Hitting Flaws

Many hitters in baseball tend to make the same mistakes over and over again when they hit. According to Troy Silva, the author of 9 Innings of Hitting, the most common mechanical errors in a hitter's swing, "...pulling the head and hands off the ball; getting long to the ball, or 'casting'; rolling over, or not getting extension through the ball; lunging; dipping; and wrapping" (397). The causes of these swing flaws are bad habits, which include timing, being scared of the ball, bad pitch selection, and knowing what kind of pitch is being thrown (397). Being a baseball player, I strongly agree with Silva that these are the most common mistakes hitters make.

One of the problems that I have as a hitter is that when I don't get a hit, the mistake I make is that I lunge. Lunging occurs "when the body weight shifts and doesn't stop. Instead of shifting and then hitting with the front leg straight, the front knee bends and the weight shift continues through the swing" (475). As you can see above, I am lunging to the pitch which resulted in a weak ground ball. Silva suggests that you can fix this problem by teaching the hitter to stay back after the body weigh shifts (482). At practice, I used Silva's advice on solving my problem.

The next time I hit, I took Silva's advice and I stressed that I needed to keep my weight back. This helped a lot and this adjustment allowed for my swing to be more consistent so that I wasn't lunging as much. Above, you can see that my swing is balanced and that my front leg is straight just like Silva suggested. I found that this piece of advice very helpful for my swing because it seemed to keep the weight of my body back instead of lunging forward. I will continue to focus on keeping my weight back and my front leg straight in order to eliminate lunging and see if this improves any other parts of my swing.

Q: What flaws do you commonly find in your swing that you want to fix?
Citation: Silva, Troy. 9 Innings of Hitting. Indiana: Dog Ear Publishing, 2013.