Baily back at it

[jryan15]

Actually got to spend sometime swinging the other day. Thought there were a few good cuts and a lot of bad ones. I think she's getting better depth with her barrel turn. I'm not happy with her initial stance and stride. Think she's starting way too open and that's probably why she keeps landed closed off.

One thing we've been working on is her keeping her hads too high. Seems like when her hands are up above her chin, she has to plunge down to swing. When I can get her to keep her hands below the chin, I think she is more free to turn the barrel.

I'm sure there are a million other things to work on, so I'd be happy to hear some recommendations.

The bad




The Decent


The good

[Teacherman]

Significant difference in barrel turn in the good clips. Knob gets turned upward instantly.

[Mike]

Significant difference in barrel turn in the good clips. Knob gets turned upward instantly.

So how did she transition to the good swing and turn the barrel up instantly?

[Mike]

Ok I have a guess . I think she has a more established corner compared to the other clips. A little more snappier leg. Love how she turns the barrel.

[jryan15]

Actually the good cut happened a little earlier in the front toss session. I think a common problem is that as the session continued, she began to try and swing harder which often screws everything up. Also late in the session, I added some speed without being diligent in monitoring her technique. Think we both went into results mode.

I think that he biggest contributors to the good swing were these:

• Do not let her hands keep riding up... You can see her hand position is different in all the clips. Her natural stance wants to have high hands, but it will almost always result in them plunging down to launch. We spent a little time reviewing Bonds' hands in this clip (link).
  
  
  
• Focus on finding hip slip and knowing that it should happen as you are pulling back. Once hip slip happens, she just need to keep pulling back.

It may seem counterintuitive that continuing to pull back is what will bring you forward, but funny things are going on in the hip joint after hip slip happens. For most kids and all elite athletes, there is really not much need to expain hip-slip. Just get them to continually pullback, and it will happen. However for quad dominant people, this isn't necessarily true so we need "special" attention .

[jryan15]

Practice swing didn't transition into game swing again. I think maybe we'll spend some time trying to preset out more of the slack that that is adding a lot of prep time to her practice swing.

I think that if we can shorten up the length of her practice swing, it will be easier for transitioning into the game swing. I'll try and do a frame analysis to see how early she would have to start to keep the same pace as current practice swing.

Also looks like her hands are farther off of her chest in the practice swing. That was one of the things we had worked on. Maybe it is even more relevant than originally thought.

[Teacherman]

I’m wondering if she would just start earlier and load slower if she would duplicate the practice swing. I’m getting frustrated as I post that same thing to many players. They aren’t quite getting to the good loaded launch position, the ball gets in on them and they bust a survival swing. They rush. They have to

I see it over and over and over.

So why don’t they start early and Slow? Because they haven’t practiced it. Therefore they dont believe they can lift and move out AND control it. Therefore they are afraid of getting beat with the offspeed therefore they consistently get beat with the fastball.

Turn every pitch into a changeup by forcing yourself to waithold back while your leg is off the ground. All that happens is you get the best stretch of your life and you crush the ball. That’s all.

[jryan15]

You are right Teach, we do need to find a way to practice it with game speed pitching. We practice it a lot when I front toss. I had to start throwing with a full arm circle to give her a timing indicator However when her coach just throws sling shot style without a windup, it's so fast that she would have to start before he does. It becomes like hitting off a machine since she doesn't have a timing indicator to start her move.

For giggles, I'm going to try and put some data together to get an understanding of how long or short her wind up move is compared to the pros.

[jryan15]

I’m wondering if she would just start earlier and load slower if she would duplicate the practice swing. I’m getting frustrated as I post that same thing to many players. They aren’t quite getting to the good loaded launch position, the ball gets in on them and they bust a survival swing. They rush. They have to

I see it over and over and over.

So why don’t they start early and Slow? Because they haven’t practiced it. Therefore they dont believe they can lift and move out AND control it. Therefore they are afraid of getting beat with the offspeed therefore they consistently get beat with the fastball.

Turn every pitch into a changeup by forcing yourself to waithold back while your leg is off the ground. All that happens is you get the best stretch of your life and you crush the ball. That’s all.

So I just did an analysis of about 20 high level swings and the typical length of the full swing (from start of move to contact) was 15 to 41 total frames. Baily's move is 54 frames long, so her move is definitely way longer than the average. Once I tweak up the database that I made, I'll share it on the site. I've added several other key frames.

Regarding Baily's move, I didn't want to speed her up. I just want to take out some slop. With a 54 frame move (almost 2 seconds), she becomes vulnerable to minor changes in the pitchers wind up.

For reference, here are pitch speed comparisons. I'm using 40 feet so as to offset some of the pitchers stride:

60 mph pitch - 0.45s
50 mph pitch - 0.54s
40 mph offspeed - 0.68s

If we use a typical offspeed difference of 20mph (which is really wicked), the time delta is 0.23 seconds. That is only 7 frames of hold time to be able to adjust between fastest full speed and slowest offspeed.

[jryan15]

Turn every pitch into a changeup by forcing yourself to waithold back while your leg is off the ground. All that happens is you get the best stretch of your life and you crush the ball. That’s all.

To start the next session, we will work some tee drills with more emphasis on longer one leggedness. She has a tendency to post up on her back leg as oppossed to fall and keep pulling back.

Going into side and front toss, the goal will be to clean up some waste from the big take-up move and hopefully shave off 0.5 to 1 second off of her total swing time. That should get her into a normal working range.

[jryan15]

I’m wondering if she would just start earlier and load slower if she would duplicate the practice swing. I’m getting frustrated as I post that same thing to many players. They aren’t quite getting to the good loaded launch position, the ball gets in on them and they bust a survival swing. They rush. They have to

I see it over and over and over.

So why don’t they start early and Slow? Because they haven’t practiced it. Therefore they dont believe they can lift and move out AND control it. Therefore they are afraid of getting beat with the offspeed therefore they consistently get beat with the fastball.

Turn every pitch into a changeup by forcing yourself to waithold back while your leg is off the ground. All that happens is you get the best stretch of your life and you crush the ball. That’s all.

BTW you were right, I'm an idiot... Need to just stick with the timing she has. Maybe down the road if it's hurting her swing, we'll find a way to compress it. For now, we just need to focus on consistency.

[jryan15]

Last couple session, we've struggled to repeat the success. It's still much improved, but there's just been something missing.

So I took some time this morning to compare her great swing to an ok one. I think I found the moment that she is giving up her stretch which appears to be the culprit in breaking her down.

Great vs good


Around frame 43 ever so slightly she gives up her stretch which results in her needing to supplement her rear hip... In the great swing her rear hip did all of the "around". In the good swing, she bleeds her stretch and then the rear hip is no longer in charge of "around". One indicator of her having supplemented in this way is that into contact, her head will bob down.


Hopefully this will give us good insight for our next workout which won't be until next week...

[Ben]

That is great video evidence in what happens to so many kids I work with, they feel the need to move the body first and lose any stretch/resistance they might have.

Thanks for this JRyan15!

[Teacherman]

Good work.