like this. This is because they keep their weight on their back foot and spin around an axis. An inexperienced hitter using this style of hitting is doomed for failure because they have not learned to cover the entire plate. They might get lucky and hit a flat fastball down the middle, but will be entirely clueless what to do with quality pitches in the four quadrants of the strike zone. They will either be jammed or hit it off the end of the bat. This is why I believe linear hitting is much better than rotational. Because you keep yourself in line with the pitcher, and take your knob to the ball no matter where it is pitched, it is extremely easy to hit to all fields (which rotational doesn't offer, look to Bautista's 30 homeruns to left field this year for proof), and almost all hitters will find that their strikeouts go down and their obp goes up. As for your claims about being able to hit the ball further while using rotational hitting, I just don't find this to be a true statement. You would point to Barry, Sammy, and Babe to dispute this put the only reason that they used this style of hitting is because they had sufficient bat speed and strength to easily launch a ball four hundred feet, or more easily put were home run hitters. I think that this is basically the key difference between rotational and linear. Rotational is an all or nothing hit the lights like in the natural swing: and linear is a relaxed, easy swing (it seems almost effortless) and when mastered you can easily place the ball anywhere you want on the field. So, if you can't easily hit home runs with a rotational swing, then I would suggest a linear swing, or you risk an increased output of popups, rollovers, foul balls, and strikeouts. Also for examples of linear home run hitters look to A-Rod and Pujols.


Every good hitter has a little bit of linear movement in their swing. Some more than others. That being said rotation HAS to happen. Guys like Pujols have more rotation and stay closer to a 90 degree angle on the finish, but if you watch Pujols hit there is clearly linear motion. Where as a guy like Eckstein will be straighter on his back leg, but there is clearly rotation in there as well. They both stay behind the ball and rotate around their front heel. Sitting and spinning is NOT rotational hitting. That is a beer league softball hack.