I control a thing when I hold it in my hand. No freedom for the thing, no surprises for me. Until the thing is out of my hand. Now there’s no control, the thing does what it will, leaving me to hope for the best. This gives control an anxious touch, as much thought and energy needs to go into establishing and maintaining control of the thing as actually using the thing. Naturally then control is very limited as well as stressful.
Command is a different deal. I have command of a thing whether it is in my hand or not. Command gives the thing its freedom out of hand, requires of me trust and understanding. I don’t need to control the thing because I know what it does and why. Therefore whether the thing is currently in hand (or even in sight) or not is of little concern. Once I’ve established command I can commit myself entirely to the actual use of the thing.
Many young hitters approach the game with the intent to control the swing – the movements involved – consciously. Whether those controlled movements are effective or not becomes irrelevant as the game speeds up. What is essential in training hitability is developing command over the movements involved in the swing. To make these movements “natural”, accessible when the brain is busy putting out fires elsewhere – namely “seeing the ball”.
I could use a strikeout. As a hitter, I can use a good strikeout. In reality it took quite a few strikeouts just to learn how to identify the good ones. The good ones go according to plan. The good ones provide answers, not questions.
I can use bad strikeouts too, simply by recognizing that they are not good strikeouts. Bad strikeouts evoke questions and usually a good bit of fear. There’s usually an urge to go ask somebody what’s wrong with my swing or my move (there’s never anything wrong with my swing or my move). Sometimes a bad strikeout alerts me to the reality which is a barrel is no longer the expectation or even the aspiration. Let’s just get a quality plate appearance on the books, be present in the actual competition between me and the pitcher. If the result of said plate appearance is a strikeout – so be it.
Even when I’m swinging it well I can use a good strikeout, probably even more so then – simply as a reminder that this game is still hard, the pitchers will adjust, there’s still work to do. Strikeouts also provide context for the more easily-appreciated outcomes as a hitter. What’s a walk-off grand slam without a good strikeout to end the game with the tying run on third?
Thing is, anyone could use a home run, or a hit, or even a barreled out. These are the tools we all want to use, the feedback every hitter wants to interpret. An easy way to separate yourself in any arena is to embrace the work no one else wants to do or – in this case – use the tools no one else wants to use.
When I realize how useful a strikeout can be, when I appreciate it’s value in my development, the fear goes. The outcomes of my at-bats change from either being great or terrible to either being great now or great later. There are no more threats and hitting – actually hitting, the whole experience of it – changes.
An unfortunate reality for a hitting coach is hitters tend to be more interested in what you have to say when they are struggling. Those are usually the best conversations. This is why it is important for a hitting coach to have a solid understanding of and relationship with failure as a hitter, part of that understanding being how much failure a top-tier hitter experiences in their best years, let alone a league average guy who may be underperforming halfway through this season.
Knowing how much failure comes with the territory – especially with the struggling hitters you will talk to the most – it makes sense that you would make a bigger impact teaching the proper way to fail than how to succeed. Learning not just how to endure failure but how to interpret and learn from it. When to adjust versus when to stay the course. Even when the lesson is about processing success, it’s more likely the hitter will not be ready to receive the lesson until they are struggling again.
A .900 OPS season does not feel like a .900 OPS season for the entire season – mainly because it is not a .900 OPS for the entire season. One day it’s .250, the next it’s 2.250, then it’s .000 for a few days, then it’s 1.500 for a week, .700 for a month, so on and so forth. Often what separates the tiers of players at the higher levels of the game is not only the ability to maintain confidence when performance is down but also to process the transitions from low to high, high to low that are bound to occur.
So much of what dictates success or failure in hitting is out of the hitter’s control that it’s not crazy to say that as the season goes hitting gets easier and harder more than hitters get better or worse. Both happen, to be clear. The thing is the high performing hitter often overestimates his ability to affect his outcomes. This is most true when a hitter gets “hot”, so when a hitter transitions from a stretch of mostly great outcomes to mostly not great outcomes they are more likely to assume that 1.) it’s because they were either doing something or not doing something then that they are doing or not doing now, 2.) that if they rectify that discrepancy or figure out something new they will begin seeing the same outcomes as before. These types of false assumptions is where pressing starts. The results don’t show up, so the hitter tries harder to do what they were doing before. Thing is when they were hitting really well before they were present, they weren’t trying to recreate a swing from the past. Now instead of just being the same hitter hitting in a tougher environment, a fully capable, competitive hitter having a rough go of it they are now also a less effective version of that hitter due to self-imposed mental interference.
So what do you do to break this cycle? The answer is infuriatingly simple – give up. No, I don’t mean quit baseball. Give up means letting go of perceived control (and responsibility) for the poor results – “charge it to the game”. Evaluate what you are actually in control of (and responsible for). You are in control of your preparation, your effort, and your perspective. You can put in the work before the game to put yourself in the best position – give yourself the best chance – to have success. You can play hard, and as hard as it can be sometimes you can find a perspective that allows you to be a positive teammate. As counterintuitive as it may sound the best way to go about finding – or getting back to – that perspective might just be accepting that sucking at the plate is something that every hitter is required to do from time to time, and this is your turn.
So the next time you catch yourself pressing remember this, and decide if you want to fight yourself (and the game) – good luck – or embrace the suck the way great hitters do. Happy Hunting!
Everybody knows that timing is important to hitting. What a lot of people fail recognize is as hitters and coaches we tend to fixate on timing as it pertains to moving with the pitcher’s throwing motion, or timing in terms of the mechanical sequence of the swing itself. A critical timing aspect to hitting that hitters usually don’t gain a true awareness of until they get to higher levels of the game is the tempo of the at-bat itself – how fast (or slow) one pitch happens after another.
There is not a one size fits all tempo for pitchers or hitters. As we saw with the introduction of the pitch clock in the MLB where many well-qualified players on both sides went through some form of an adjustment process learning to navigate at-bats under strict time constraints. This is not to say anything about the pitch clock more so to point out that some hitters do better with more time than others and the same can be said for pitchers.
While there is variability when it comes to optimal tempo for individual performance in one at-bat for both pitchers and hitters in a broader sense there is a “time of possession” effect that comes into play when we talk about two teams competing in a 7-9 inning game. The more time a team can spend hitting and the less time they can spend playing defense the better. This is to say that up until the point where it hinders the individual athlete’s ability to perform at a high level hitters help their team win by taking their time within their at-bats and pitchers help their team win by working quickly.
More on the individual performance side of this is a feel versus real conversation. For hitters when we are locked in the game slows down. A better way to put this is when the game slows down we lock in.
Now the question is how to slow the game down instead of how to lock in. Let’s start with this : what does it mean to say the game is slowed down? To put it simply when the player has fully processed the scenario from a strategic and emotional standpoint they free themselves up to focus fully on the task at hand. This is flow state if you will, being able operate effectively with no mental interference. Important to note we get here by processing relevant information effectively not necessarily by simply blocking out all information.
So now that we’ve covered what slowing the game down is we get to how to do it. This is where breathing comes in, or more specifically the hitter’s focus and awareness of their breath. Between pitches, having a routine for getting focus back to the breath gives the hitter time and space to process whatever relevant information has come about to that point – the hitter may or may not know exactly what information will be relevant before they step out of the box, still a good idea to create the time to process it – as well as get oxygen into the brain (important) and muscles. Besides the actual physical effects of breathing focusing on it gives you something to think about other than what your front elbow is doing. Most of us haven’t reached a level of zen where we can think about nothing on command, next best option is find something to think about that aides our physical task or at the very least does not interfere.
The thing about structure that is often misconstrued is that it inherently stifles freedom and creativity. In reality it is by establishing and enforcing effective structures in our practice that we free ourselves to find new, creative solutions, effectively expanding the space we can control. In the swing big, complex, noisy movements looks like, feels like freedom. However, if those big moves reduce the hitter’s margin for error and in turn their adjustability that “athleticism” is actually a restriction, only allowing the hitter to experience success under certain conditions. Being able to accomplish the same tasks, check the same boxes with less/quieter movements allows the hitter to repeat their swing more consistently.
This concept applies to how we approach our cage and batting practice time as well. It is the value of the boring routine. The hitter and/or coach can identify a small number of key checkpoints that can be addressed with a simple, highly repeatable – albeit possibly boring – routine. This cuts down on time the hitter spends chasing their tail – rehashing the same conversations, finding new ways to attack the same problems. At the youth/high school levels this can free up time to talk about/address other aspects of hitting. For example, instead of spending 45 minutes of an hour session every week figuring out how to effectively turn the barrel a player and/or coach may consider implementing a 10 minute routine for that specific issue. This not only allows the hitter to continue the work on their own, it frees up 30 minutes per session to address things like hand-eye coordination and approach/strategy, or of course just to get more reps (at the youth level nothing is going to add more value than an uptick in focused, quality reps). At the college and professional levels – especially full season pro ball – hitters will benefit from conserving mental and physical energy. When you play 5-6 days per week simply figuring out how to “fix” your swing every other day is a costly drain, let alone the 50-100 extra swings hitters tend to take when the new drill fails to give them that “fix” or makes the problem worse. Besides leaving hitters physically and mentally exhausted this type of practice typically does not produce hitters that have the discipline or confidence to perform at the highest levels.
In conclusion for the coach or player reading this I encourage you to consider the structure of your practice – especially when problem solving for common swing issues. By designing simple routines for day-to-day work, efficient flows for your batting practice and private cage sessions you can free up space and time for a more robust hitting conversation and experience.
Part of human nature is having this desire to understand the world around us, to define the rules that govern it. If this, then that. If I swing like this, I’ll catch a barrel. If I swing like that, I’ll roll over. If I think this way I’ll get a hit, if not, I won’t.
The reality of hitting is there are very few – if any – absolutes.
A cue will work for one hitter at one point at time, then work for another hitter at a different point in time. An approach will have you feeling absolutely locked in on Monday, then completely lost on Thursday.
Understanding this, you will do well to detach from the notion of a “right” way to swing, to think about the swing – or hitting in general.
Noise Reduction
Nothing happens in a vacuum. Everything in the swing affects everything in the swing. The kinetic chain has a few links and every time one breaks down the next ones have to compensate
Naturally there’s a lot of noise if your goal is to diagnose the cause behind every miss, especially if we’re focusing closer to the “end” of the chain.
More importantly if you are solving problems at the “end” of the chain, ignoring them closer to the start, progress will likely be unsustainable. This will probably look like a constant stream of new feels and fixes.
There’s two issues with operating this way :
It’s draining, mentally and physically
It robs you – the hitter – of the benefits of consistent practice.
Not only do you get better at anything you do consistently, the more you do something the less mental energy it takes to do it again.
you will do well to detach from the notion of a “right” way to swing, to think about the swing – or hitting in general.
Zoom out, observe greater patterns and diagnose their causes in order to design effective solutions. Also, understand that in hitting you will not solve for every miss, every undesirable outcome. This understanding is how you avoid wasting time and energy fixing the same “problem” every two weeks, or every two swings.
This applies to every aspect of hitting, not just the mechanics. When developing or evaluating an approach there are certain outcomes that you will simply have to charge to the game simply for the sake of continuing to improve using that approach. It is a good idea to anticipate what some of those outcomes are beforehand to avoid emotional knee-jerk adjustments when things go sideways.
A couple more thoughts regarding approach :
The approach doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It fits (or doesnt fit) the game situation where it is applied, it also fits (or doesn’t fit) the hitter who is applying it.
The approach does not necessarily have to match the desired outcome. Missing is an inherent part of hitting. Elite hitters – consciously or subconsciously – have an understanding of the patterns of their misses and factor this understanding into their approach.
K.Y.P
One of the few absolutes when it comes to the process of developing as a hitter is this : the process has to work for you – the hitter. This doesn’t mean your program has to be custom tailored to your movement capabilities or that every drill or exercise has to make you feel like Barry Bonds. What it means is you – the hitter – must have some conviction about your process, a sense that you are doing everything you need to do to be the best hitter you can be.
Developing this conviction in your process starts with developing greater awareness of yourself as a hitter.
Developing greater awareness of yourself as a hitter starts with taking a more proactive approach in your information gathering process. This might look like adding some personal research time, it can also look and sound like you intentionally asking more questions both to coaches and fellow players.
Don’t wait for someone to tell you the right answer. Go gather a bunch of data and figure it out for yourself.
We – the hitting community – have come a long way in terms of performance tracking technology. At this point we can measure pretty much every part of the swing process. Still, the most widely accessible mode of feedback for young hitter is video analysis. Anyone with a phone has the ability to record and analyze their swing. So what is the best way to go about this? What are some common mistakes to avoid? Let me walk you through a few things to consider when breaking down your video.
Movement vs positions
Modern technology allows us to be quite in-depth when it comes to breaking down video of a swing. We can slow video down, stop it, speed it up, reverse it and so much more. The positive here is this ability has ultimately led to many significant breakthroughs in how we understand the swing. “Feel vs real” – which is one of the more important concepts in swing philosophy – might not be so widely accepted if we didn’t have slow-motion video to reveal that many of the great hitters’ swing paths didn’t/don’t match up with the way they themselves described the swing.
That being said, this ability also has the potential to lead us astray. Swings don’t happen in slow motion, they don’t stop and start and back up so you can see something real quick.
Not only are swings fast, they are in essence a gathering of energy and a transfer of force. This is obviously an important bit of context that can easily end up getting lost when a hitter overly fixates on “positions” – stopped or oscillating footage.
The body organizes more efficiently to accomplish an external task (in this case applying force to a baseball) than it does to replicate a series of positions. In this way overly fixating on the positions, using conscious energy to attempt to replicate or even adjust them as you actually swing the bat can cost you reaction time as well as attention. Both of which are premium resources when it comes to accurately striking a baseball.
This does not mean you should never pause or rewind your video for further analysis. As stated before this is a valuable tool. The point is your fundamental understanding of what the swing is and how it works will have a tremendous impact on how you process video. For better or worse. So before you break your swing down into a thousand pieces it’s advisable to make sure you’re comfortable with your understanding of what it is you’re looking for.
Perspective
Hitters – especially younger hitters – tend to watch video for the purpose of identifying aspects of their swing to improve. Of course this makes sense and is generally encourageable. Where it can become problematic is when these hitters start viewing every video through the lens of “what’s wrong with this swing”. This is where over-analyzing can start since there are so many more ways for a swing to go wrong than for it to go right. Also, with this perspective video of swings that produce barrels seem to serve the hitter less than videos of swings that don’t. It becomes easy to miss the positive feedback that is available.
My advice is whether the outcome in a video is desirable or not you – the hitter – should try looking for what it is you are doing well in that particular swing. Simply by shifting your perspective to the positive you can change the entire complexion of the process. Your brain is incredibly proficient at finding whatever it is you are looking for. If you are constantly looking for shortcomings you will constantly find them, reminding yourself over and over of everything you are not. The same is true for positive reinforcement. If you train yourself to find things that you love about your swing when you watch video you will become good at finding them, reminding yourself over and over how great you are. This is simply a more fun way to refine your skills and as corny as it sounds we tend to learn faster, more effectively when we are enjoying the process.
You may ask ‘well if I just stop paying attention to the things I’m not doing well, how will I fix my deficiencies’? The answer here is essentially the same : a small yet critical shift in perspective. Instead of characterizing your deficiencies as the presence of an “incorrect” move you can think of them as the absence of the “correct” move. This way correcting your swing issues becomes the process of subtraction by addition. Again this shifts the complexion of the process to the positive. Cues are now to add more of the good moves as opposed to stopping or limiting the bad ones.
Experiencing self vs remembering self vs viewing self
You hit a home run. For the sake of illustrating this concept in this scenario we are going to highlight three distinctly different versions of your self. Self 1 is hitting the home run, Self 2 recounts the experience with your teammates in the dugout, Self 3 watches and re-watches the highlight video after the game. Nobody ever really gets to talk to Self 1, I think that is super important to consider given his proximity to the act. Self 2 and 3 could also be dealing with drastically different information. As time passes certain aspects of your memory of the home run swing will shift and change. On top of that your memory of the act will always be different than watching video. There’s a lot more information, words available to Self 3, given the time and space (perspective). Self 2 is slightly less articulate when it comes to full body positioning. However can provide much better insights into more visceral aspects of the act. The literal feel and the emotion of it, the strategy within the at-bat. Self 1 is only required to express themselves through action. Feel is the only language available. The key here is to make sure the right version of the self is processing the right type of information at the right times. Self 1 doesn’t need Self 3’s analysis of the spine angle on the last swing when you’re in the middle of an at-bat. Self 3 doesn’t need Self 2’s emotion or judgement when reviewing video of the last game. Manage the Selfs’ schedule and workload appropriately to maximize the benefit of video and other performance tracking technology, avoiding the dreaded paralysis by analysis.
As high schools and colleges roll into winter ball alot of young hitters are going through the process of getting back into the rhythm of practicing and playing ball again after a long break. A common theme will be players struggling to get their cage work to translate into their at-bats. More times than not this is simply a matter of players getting enough reps for their timing to calibrate. That being said for those that are fighting for a spot or an expanded role on their team the time this process takes is of the essence. Outside of doing the work to develop the swing and other physical aspects of hitting, here are some simple tips on what you can focus on to improve your experience of hitting in the game and speed up the often frustrating part of the journey that is finding your timing.
Improve your information gathering process leading up to your at-bat
Your plan, your approach play quite the substantial role in your performance at the plate. The quality of that plan oftentimes is determined by what kind of information you – the hitter – are able to gather and process. Knowing this it makes sense that the first place you should look to develop – especially if you’re just getting back to game hitting – is your process for gathering and processing the information the game has to offer.
You may also want to consider exactly what type of information is most useful to you. Just like different drills make sense differently to different hitters. Different pieces of information will be more or less useful to different hitters. On teams that offer scouting reports on opposing pitchers you’ll find some hitters want to know everything about the guy on the mound, others want to know very little. Some want to know which pitches get thrown in certain counts, some just want to know what the “out” pitch is, some (like myself) only want to know what pitches are in the pitcher’s arsenal. It is entirely possible that you are better off with no information about the pitcher except for seeing his delivery for timing purposes. Hypothetically if that was the case it wouldn’t make much sense to be in the dugout flipping through the scouting report binder while the pitcher warms up. On the other hand, if you like to sit pitches in counts, it’d make a lot of sense for you to utilize that same time gathering as much information as the book has to offer. Whether you need more information or to better filter the information you’re getting now simply reflecting on exactly what types of information will help you feel best prepared going into your at-bats is a great way to start designing and refining your information gathering system.
Whether your team has scouting reports or not it’s generally a good idea to find a hitter on your team who has a similar profile – is likely to be pitched to similarly to yourself. This will be someone who’s at-bats you can watch to develop ideas and perspective on how you are/will be pitched to. Start developing a rapport with such hitters, being able to discuss your shared experiences at the plate will open lines of communication that will likely continue to provide useful information over the course of the season.
Improve your pitch-to-pitch routine
The same way your information gathering process needs to be sharp before your at-bat in order to develop an effective approach, your pitch-to-pitch process needs to be sharp in order to digest information effectively enough to make adjustments as the at-bat progresses while maintaining present mindedness enough to compete.
Each pitch changes the complexion of the at-bat both from a strategy standpoint and in how you – the hitter – will see and react to the next pitch. Your pitch-to-pitch routine should allow the hitter space to reflect on these implications and adjust their approach accordingly. This does not necessarily mean you need to step out every pitch and do a complicated math problem, playing chess trying to perfectly predict the next pitch or recall which mechanical fix your hitting coach suggested to fix that last crappy swing. Given the right objective and the understanding of all that goes into a pitch sequence and making the appropriate adjustments as a hitter over the course of the at-bat your subconscious is perfectly capable of handling all of these tasks. Your job is simply to put your body and mind in the right position, give yourself the time and space necessary for this process to unfold.
Lastly, before you – the hitter – get back in the box and look at the pitcher you need some mechanism to clear any mental clutter and re-focus on the simple task of seeing and reacting, swinging. There are many simple yet very effective visualization, breathing, self talk, movement prepping techniques at your disposal to achieve this. For example I would pick a small spot somewhere near the left field (opposite field) foul pole to focus on before I stepped in the box. This had the dual benefit of practicing narrowing my visual focus down to the size of a baseball while also giving the third base coach the impression that I was paying attention to his signs. Whatever your chosen mechanism, the goal is an uncluttered mind with a clear objective.
Improve your perspective
Nobody has to tell you to enjoy your at-bats when you’re hitting well. Catching barrels is fun, and when recent history suggests your chances of catching a barrel are high(er) you relish every opportunity to do so. Hitting is fun because you are hitting well. That statement generally rings true. However, the statement also works in reverse : You are hitting well because hitting is fun. When we look at it from this perspective your feelings towards hitting are no longer simply a result of your performance. It is important to understand not only that your emotional state has a profound impact on your ability to perform at a high level but that you can dissociate feelings of gratitude, enjoyment, and confidence from past results. The key to doing this lies in becoming aware of and setting goals for yourself based on what you enjoy or appreciate about hitting that has little or nothing to do with “getting a hit”. If you can successfully associate your own perceived competency with an aspect of hitting that is highly achievable and very much under your own control (example : how many quality swings did you take today?) you can set yourself up in a feedback loop where you cultivate just as much confidence, get all the same good vibes from an 0-4 performance that you would from going 4-4. This is ultimately what consistency looks like in hitting. Showing up as the same guy, maintaining the same high level of self-belief regardless of what the results say.
So the next time you notice your results (or lack thereof) at the plate are getting you down, take it as a reminder to re-evaluate your perspective, set some new goals, find a way to enjoy the process again.
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