How many times have you seen this? A hitter comes to the plate. You know she has a good swing and a good eye for the ball. You’ve seen her rip the ball numerous times in practice and in games. But when the pitcher throws the pitch, she flails weakly at the ball like she just dropped in from the Andromeda galaxy and someone handed her a bat and said go hit.

What you’ve just experienced is what I call the panic swing. It generally happens when the hitter is unprepared physically and/or mentally to hit, but steps up to the plate anyway. There’s no intention to hit the ball hard, or use those mechaniccs you’ve been working on with her during the offseason. The posture is more one of defending herself than attacking the ball.

There can be any number of reasons for a panic swing. Some are physical, some are mental. She may lack confidence in herself or her ability to hit, and thus waits until the last possible moment, when she’s sure it’s a strike, to start her swing. Unfortunately by then the ball is on top of her and all she can do is flail. Or, her timing may be way off. Hitting is all about timing, making sure everything not only happens in the proper sequence but at the proper time. If the timing gets off, the sequence may get off, she may skip a couple of steps, or she may just be completely confused.

How does that happen? One way is by overpowering hitters during practice to the point where their timing is destroyed. For example, suppose you have a group of fairly new 10U players and you crank the pitching machine all the way up? You’re thinking you’re preparing them for fast pitching, but what you’re really doing is destroying any sense they have of how to time the pitch. All they can do is try to get the bat there somehow. In the meantime, mechanics break down while their brains learn a new and unrealistic pattern. When they get to a game they’re not sure what to do, so they just freeze until it’s too late.

I saw something similar with some high school players I know last week. They all have good swing mechanics and can hit the ball well. But when I saw them in a game, they were taking panic swings. I found out later that they had spent two weeks practicing hitting without being allowed to load or make a positive move to the ball. They were just expected to swing from their heels in an effort to increase their bat speed. Needless to say, it backfired. They lost their timing and thus weren’t sure when to load, when to stride, and when to swing. So they took panic swings and hoped for the best.

Again, hitting is about confidence and timing. Hitters with high confidence and good timing can often become decent hitters even with poor mechanics — much better than those with great mechanics who can’t time the swing. Of course, the ideal is confidence, timing and great mechanics. A big part of timing is getting through the load/unload phase in time, so the hitter is poised to bring the bat through.

If you see your hitters in panic swing mode, first determine if the issue is confidence or timing. If it’s confidence, get them some drills and self-talk to help them build confidence and reinforce them yourself with encouragement. If it’s timing, have them work on making the negative move and stride sooner, and in a calm, easy fashion. (If you go no-stride, go from load to whatever you use in place of a stride that way.) The core of the swing starts at heel drop. Make sure all the preliminaries are out of the way in time and your hitters will deliver the bat to the ball better.

One of those hitting cues that has been around for years is “take your hands to the ball,” or its cousin “take the knob of the bat to the ball.” The idea is to give hitters something specific to do to get online with the flight of the pitch as it comes in.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work. Unless you’re planning on hitting the ball with the knob of the bat — what I call “pool cuing” the ball — taking your hands or the knob of the bat to the ball actually puts you in a poor position to hit the ball. It leads to dropping the hands among other things, and actually does more to take you off-line than put you on line, particularly since it will cause the barrel of the bat to be above the hands rather than below.

A better cue is to tell hitters to take the fat part of the bat (the barrel) to the ball. It sounds simple, but it makes perfect sense. Of course, there are several things that occur prior to that point, but when it comes to how to take the bat to the ball, the focus is on the fat part. Do that and you’ll find you hit a lot more.

A few posts ago I put up a post about the slug bunt, also known as the fake bunt and slap. Afterwards, Stevepic at the Discuss Fastpitch Forum asked me to post a video of it.

It took a little while to get it, but here it is. It’s Kathleen, one of my players, executing it in the batting cage. Note that she keeps her shoulders forward (mostly) and uses top hand only to make contact. 

Kathleen executes a good slug bunt/fake bunt and slap

In science, the proper way to conduct an experiment is to limit the number of variables to one. In other words, all else is the same except for one thing that changes. That way you know whether the one variable that changed was the cause of the success or failure of the experiment.

We had that opportunity earlier today. We were working with our 18U hitters, which is our usual routine on Sunday mornings. Today was a machine day. We had the Jugs Jr. cranked up to 100%, and as it turned out we were shooting balls from about 30 feet. We actually had planned on going from 35, but the plate was moved up in the cage and we just left it there.

In any case, most of the girls were doing fine, but a few were having some trouble. Mostly, they were swinging under the ball. So we told them to lower their front shoulders as they went to toe touch. This was a point we learned from Deb Hartwig at the National Sports Clinics. She showed how all top hitters have their front shoulders lower than the back at this point. It’s something you don’t hear about in even the latest hitting videos, but it seems essential to great hitting.

Lowering the front shoulder was the only change we made. Yet in every case the hitter went from missing completely to hitting the ball solidly. At this point it was more of a reminder than a real change — they all know they need to be in that position. But sometimes they forget, especially in the heat of high-speed BP.

If you have hitters struggling with swinging under the ball, or just with dropping their back shoulders to go into launch, have them work on lowering the front shoulder. It works!

One of the most fun short game techniques is the slug bunt, also known as the fake bunt and slap. You show bunt, getting the corners to come crashing in. You then pull back and slap the ball into play, past the corners crashing in and into one of the holes where one of the middle infielders used to be. Properly executed it can create all kinds of havoc, getting runners in motion and possibly scoring runs where they might not have been scored otherwise. It can also create some nice momentum that could result in a big inning.

Of course in order to get all of that you first have to be able to execute the skill. That can be more of a challenge than you might think. It seems easy as you describe it — show bunt, pull the bat back to your shoulder (without turning your body), then slap the ball when it comes in. Yet I’ve noticed that a lot of hitters seem to have trouble figuring out exactly how to do the actual slap.

I think it’s because there’s a difference between slapping like this and standard hitting. From what I’ve observed, hitters try to use the same technique for both. But there’s a critical difference in what the hands do. In a standard hit, when it’s time to launch the hands you pull the bottom hand, then drive the top hand through. But in a slap or slug bunt, it’s all top hand. Pulling the bottom hand first puts the hands too far out in front and doesn’t allow for a good, strong, quick slap.

Once the bat head is back to the shoulder, have your hitters launch the bat using the top hand only. It should snap forward smartly. The bottom hand just rides along to help balance the bat.

One other thing. Many hitters have a tendency to start too low, even on a regular bunt. On the slug bunt it’s death. You need to hit the ball down. It’s better to start out higher and chase the ball down if needed. The hitter will at least be headed in the right direct, and will be more likely to hit the top half of the ball.

My previous post on timing the weight shift has spurred some comments on when exactly it happens. In one of the comments, Mike suggested he would like to see what a good hitter does when he/she doesn’t swing. Is the weight shifted because the hitter committed, or is it part of the setup to hit.

I just happen to have a video shot by Coach Rich of Albert Pujols. It’s not a standard 30 fps video (it was shot on a digital still camera) so I hope it plays ok. But you can clearly see here that Pujols shifts his weight onto his front foot , as part of the stride. without swinging several times. The hit doesn’t come until the end. Also interesting is that it doesn’t look like he has much intention of hitting the first pitch. Seems like he makes sort of a token effort, at least compared to what he does later.