The swing starts from the ground up and your legs start the power that creates torque to hit the long ball. The core controls your whole body. The stronger your core is the stronger you are.
Soft toss is a foundational training activity that can help athletes improve their swing. “It’s good for your time. It’s good for bat speed and it’s also good for getting your hips around and really extending and getting that power into every time you swing on the ball,” Pezzelle says.
Kids often don’t like it, but hitting off a tee is useful for developing hitters. It’s also quite useful for accomplished hitters. Most major league players practice with a tee every day.
In fact, utilizing a batting cage is one of the quickest ways to develop the skills needed to be a successful batter. While many will argue that there is no better way to improve your batting than with a live pitcher simulating game conditions, there are many advantages to practicing in a batting cage.
Composite wood bats perform similarly to standard wood bats but generally last longer, making them another good candidate for batting practice/cage use.
In general, players should take batting practice 3 times a week. The more advanced the baseball league, the more times players should be taking batting practice. Little League players usually take batting practice 2-3 times per week while Major League players take batting practice 7 times per week.
Yes, every ounce makes a difference. Two ounces doesn’t seem like much but I’ve seen it make a large difference. 1 inch in length is huge.
Typically a heavier player is stronger than a lighter player and therefore, able to produce more bat speed + hand speed, coupled with the ability to swing a heavier bat which allows the batter to create more momentum and more exit velocity and distance.
So, using a heavier bat should result in faster hit balls, which means the hit ball will travel farther. If a player can maintain the same bat swing speed with a heavier bat, the heavier bat will produce higher batted ball velocity and an increase in distance.
While pitching machines may not be great for hitters, they are great for fielders! They can really help catchers with blocking, if you tilt the machine downwards to bounce just behind the plate. They are great for outfielders, you can tilt the machine way upwards and work on high pop-ups.
Using a batting tee is one of the best ways to achieve this career-long process. This is why so many Major League baseball players still use the batting tee before games and during off-season – it’s not just for young players.
By age 7 or 8, young baseball players have a bit more coordination, and coaches can start to go beyond the basics of how to catch, throw, field, hit and run the bases. Game-like situations help young players think on their feet, and to communicate and collaborate with each other. Baseball is a team sport, after all.