Posted by: Shane Haycraft (galightningbaseball@hotmail.com) on Thu Apr 5 08:38:56 2007

I have a friends kid on my travle team, who has a developed the habit of dropping his hands and swinging around his waist on every pitch. We have worked with the kid on every aspect of his hitting, but cannot break this habit. He is not the most athletic kid in the world and tends to be lazy and extremely slow. His load sequence is fine, but from their drops his hands and literally swings from about waist high. I have two options, get this kid to hitting the ball or cut him. I prefer to get him hitting, because I think if he can gain some confidence with the bat , he will pick it up in other areas of the game. The only theory I have on the reasons that this habit is so ingrained in his swing is over exposure to pitching machine ball. He is 10 years old and besides from my travle team has only played machine pitch baseball and is playing it again this year. I think he is using the hands drop as a timing mechanism for the pitcing machine and the swing is a result of the flat plane on which the machine throws the ball. No deviation in plane or location results in this awful swing. I have professional playing experience and have some very profound hitters on this team, two who I have personnaly turned into productive switch hitters, I do know a little bit about the baseball swing, but this kid is killing me. Any suggestions?