We have all heard this story before, maybe even experienced it ourselves. We have a good junior year. We put up solid numbers, and figure the upcoming senior year is going to be even better. We work hard and anxiously await the opportunity to improve upon the previous season and get our shot at playing at the next level. However as that season comes and goes, something is wrong: the results aren’t there. In fact, we end up having a better junior year than senior year. What happened?!
That is what this article will be about. It doesn’t even have to be junior to senior year. The goal is to improve each and every year, so if that doesn’t happen, we need to figure out why. Yes, the athlete in this article is myself. However, my goal with this was to look at it as an outsider. Take an objective look and try to find why this athletes’ junior year was better than his senior year, despite putting in some pretty crazy work over the offseason. Let’s get into it!
There is some stuff to get out of the way before we take a look into the swing differences between the two years, which was what I found to be the deciding factor. Both years this athlete put in adequate preparation for the season. I mean that in the form of 200-400 swings, 6 days a week, measuring and tracking the results in a notebook. The athlete was adequately strong during his junior year, but put on additional strength and size his senior year, which should have contributed positive results (and obviously didn’t). What gives?!
The Swing
Junior Year:
Senior Year:
Cool, let’s break them down.
Gather:
Junior year we see some good things going on. The athlete starts with the bat on his shoulder and simply lifts it off and begins “cocking” immediately as he goes into his leg lift. We see him getting into his back hip, sitting down and coiling forward a little bit. Good stuff!
Senior year we see a lot more movement. The athlete gets a huge bat tip forward, mainly controlling it with the wrists. We’ll see this show up later in the swing. Lower half we see a straighter back leg. Whereas we saw the athlete sit a little bit in the first clip, now we see him pop up and coil with a straight back leg as the bat tip gets forward. Still not a terrible lower half, we’ll see where it goes.
Forward Move
Here we see some pretty simple, yet solid movements going on. With the upper half, the athlete is really just maintaining the angle they created earlier. Fairly simple, pulling back, maintaining the space of their hands, waiting to launch. The lower half is where we see a lot of good stuff happening. We see him maintain the sit that was created earlier, carrying the center of mass forward. Near the end of the clip, as the athlete is moving into footplant, we see the lead leg/hip pull back and open, clearing space for the hips to clear. In the last frame, we can see the barrel begin to blur near the back shoulder as the athlete begins to launch the swing.
In this clip we see some more complicated moves happening. The lower half has a little more “up and down” feel versus the clip from the previous year, but is still serviceable enough. We still see the back hip start to open and the front hip clear going into footplant. The hands are coming out of the tip, fighting to get into a good spot to launch, but they never really get there. Here is a comparison of the athlete at footplant:
See the difference? On the left, we see the barrel is flatter behind the head, hands back by the rear shoulder. On the right, the barrel is still up at the helmet, if not angled above it. As we’ll see later, that does not bode well for direction in the swing.
Turn
Solid turn here. Barrel is in the zone for a long time. Visually we can see the barrel blur through the zone, allowing a lot of room for error. If we are a little early or late with the swing, we have the opportunity to foul it off and live to see another pitch. Also, we do not have to be 100% on time to square a ball up with this added margin of error. With the lower half, we see the front hip continue to pull back and around towards the backstop, driving the turn. The front leg braces well, ensuring we transfer a maximal amount of energy up from the ground.
Going from the steep barrel position we saw earlier, the turn in this swing is not quite as clean. Instead of the barrel turning forward around the torso, we see the hands whip the barrel forward. This is a result of the handsy tip we saw at the beginning of the swing. The barrel has to go from a very steep position to contact very quickly. In effect, we don’t see the same margin for error in this swing as the previous one. Instead, the hitter NEEDS to make contact very far out in front. The barrel is simply not on plane with the pitch as long due to the position it is launched from.
Finish
Not a lot I want to point out here in the finish. This is just an effect of what happened earlier in the swing. The biggest thing to notice is the energy still present in the follow through on the bottom swing. Once again, we are seeing the result of the “sliced” barrel direction that was created in the second swing. In the first clip, the direction was created towards the center of the field and the finish is somewhat boring. However in that second clip, we see an aggressive finish with the hands over the shoulder. The batspeed in this swing is directed towards left field. If you try to picture it in terms of a line in front of you the first swing would begin around shoulder height and continued forward on a relatively flat, slightly upward plane. The second swing would begin up above the shoulder and take a downward path towards the baseball.
So what caused this athlete to get worse from one season to the next, at a time when he should have gotten substantially better? It was not work ethic, he “wanted it” just as much the second season as the first. Instead, it was simply a change he made in his swing that literally gave him less of a chance at the plate.
What can you take from this? Understand that every change you attempt to make will have an effect on the whole system. A tip is not harmful. In fact, many of the greatest hitters use one. That is why I tried to build one into my own swing. However, I did not understand that the tip needed to run back and through a “better” launch position like we saw in the other clip.
Hard work, dedication, etc is not always the problem. If you do not have that, you are already behind. We need to make sure the work we ARE putting in is taking us in the right direction. If it isn’t, aren’t we missing the point?