Making Adjustments

The order in which a batter reacts to a pitch is this: the eyes see the ball released, sends a message to the brain telling it where the ball is going, the brain tells the body to swing, then the body swings in the way it was taught, after all those long hours of batting practice of course. But, from the point of release our eyes only have an idea of where the ball is going to be. Only as the ball gets closer can we pinpoint where the ball is actually going to be. Therefore, as the brain processes the information from the eyes (answering the 5 questions) it has to give the body corrections or adjustments from it's original messages. And given a 65mph fastball takes .420sec to get to the plate, this relay of signals often doesn't happen fast enough in order to hit the ball square.

However, if we are able to watch the ball come in, and delay moving our hands, the ball will be easier to hit. Due to inertia, our hands (and the bat) want to keep going in the direction in which they started on, so once our hands start to move forward, it will be harder to change their direction. Those who have ever been fooled by a change up know that once your swing has started coming through it's really hard to slow down to hit the ball. So contrary to popular belief of "throwing your hands at the ball," it's far more efficient to load your hands, keep them still as long as possible, and bring them to the same position every time. Loading your hands, also creates separation between the lower and upper body, aka the X Factor Stretch and more power.

See the difference between loading and not loading your hands <here>. Since the hands, and thus bat head, must drop to hit the ball, not loading your hands creates a sharper angle downwards as shown in Figure 1 below. And what we know from inertia, once your hands start moving down, they're going to want to keep moving down, therefore making it harder to bring them back up fast enough. But, if we create a less steep angle downwards, making the adjustment to bring them back up for a rise ball will be easier.

Figure 1: Flowchart of hands during swing, with and without loading. The blue lines create a less steep angle between each other than the red lines, therefore making it easier to make the adjustment to the higher pitch.