Creating Angle With Shoulders
Nathan is one of our longest tenured hackers. He had an awesome season as a freshman at Bellarmine hitting over .400 and also had a great summer with CCB. Nathan's log goes all the way back to last November so you can see the greater and more subtle changes over time in his swing. One of the bigger concepts we worked on with him was to get his shoulders less parallel to the ground to create a more efficient path to the ball. It's also going to help him drive the ball the other way better. It'll result in less groundballs to the right side and more back-spin liners.
11/16/2022 - 11/30/2022
In both of these videos you can see that his shoulder plane is pretty level throughout the swing. By this we mean his right shoulder is just as high as his left shoulder. This isn't necessarily a "bad" thing, but it's not optimal for hitting balls in gaps consistently. It's especially difficult to hit a ball to the opposite gap like this.
One drill we worked on to try and get a little more "tilt" in his shoulders was our PVC pipe drill, which can be found here: Dry Drills. The other thing we did was put a ball on a tee low and away A LOT. We wanted him to hit this ball over the second baseman's head vs. just to the second baseman. This naturally gave him a little more tilt.
Here's a couple of the best hitters of all time on contact. Recognize their shoulder plane on contact.
4/6/2023
This is where he had gotten with this concept by April. This is also in-season so we're not really working on as great adjustments at this point. By April, Nathan had made this adjustment his natural swing.
Notice the plane of his shoulders with the left one being higher than the right. This took a couple months for him hitting almost every day to make natural.
10/29/2023
Exaggerated Movements
Nathan has always had pretty good rhythm so adding these types of moves have come naturally. Here he was working on a large bat tip. The advantages to this include giving the bat a running start so that we don't have to get it moving from a standstill and also that it creates a longer path traveled (by distance) to give us force applied to the baseball on contact by increasing our acceleration. When we add these types of movements, we can always exaggerate them and then dial them back. Here you can see the tip of the bat get past his head. Not a lot of coaches are going to encourage this drastic of a move because it's extra. But if it is something that can help you with your rhythm and doesn't decrease your barrel accuracy, then it's something you can play with. Especially if you're a player that is undersized. The increased speed is going to give you a little extra juice that you might need to find gaps more consistently.
One thing we noted with him here was on where the bat tip is coming from. At first he was using his wrists to do it and not his full forearm. Now you can see his back elbow move up and down with the bat tip. Using bigger muscles to move the bat is going to help him keep his angles a little more consistently.
8/12/2024
12/5/2024
Breaking Balls and Check-In
Two quick videos for Nathan that just as check points. The one on the left is just his him doing some breaking ball work. The one on the right if of live BP. He was checking out his hips to see when they were clearing or if his hands were getting out in front of his body a little bit.
