With the onset of Spring Break, only four players made it to practice on Sunday. But that’s OK, this gave me the opportunity to work with them individually on their hitting. We always hit at Saturday practice as we always tend to have more room to hit the ball.
To start, I had them working on the fence drill, where they place their bat at their bellybutton and stand the bat’s length away from the fence. The purpose of the drill is for them to learn to get their front hips and legs into the baseball instead of using only their arms. If they step forward first and turn their front hips at the ball, then they’ll be able to finish their swing. If they drop their hands first, however, then their bat goes right into the fence and they won’t be able to swing at all.
Next came the batting tee. To my surprise, there were not very many bad swings on the batting tee at all. My players all had nice, level swings that produced ground balls and line drives. What I did notice, though, is that a lot of my players have backwards movement in their hands before they swing. Essentially, they all start their swing by moving their hands up and back before moving them forward. All this does is lengthen their swings and have them take longer to get to the baseball. This needs to stop, and the batting tee and soft toss are the perfect drills to correct this.
We ended with soft toss, always a favorite. A lot of my players seem to like the low pitches as they connected with them a lot better than the other pitches that I tossed up at them. This is evidenced by their bat angles. They all have very high bat angles in their swings, meaning that they can reach the low pitches better than the high ones. While there is nothing wrong with this, they do need to be able to hit pitches all over the strike zone.
As practice ended, I learned that one of my former players who made Select now practices immediately after us at the same field. It will be nice to see him each week.
The Marlin Way 