- Apr 11, 2015
- 877
- 63
Sure, I understand the terminology can be difficult; heaven knows it took me plenty of head scratching, and loads of questions (and bickering back and forth) to finally get the concepts somewhat clear...or clear enough to at least teach them with some success. Places like this are great to find resources to help, and it was at another site like this that a buddy started talking about the swing being "rotational and linear"...bink, lightbulb went on.
So basically what he was saying, was that back at that time "rotational hitting" was of the day what "turning the barrel" is becoming today. There were plenty of discussion of getting into a certain posture, connecting the bat/barrel to a certain position relative to the body, and then rapidly rotating this unit to the ball, and then this rapid rotation would eventually throw or launch the barrel to the ball. This was the basic swing model used as the example of what was a large majority of opinion of the proper swing path at the time....
While this did seem close to what some of the top hitters were doing, but to myself and others there was something not correct about it, so the journey continued.
This is where/when TM started talking about "Swinging out from the body", which on first read made no sense to me (sure seemed like he was talking about casting the barrel), but after plenty of discussion, and enough vitriol to go around (others know what I'm talking about even if you might not
), it started becoming clearer. It was then that a really good coach (and friend), who was involved with all of these discussions himself from early on, said that the swing to looked to him as "rotational and linear". IOWs, it started out early on a rotational path (the turning the barrel part), and then once this turning barrel was brought "rotationally" from around "behind the corner", the swing was released or launched at the ball on a "linear" path " out from the body". So there was a "rotational" turn of the barrel behind the ball (and hitter), but the actual swing continuation was "out from the body" as the barrel was launched behind and through the now read incoming pitch location.
I saw it posted here a little while back, but Stanton has a pretty much purely "rotational" swing, and is basically making a "hard left turn" all the way around his body, and a comparison swing was post (I believe Cabrera), that showed the more "rotational to linear" swing "out from his body" that all the other HL hitters have. I don't have (nor care to look for) those two example clips, but maybe you already know the ones I'm speaking of, or maybe someone can repost them here if they happen to have them handy.
Hope that helps some,
MB
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