One thing we think is really important for all our hitters before the season starts is to make sure we know where each player’s Home Run Alley (or extra base lane) is.
Years ago when I first started charting every swing in both practice and games I had a young hitter nicknamed “Cheese” who was leading our team with a batting average of .500 halfway through our season. I was so busy trying to get the bottom of the lineup to get above the Mendoza line (.200) that it wasn’t until mid-season that I really looked at Cheese’s charts. When I did I realized he was hitting over .700 below his belt and less than .200 above it. What’s more, all his doubles and homers were on low pitches.
In talks with Cheese himself, who was a very smart player, he recognized he was swinging at a lot of high pitches early in the count and putting himself out because those pitches were strikes and he thought he should swing at all strikes.
Truthfully I had never really talked about it with my players before, but from that point on Cheese and I agreed that for the rest of the season he would swing at pitches “belly button down” until he had two strikes, at which time he would shorten up , get into his two-strike approach, and put the ball in play. To make a long story short, for the rest of the season Cheese hit over .700 and took his slugging percentage through the roof with lots of extra base hits.
Since then we have taken the idea of identifying HR Alley for everybody and we have gotten quite good at it! The key is to identify the size and shape of it–not in relationship to the plate–but rather in relationship to the hitter’s body!
Once we know exactly where his Happy Zone is we can move our position in the box to make sure that the pitches our opponent is throwing are coming through our HR Alley. There is no sense looking for pitches or locations he never throws.
The results have been quite staggering! HR Alley.
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