I know it's been a challenge to get much baseball in so far this season with all the rain we've, had but with a lot of the younger divisions starting practices this week I thought I'd spend a couple minutes on some really valuable pre-season hitting tips.

 

By the end of May, I will have completed roughly my 15,000th private lesson (no exaggeration) in my 20+ year coaching career - I have seen A LOT of Little League baseball swings in my life and have identified a few key things that all players ages 5-12 can improve on.

The concepts I'd like to talk about today are 1) Balance and 2) Simplicity.

 

Let's start with Balance:

 

Hitting a baseball is the single hardest thing to do in sports; we must hit a round ball (moving towards us) with a round bat (moving in the opposite direction), while simultaneously trying to figure out in a split second where and when the ball is going to arrive in the hitting zone.  That's not easy to do, and it's the reason why the best players in the world only get a hit about 3 out of 10 times.

What makes achieving consistent hard contact even more difficult is when a young hitter loses his balance at some point in the swing.  The pitch is moving and the bat is moving, but when additional excess head and body movement is added to the swing, we're in big, big trouble.

 

Maybe your young hitter loses his balance because he takes a huge step forward toward the pitcher, or leans towards the ball with his front shoulder, or steps away from the ball, or falls back on his heels, or shuffles his feet - or sometimes even a combination of all of these things.

 

Step 1 to getting control of the swing is to focus on balance.  Have your hitter take 10 full speed practice swings where he starts balanced in his good athletic set-up position, stays balanced during the swing, and finishes in a balanced position.  The only thing he should be thinking about during these dry swings is staying balanced!  Even without swinging at a ball this can be hard to do without focus.

 

By learning to maintain balance throughout the swing, his eyes will be able to accurately relay to his brain where the ball is actually going and how fast it's moving, AND he'll be able to physically have a much better chance of getting his barrel to the ball.  

 

This brings me to my 2nd concept: Simplicity.

 

Hitting a baseball hard is extremely difficult but not very complicated, from a technical standpoint.  In the most basic terms, all we have to do to hit a baseball hard is get the barrel to the ball, while the barrel is going fast.  That's it.  

 

When the swing gets complicated with a big step, or long arms, or lots of head movement, or feet that shuffle, or shoulders diving, or knees collapsing, accomplishing the very simply act of getting the barrel to the ball becomes much, much, much more difficult to do.

 

A lot of the pre-season swings I see remind me of the crazy inflatable flailing arm guy you see outside Jiffy Lube - body parts randomly flying in every direction:

 

 

What a youth baseball swing should look like is this:

 

 

So before we focus on the more technical aspects of hitting like bat path to the ball, or generating power from the lower half, or how to hit pitches in different locations, let's work really hard to get our hitters to learn how to take balanced, simple swings.  You'll find that they immediately start making more consistent contact and then, from a long-term teaching standpoint, they'll have a much easier time learning and applying new mechanical concepts if they've first learned how to control their bodies during the swing.

 

Good luck!