[tdarko]

[ QUOTE ]
What I've been saying to help with the hand path are:
-Stick your rear elbow into your side (helps eliminate bat drag)
-Utilize a "trigger" stride (helps block the front leg and understand rotation while keeping the head still)
-Hands move around the body, not to the ball

[/ QUOTE ]

This is good. "Getting the body out of the way of the swing" is some of the best advice I ever received years ago--and was told it again later when I was learning how to pitch. Really good stuff.

I love the elbow into the side, that is a power position--every good hitter and big league hitter does this, you have to do this for a ton of reasons. Such a great concept.

You don't want bat drag of course but something that has been a mistake for so many years is bat path to the ball. Everything I have read you do a good job w/ bat path---and those gifs are the best thing ever!

Anyway, all our lives we were always taught to "swing down on the ball." The reason big league hitters are so good is that their hitting zone is so large (what I was talking about when I said "big zone"). What I mean by this is when you swing down on the ball (this is stuff you already know, kind of just rambling) the barrel of the bat is out of the zone for most of the bat path until it strikes the ball--then if you have timed the pitch right it is in the strike zone briefly and then out of the zone again. The reason that isn't good is that you have to time each swing relatively perfect to give yourself a chance to center the baseball, resulting in a ton of foul balls and obv missed pitches.

Take the gif at the beginning of the thread: Using live and independent hands and keeping that elbow "locked" into that side the barrel is now lagging through the zone. Such a weird term b/c it implies slowness, but that is what the term drag implies. We want bat lag, the barrel to sweep behind the plate, through the heart of the plate and then out in front and extended. That is hitting in a big zone like in the gif, watch the barrel of his bat. What this does is reduce the need for timing each pitch. For instance, let's say you mis-time a pitch badly and are way late--hitting in that big zone and with the barrel behind the plate will give you a chance to drive a ball to the opposite field. Big leaguers do this all the time, we watch games and see them do it and it looks like an accident but it isn't...they swing in such a big zone that they are giving themselves the best possible chance to drive the ball. Then let's say you are way early, w/ that barrel staying in the zone for so long--even way out in front of the plate this allows for those balls you are early on to be centered and hit for HR's much of the time.