- Donny Buster, Swing Buster, Selma, Alabama

The most crucial part of hitting is having the hands come to cocked position when the front foot touches down. One only need to watch a little league game to figure this out. Just sit and count how few kids actually do this. The corollary might be that I can go to a LL practice and say ≥keep your bat cocked right here and your lead elbow bent  until you foot touches and hit≤ and make the entire team hit remarkably better in 45 minutes.
 
The loopy pitches and wild pitches of youth ball make upper body mechanics actually more crucial than lower body mechanics during this period of play and development. It is hard to stride to a balanced point and swing at a ball coming down or at you.  So the youngest kids  that learn how to pre load and unload the upper body have more success regardless of what they doing below the waist. Even with other imperfections concerning stride , swing plane, and balance,  maintenance of this cocked hand position until launch will insure some very good pop. For the immature batters it is advisable to have the bat near the launch point, centered behind the head , with cocked hands and hit the ball hard with the hips. Getting to the contact zone with the hands leading the barrel is key here and the key later too.
 
With only 600 pro ball players and 4 million youth to high school  ball players itπs a no brainer as to why the vast majority hit poorly. Most of you reading this have the most influence in the larger group as I do.
 
Cocked hands can be demonstrated easily. To demonstrate this point as a coach, stand a bat on the knob end vertically on a table. Ask you player to lay his arm down from elbow to wrist flat on this table and place his bottom hand around the bat handle.....thats a 90 degree angle. Now tilt the bat forward until it almost touches the table. This hinge point and this range of motion is the pendulum that every mechanical thing you will read about in this contest is working toward energizing. Staying inside the ball is really about hitting the ball somewhere between the 90 starting point and the forward angle where the bat almost lays on the table.
 

Well, what about the stride, the balance, the torque, the hip drive ? ....if the hands are not cocked at toe touch the rest doesnπt matter because all the rotational forces  from torque need to be focused to uncock you hands. You cannot fire what never comes  cocked. In the early years of youth ball this IS the problem.  Further discussions about hand and arm action will really be about how to get them moving in a pattern to stay flat through the zone longer.  By doing this batters can uncock this hand to forearm angle transfer this energy,  stay in the plane of the pitch longer and widen the timing window.
 
You see there are three rotation centers involved in hitting. They are...

• the turning hips,
• the turning shoulders,
• and the more obscure rotation center between the flat hands.

The mid section or torso is a spring that winds and unwinds.  The kinetic chain links these three centers sequentially nearly depleting the energy out of each center until it is focused between the hands as the knob pulls back and the bat tip goes forward.


The lower center/ hip action is definitely a teach but as said before a difficult teach in youth ball because of pitch location and pitch angle issues.  As kids progress in the game, they  must learn to form a solid front side base to rotate around. You must form it early enough to transfer this hip energy up into the torso in time to swing the bat.  We want to get our feet the optimum distance apart to thrust our hips. We can do that through a linear stride as a timing device and  to capture momentum to add force to uncoil the hips. We can chose to coil during the load and uncoil into launch with no stride. I ask hitters to stride to the launch position and stop.  I tell them to drop their bat and rebound a basketball.  If they stayed back too much or if they lunged it is sorely apparent to me and them.
 

The upper body must create some resistance to the lower body rotation so the hips can lead but in an unconscience sense. In other words,  we need a way to just swing and  the hips go first...not think hips go first. There is a discussion of 'how to' below.
 
There are three basic bat positions and one common launch slot. The launch slot is always the 45 degree diagonal between the head and the shoulder regardless of the starting position. All bat positions  can start with what we call two 90s.  The first is the wrist to forearm angle and the second is the lead elbow. When you draw a line down the lead arm, over the forearm and up the bat  it  forms a outline of a  U. If you rotate this shoulder unit back by turning rearward until the lead elbow is behind the belly button( rock the U),  then you are loaded properly to have a short radius swing. The difference between golf and baseball is the bent lead elbow forms another hinge point or pendulum. Golf is a shoulder / wrist double pendulum and baseball is a shoulder/ elbow/ wrist,  triple pendulum swing. 
 
To get the upper body resistance,  some batters can rotate their shoulders back around the spine maintaining two eyed contact as the hips uncoil into toe touch. Some have called this over lapping the load and the unload cycle. Since it involves the upper body moving opposite of the lower body many find this difficult. Those that can do it often just load and unload in the 45 slot. Luis Gonzales would be a great example
 
Some need to elevate their rear elbow to get in a more optimum position to pull the rear shoulder back and around. . (try to pull a bow back from a low elbow position...not easy. ). When you elevate the rear elbow the bat barrel goes over the helmet and out of the 45 slot. The top of this load cycle can be seen as the high rear elbow and the bat splitting the helmet. The momentum of the high rear elbow coming down can be conserved and converted to rotary power just like stride momentum converts to a harder hips turn. The bat as always returns to the 45 slot at launch as it flattens to get on plane. Clips of Chipper from the left side show him employ this load.
 
The third bat position used by many power hitters involves putting the hands in front of the collar bone with the rear elbow high and the bat tipped to the pitcher. The advantage of this is the bottom hand is under the top and the bat is in a vertical plane with cocked hands( top hand in a pronated position). The batter must reposition the bat to hit because the wrist would bind at this steep descent. Pujols is a poster kid for this method.
 

People that cannot load back as they rotate the hips to toe touch can use this mechanism to overcome their deficiency.  Its as natural as throwing.  They will now be forced to take their hands back as they stride and moreover the hand action (top hand around bottom as the bat  flattens ; which it will to get on plane) gets the knob going to the oppo box. When the shoulders and hips continue turning then the knob is  redirected and the hand path is a  perfect circle. The method creates great opposite field mechanics and a versatile swing with torque. As always the bat launches in the 45 slot. A view from behind a batter will likely show the hands closer to the tip of the rear shoulder by this upper body pattern because the hands and bat weight create the most resistance.
 
Batters must learn how to rotate effectively and forcefully but the ability to synchronize these three centers trumps strength when it comes to bat speed. All  MLB players have their hands cocked at toe touch(except Jeter). Think how good he would be if he did....lol. 

Hitting is a progressive skill. It will morph from youth ball to college and beyond in a predictable pattern based more on plane of pitch than other factors. From cocking the hands as the initial focal point for the little guys to putting the kinetic chain together seamlessly for the developing player, it is truly a journey and a fun one!