Probably one of the most common phrases you hear at a baseball game when a player swings and misses at (is early on) an off-speed pitch (curveball, changeup, etc.) is "stay back". Is this really good advice?
Personally, I think this advice has led to an epidemic that we see in hitting at the youth and high school levels. I would say about 75 percent of the hitters we see for the first time have a problem with weight transfer. "Stay back" is not necessarily bad advice if the intent and interpretation are correct, but we generally see hitters interpret this in regards to the location of their center of mass. This means that a right handed hitter feels like more weight is in his right leg and he understands this advice to be to keep his weight there longer.
There are a litter of potential problems with keeping our weight on our back leg through our swing (especially on breaking balls). For one, if you become static with your weight over your back leg, it's actually going to take a slow pitch and make it feel slower. This means you're going to have to wait even LONGER for it to get there. Another issue is that it can actually limit our power. Just because your back leg is tired after a few swings does not mean your swing created power and energy into the right place. Most players that spin on their back foot (squish the bug as they say in little league) are actually just creating a human shock absorber (foot into the ground), which will limit how hard we can hit the ball.
If you are one of the fewer players/coaches who interpret "stay back" to mean "keep your hands back" then this is actually good advice. Your body can continue to move without your hands committing to the baseball. The separation between our lower body and our hands is essential in becoming a great hitter. If with our body we are out in front (timing wise) with our weight into a front foot on a breaking ball, we can keep our hands back and still hit a baseball hard.
This video is a great demonstration of this:
The pitch that Hanley Ramirez hits here is a change up for a home run. Watch how much his left knee bends after it lands. This indicates he's not perfectly on time with this pitch. Now notice that as that knee is bending his hands are still back in his hitting slot. Lastly, notice how much his back foot moves forward, meaning he has a very small percentage of his weight there (note: he doesn't do this when he's perfectly on time to a pitch, it happens to this extent because his timing was early).
This is how you hit athletically as opposed to statically (staying on our back leg). Obviously, this is a guy who made millions of dollars playing and your skill set is not the same yet. But learning some of these principles and moves is essential if you want to maximize your potential as a hitter.
Keep your hands back. Not your body.
