Posted by: Jack Mankin (MrBatspeed@aol.com) on Thu Jul 12 12:09:32 2007

>>> Jack, if I'm understanding your last question, my answer would be perpendicular to the flight of the ball. My reasoning is that if the there's a good pitch to get after low and away, I can't imagine how it would make sense to stress getting the hands that low or, paralell, to the ball. My basic approach is always to stress keeping the head of the bat level to the BALL. When you refer to coaches that say"keep the hands inside the ball", which at times may lead to the hitter hitting around the ball, that isn't at all keeping hands inside the ball.The easiest way for a hitter and, age certainly comes into play, but if we're talking about a player of say 12ish and older, if they keep that back elbow tucked into their side when the back shoulder drops, THATS inside the ball. Low and away, just try to have them look to let the pitch get deep instead of having them cast the hands away from the body. Again, I'm no expert, but it's really frustrating for me to see people instructing kids that don't have any idea of bare bone fundementals, and keep stressing buzz words that they them selves don't fully understand. <<<

Hi Dadshitting

You are correct. An overhead clip of a high level swing shows that as they initiate the swing, their hands are being first accelerated perpendicular to the flight of the incoming ball rather than back toward the pitcher (parallel with the ball). I have no problem with your interruption of “keeping hands inside the ball.” As I stated before, my problem with the cue is when I ask most coaches to demonstrate the mechanics of “keeping hands inside the ball,” they exhibit driving the top-hand straight back at the pitcher. This would keep the hands inside the ball, but would also produce weak results to all fields.

Jack Mankin