Baseball Hitting: Hitting A Round Ball, With A Round Bat And Squaring It Up; Is It The Single Most Difficult Feat In All Sports To Accomplish?

Baseball hitting: They hand you a round bat, someone throws a round ball in your direction and you are supposed to square it up.

To add a little spice to the scenario, over time, pitchers have developed numerous ways to make the ball sink, curve, run in, run away and drop like it fell off a table. These pitches are all thrown at varying speeds and often combine two movements, such as a pitch that runs away from the hitter as well as sinks.

Logically, it doesn't compute well. It does, however, lead to that centerpiece of baseball, the pitcher/hitter confrontation.

The art and science of hitting a baseball, the most interesting and talked about aspect of this great game.

Estimated to be the single most difficult feat in all sports to accomplish, it might be better stated that the most difficult part is to hit the ball consistently, day after day, no matter what level you are playing on. Consistentsy is certainly the measure of whether a player is a good hitter or not.

Is hitting a baseball that complex? The steps, or hitting progressions, that put a player in position to hit the baseball are not complex. With time, effort and determination batters have mastered those progressions for almost 170 years, at all levels of the game.

The complexity is created by the small amount of time available to decide if a particular pitch is one you want to swing at. The goal of every young hitter should be to develop and refine those hitting progressions until they occur with no thought process. The requirement to do this is a lot of correct repetitions.

Make sure you know what to do, and practice it correctly over and over. Your mind will learn what you teach it, whether it is right or wrong.

Tony Gwynn - Two Things You Have To Do, Every Time You Go Up To The Plate!

1) Mentally, you have to believe you are a good hitter. You have success by being consistent with your approach.

a) Balance: When you load, if your weight gets out over your front leg, YOU ARE OUT!

b) Front hip opens up, YOU ARE OUT!

2) Once you get to that balanced position, you swing the knob, not the barrel head. If you swing the knob , the barrel will follow in the zone.

TO THE BALL - THROUGH THE BALL!

Sound advice, from one of the most consistent hitters, baseball has ever known. Simplify!

Armed with a series of solid hitting progressions, the hitting process then becomes much more of a mental endeavor than a physical one. The mind is a powerful computer, providing us the opportunity to do spectacular things and achieve tremendous results.

The Theory Of Baseball Is As Simple As That Of Any Field Sport In Vogue, And Herein Lies One Of Its Attractive Features; And Yet, To Play The Game Up To Its Highest Point Of Excellence Requires As Great A Degree Of Mental Ability As Any Known Game Of Ball. ( from, THE GAME OF BASEBALL By Henry Chadwick, 1868)

Mr. Chadwick had the game of baseball figured out very well in 1868. In today's language it might be stated that baseball is an easy game to play; but a hard game to master.

Hitting Tips From the Dugout

.400 Hitters Club

In this modern era, the advent of ESPN and the aluminum bat, this situation is far more prevalent than in Ted Williams era, playing from 1939 until 1960.

Due to the nature of the product, ESPN shows the dramatic highlights of each day, thus the home runs tend to take center stage. While the long ball puts people in the seats, (and we all know chicks dig it,) the downside from a pure baseball perspective is, it creates that “need to hit home runs” in the youth baseball culture, from players and in many cases, coaches and parents.

There are roughly twice as many fly ball and pop fly outs as there are line drive and ground ball outs. Younger players attempting to hit home runs tend to over swing, resulting in pulling their head and creating a long, looping swing, producing more strike outs and fly ball outs.

An additional danger is attempting to “lift “pitches into home runs, a practice better suited to those being paid a premium to do so.

”Line drives and ground balls son, home runs are just line drives gone bad.”

If I had a dollar for every time one of my former coaches said that to one of us. What players see in the media each day makes it harder to get them to concentrate on those line drives and ground balls.

That said, it is worth the effort on our part as coaches to change that thinking, in the interest of enhancing their success level, thus their enjoyment within this game.

Hitting Vision

You won't hit what you don't see; No matter how perfect your swing is!