In this the age of technology I would like to issue a word of caution to all the aspiring hitting coaches: it ain’t that easy! There is no one way to hit! Need proof? Turn on the playoffs or the World Series and look at the great hitters. They are all different! Every great hitter is an original.
Right now there is a movement afoot to follow a couple of internet gurus who teach the same sit and spin swing and claim that every good hitter hits their way. I have no intention of bad-mouthing any coach who has spent as much time studying hitting as those two guys and they have done a good job creating drills and promoting work ethic and physicality to have positively impacted many players already. The thing is, very few hitters actually swing exactly the way they teach. 40% of the population are aerial movers and as such cannot sit and spin.
You see, every athlete has 13 body preferences as well as certain visual skills that tell the athlete what he can and cannot do. What’s the best way to see the ball? What’s the best way to move and deliver a blow? How do I load? How do I achieve balance and control? etc. etc. Not only that, but the way a young player is first introduced to hitting a baseball goes a long way into determining the structure of his swing. Most athletes have played enough baseball by the time they are 12 years old to already have a good idea of how they are most successful and comfortable unless they have been coached by a cookie-cutter guy who made them do something else.
Therein lies the problem. Is your student doing what his body tells him to do or is he doing what the instructor told him to do?
In baseball, athletes are either aerobic or terrestrial movers, meaning they primarily use the muscles in the front of their body or the back of their body. They achieve balance with the weight on the front of the feet or on the heels. Are they top or bottom hand dominant? When you take into consideration the 13 possible motor preferences, the 4 visual preferences, the tremendous variance in limb lengths, lever systems, flexibility, mobility, strength levels of certain body parts, you have a better chance of winning the Mega Lottery than identifying how exactly someone should hit. For example, there is an inordinate number of Hall of Famers and All Stars that are cross dominant, meaning they bat the opposite way they throw. There is also a higher-than-normal number of stars that either switch hit, come from countries where they had nothing but big old wood bats, or they started so early they could only swing a bat if they used their bottom hand at least as much if not more than the top hand! Make no mistake–Hall of Fame swing structure calls for the hitter to use his bottom hand.
Photo during one of The Hit Doctor® USA Baseball Camps
Now that we see the difficulty of being a great hitting coach let me give you a few tips:
- Find out all you can about motor preferences.
- Read a book, watch a video, and or talk to a hitting guru every day for a minimum of an hour.
- Work with as many kids each day as you can. Identify how they make their outs.
- Ask other coaches for their opinions of what they would do and why.
- Have your students keep a notebook.
- Check their notebooks or apps on a regular basis.
- Log player swing scores and bat metrics on a regular basis.
- Have your hitter’s parents video tape his practices and game At Bats and send them to you.
- Watch your students play or call them after games to ask them how they did, how they felt, what they were thinking, who they faced, and how he pitched them.
- Create good hitters by creating students of hitting.
The video shows Coach Joe Barth coaching for a drill demonstration
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