Posted by: skip (piks5@sbcglobal.net) on Fri Jun 1 07:11:10 2007

A word to the wise: For the month of March, I worked at adding THT and BHT (and refining his hand path) to the swing of my son, an 85 lb. 12 yr old high-average-singles-hitter. He worked on his swing almost daily on the heavy bag.
Then, with NO live BP whatsever since Oct., he faced good pitching in a mid-April travel tournament and, despite using a heavier end-loaded big barrel bat for the first time in his life, roped the ball better than ever in almost all of his at bats. I attribute this to the refinements that Jack espouses and to the efficiency of learning them through the heavy bag training method.

But, once we got back and started regular in-town baseball, the heavy bag took a back seat to time demands and other factors. His hitting spiralled downward to worse than he's ever hit before. His swing seemed "confused". The bag was still hanging out in the garage, so he started hitting the bag again last week and he immediately returned to a clean and efficient swing, and is back to hitting the ball with authority.

From my limited experience, if you're converting an already-successful hitter over to Jack's rotational methods, for the short term anyways the heavy bag training -- trying to ingrain perfect repetitions from initation to contact -- will pay more dividends than working out against live BP. Stay with the bag as long as your "pupil" will tolerate it.

Jack's methods can improve a batter's batspeed and swingpath. But , of course, the batter is on his own in the other two key areas of timing and approach (getting a good ball to hit).

One way I've kept my son interested in refining his rot. hitting is that we've been playing a little game analyzing all the best hitters in his league in terms of batspeed, swing path, timing, and approach. For instance, we each on our own analyzed the best power hitter on his travel team using those 4 criteria. Then we compared notes, and it turns out we came up with the same answer: our best hitter has avg. batspeed, but a great swing path, timing (seldom fooled or out over the front foot) and approach at the plate.

My point is that you should do everything you can to sell your "pupils" on thinking about batspeed and swingpath as the gold standard of powerful hitters. Especially, if they are skeptical teenagers, or in the process of becoming that.

When they get to the 90 ft bsepaths/60 ft mound distance,add "wait and be quick" to the top of the list of swing cues because, in one quick transition as the field dimensions increase, being early on pitches becomes the main problem instead of being late, which bedevils so many hitters on the small diamond.
Skip