Made a breakthough in hitting, possibly pitching

[kyleb]

I figured I'd post this here, since no one anywhere else is likely to care, and if you guys don't care, well, too bad, it's my forum.

I went to the local hitting cage to get back in the swing of things since I've been dedicating practices to throwing off the mound, long toss, fielding grounders at short, and maybe some soft toss hitting. It had been awhile since I just hit off an Iron Mike machine throwing 80 mph meatballs down the middle of the plate, and I was pretty embarassed to foul a ton back to the screen and pop up a ton of them.

After about 5 minutes of this, I stopped the machine, reviewed the video I was taking of myself, and saw that my front foot was getting down late. This is a habit I've had for awhile, and it's easy to fix if I'm practicing, so I worked on that and had no problem after another 5 minutes.

While picking up the balls to put back in the machine, I started thinking of the popular hitting poses that Bonds, A-Rod, and other great hitters are often photographed in. The word that came to mind was "connection."

I started drilling the balls to left-center as I cleared my hips (tdarko's cue of "getting the body out of the way" helped here) and hitting what would have been obvious doubles through the gap. Then, I started experimenting with an idea of "disconnection," strangely enough. In doing so, I thought about opening the legs first, using a very short/no stride approach, and spinning on the front foot like Richie Sexson, Jim Thome, and Edgar Renteria are famous for. In doing so, I generated a lot more power and felt a "disconnection" between the lower half that eventually pulled my upper body around. When I tweaked with this for a bit and started making consistant contact, my hits were going to all parts of the cage with significantly more power - at least 15% of them were no-doubter home runs, too. It also seemed to lower the stress on my entire body, especially my back (where I used to get muscle strain after a long hitting session).

I will attempt to use this in pitching, along with some other disconnection ideas and cues to keep my upper body stable while I open the lower body first. It's interesting how I feel that I have mastered the idea of connection in the swing, but need to implement "disconnection" to increase the power and bat speed of my swing.

Pretty cool revelation.

[tdarko]

Kyle,

This is good stuff. You are getting a lot more leverage with your swing right? When you implement this w/ pitching post the results, I am curious.