As I have begun working with more and more young hitters a question I often get asked is who has the “perfect” swing? A year ago I may have answered Josh Donaldson. Or Barry Bonds. Whichever swing I was hooked on that week. Over time I have come to learn that swing doesn’t really exist. My goal with this article is to give younger hitters a better idea of how they should use the examples we have in front of us and give them an idea of some better questions they can start asking.
As I said, I went through this stage as well a couple years ago. I would idolize a different player and his swing every week. I would spend my cage time videoing myself and putting it side by side the hitter I was looking at. I would obsess over the tiniest of details. Why does Donaldson get his back elbow up two inches higher? Why am I using a leg kick if Griffey didn’t? It can go on and on and it is a dead end path. There are two things wrong with this. First of all, if our goal is to become like these players, we should use them as learning subjects, not idols. I would put up whatever player I was studying on a pedestal and I never really believed I could do what they did. I thought if I did not move exactly like they did I had no shot. Secondly, I failed to realize that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses. Everybody moves differently and has different levels of mobility, athleticism, etc. How you are built will greatly affect your swing and optimizing your movement.
So what this lead to was extreme frustration and very little progress. My swing never really got that much better because I was constantly trying to rebuild it into what I saw in someone else. My time was spent on small, insignificant, details.
After some time I began to realize my lack of progress. I realized that I could not swing exactly like pro player X or pro player Y because that was not how I was built and I already had ingrained movement patterns that just needed to be sharpened, not completely changed. This was a huge shift in the way I trained and thought.
Following this shift, I began looking for similar characteristics in the greatest hitters and working them into my own swing. I found these were much more important to have versus making sure I looked EXACTLY like one player.
So for the younger player reading this, my challenge to you is to look deeper into the swing and find the stuff that is truly important. One guys’ swing is not perfect. Your swing will never be perfect. Develop the patterns that are similar in elite hitters and put your own style on it.
What are some of these characteristics we are looking for? I have discussed some of them before but will cover them briefly here.
Barrel Turn: we want the barrel to get on plane with the pitch and then stay there as long as possible. Keep the hands at the back shoulder for as long as possible, release them based on adjustments you need to make on the pitch.
Timing Mechanism (take the slack out): we need to be able to create tension to control our swing so that we can control it as we adjust to different pitches and release it when and where we need it. This is often done in the form of a hip coil, hip hinge, or some combination of that in the lower body. In the upper half it is often done through a tip and untip synced up with the lower half or simply maintaining space with the hands and pulling back until it is time to release (think Correa, Griffey, etc).
Beyond those two things there really is a ton of variation in what hitters do. Even the timing mechanism is done differently in every hitter. And that is the important part to understand. You don’t need it to look exactly like one player or another, it just needs to be present. Figure out what is important, discard what is not.
Hope you all enjoyed and learned something from this article! Thanks for reading, and as always, if you want to discuss your own swing and what you can do to make it better, you can shoot me an email at brady@dacbaseball.com.