Whenever a player is in a slump, they will do anything to get out of it. They will try any advice if they are desperate enough. And usually there is no shortage of people looking to give them advice. Before their first at bat, a teammate might tell them they have to ” get the front foot down earlier.” The hitter heads to the plate confused and overwhelmed. They are not focused properly and they swing at a bad pitch. Their coach tells them they are “pulling their head out”. They try to focus on their head and because they are in a state of “paralysis by analysis” take a perfect pitch right down the middle for strike 2. Their parent yells from the bleachers “don’t drop your back shoulder”. The hitter tries to make all these swing changes all at once and whiffs at a normally hittable pitch. This method of improvement is a recipe for disaster.
First of all, a lot of these common phrases that are yelled at the player are simply not helpful and are incorrect as to what elite hitters actually do. I explain more about this in a previous blog post you can see here.
Also, the baseball swing is an extremely fast movement and it is almost impossible to diagnose mechanical flaws with the naked eye. You must do this with slow motion video or other technology. Most parent are not doing this, and even if they were, they are not qualified to analyze the swings.
But, even if the parents/coaches/teammates/umpire…. whomever, is giving good advice, when the player is hitting it is not the time to give that advice. Hitting is already difficult enough. Trying to control and alter your ingrained movements, all while a ball is thrown at you at high speed, is next to impossible. The advice givers are trying to help the players performance but in reality they are hurting the players performance.
A fastball can reach the plate in 0.4 seconds, and a good hitter only has about 0.25 seconds to decide if they should swing and where they should swing to make contact with the ball. This is not enough time to be trying to make changes. Especially under the pressure of a game, a hitters body and brain will not allow them to try any new movement. They badly want to produce for the team and make contact. The hitters brain will signal the body to use the movement patterns it is familiar with and that have the best chance of making contact with the ball.
That is why swing changes must happen in practice. Even in practice, some hitters brains will not allow them to make the swing changes. Their brain is used to trying to hit the ball in one way and it won’t allow them to change. Their brains are too concerned with hitting the ball as best as they can rather than trying to improve their movements. In those cases you must have the hitter hit a ball off of a tee, so they don’t have the pressure of hitting a moving ball. Or in a lot of cases you must have a hitter not even hit a ball at all. Hitting a heavy bag or rotating with a pole, might be the only way to break their movement patterns and train them their bodies to allow them to swing in a different way.
It takes thousands of swings to train the hitter to move differently. After thousands of repetitions of more optimal movement in practice, their brains will start to realize they can swing in this new way and still perform. Only then will they start to swing with these better mechanics in games.
