Batting Tips

One Handed Drill for your bottom hand

You might need a lighter bat than your regular bat for this, but technically you should be able to do it with even that bat. But for this drill I have the kids I work with use a t-ball bat.

It involves gripping the bat at the knob with your bottom hand's thumb and forefinger only. Then as you move your hips and torso the right way you should be able to hit with almost as much power as hitting straight away, since the that's how the swing should be done anyway. So keep your head still and on the ball off a tee to start and maybe rock once or twice until you get it, then swing with a powerful rotation.

Keep working at this until you get it and especially keep working at it until you can hit the ball harder, then try your regular tee swing and see if you don't hit the ball better.

Is your bat Rotational or Linear?

What that means is if the hottest selling bat right now is end-loaded then that's what they'll sell. They don't care about the coaching theory around what an end-loaded bat does. It was the same a few years ago when they were trying to take out as much weight as possible, -10, -11.5, all the way to -13. Why don't you see those as much now? Because the current rage is having end-loaded bats.

End-loaded is great if you swing rotationally because as we showed in the drill above, if you can get the bat started with our hips, then the bat flies through the zone and a bat with weight at the end reinforces this.

So what if you like your linear swing and the only bat you can find is end-loaded? Do you buy that bat?

This situation recently came up with a new student of mine. She plays college ball but was struggling at the plate. To compound that, her coach was teaching her in ways she hadn't used on her high school travel teams. (I recognized what she was describing was the coach was teaching a traditional linear swing). To top that all off, her bat was one of the popular models of today and it was end-loaded.

Since she decided it would be best to learn what her coach was teaching than to go through the whole struggle of convincing her coach to let her swing a different way than the rest of the team, I had her work with an evenly weighted bat and after the perfect swing is embedded, she'll need to find a evenly weighted bat that feels comfortable in her hands.

Which reminds me of another tip on choosing a bat -- hold off buying one until you've developed a great swing, as the swing you start learning will be different than the good one and will make the bat feel different.

Make sure you know which swing is best for you and choose the right bat accordingly.

Here is the Little League World Series schedule

Upcoming News

And as I mentioned in my last in my last newsletter I've written a book entitled "How to Make All-Stars, tips and techniques to help you make the team". It's at the editors as we speak. If you're a publisher or you're chomping at the bit to get this, e-mail me. Otherwise, I'll be letting you know how you can get your copy as soon as I have the editing done.

Thanks for reading and talk to you next time.

Coach Andy

6801 Dove St. Ventura, CA 93003

805-642-5827