Hitting: Take the fat part of the bat to the ball

Guest post by Ken Krause, Life in the Fastpitch Lane Blog

Softball is a game of tradition. Often times that's good, because it is good to honor the past, and it gives us a sense of where we've been as well as where we're headed. That's why fastpitch softball, and its male cousin baseball, are still America's national pastime.

Yet that tradition can also work against us, particularly when we cling to ideas and techniques that aren't the best, simply because that's the way we've always done it or the way we originally learned it.

A classic example of this type of thinking is the old hitter's cue of "take your hands to the ball," also known as"take the knob of the bat to the ball" or "throw your hands at the ball." It was popular even back in my playing days, and I continue to hear it said whenever I walk by areas where people gather to work on hitting.

Unfortunately, it's not only bad advice, it's counter-productive. The truth is no good hitter hits that way, and any that hit with that instruction are ignoring it when they hit, either consciously or sub-consciously.

The idea of taking the hands to the ball is essentially an aiming device. It's supposed to help the hitter get the bat on-plane so she can swing through the ball. The problem is you're not trying to hit the ball with your hands, or the knob of the bat. You're trying to use the fat end. So right away you have an issue. But it goes beyond that.

In order to take your hands to the ball, you have to drop them down, especially on a low pitch. Yet good hitting technique says you shouldn't drop your hands. You watch good hitters and most will have their hands relatively high, in fact somewhere around the top of the stomach to the back shoulder high except on extremely low pitches. So how do you take your hands to the ball when the ball is at your thighs? The answer is you don't. Or when it's anywhere else either.

Taking your hands to the ball is also often taught to encourage a "level" swing, i.e. level to the ground. That's not going to work too well either. If your bat is leve/parallel to the ground as you swing, you have very little margin for error. If you are a couple of centimeters above or below the center of the ball, you are either going to get a popup or a ground ball.

You certainly won't get that line drive you want. No, you'll only get that if you hit it dead center, which is awfully tough to do on a moving ball. If the bat is angled down, with the end tracing an imaginary line in the dirt somewhere around the opposite batter's box, you give yourself more surface to work with  and a higher margin for error.

No, the thing you want to do is keep the hands above the ball, and focus on taking the fat part of the bat to the ball. Get the sweet spot on it and watch it fly. That's what the girl in the photo is doing.

Despite the pitch being on the high side, she is keeping her hands above the ball and getting some downward angle on the bat. Her hands are still up around the height of her back shoulder, and she's getting ready to drive this pitch into the outfield. It probably won't surprise you to learn that she is one of the best hitters I've ever worked with, and one of the toughest outs I've ever seen. She went an entire season of 18U ball, plus half a season at 16U before that, without striking out.

It wasn't because she was so tremendously athletically gifted either. It was because she took her hitting very seriously, and constantly worked at her craft. She could hit for power, she could hit for average, and she was a darned fine bunter on top of it. She never worried about her hands. She simply focused on getting the fat part of the bat to the ball.

That's the key. Tradition is a wonderful thing, but not when it gets in the way of today. Forget those old cues. Working on getting the fat part of the bat to the ball and you'll find you (or your team) are a lot more successful.