Timing of the positive move can be difficult for youth hitters.  Often times, rather than the advance being taught correctly, I often see youth coaches take it away in a quasi “no stride” approach that makes  youth hitters a synchronizational nightmare (I’ve yet to see a youth hitter in the thousands I’ve worked with, be able to correctly synch up a no-stride approach, but that’s for another day).  The last two weeks my staff and I at Elite Baseball Training have been using high speed cameras and charts to find out when exactly the stride foot has to start, get back down to the ground, and when the swing has to launch to correctly time up a pitch.  The study will be elaborated in a new video training system Elite Baseball Training will launch this fall.  But here is a sneak peak of some of the basic results.
Now to start any study, you have to understand that the results are general guidelines and are affected by a number of things:
Estimated margin of error, (which I’ve factored at +  1.4 ft.), velocity of the pitch, location and height of the pitch, style of the negative move and stride, and bat speed of the hitter.  Even with that, there were a consistent set of parameters that a coach could use when teaching timing.  We filmed and charted about 75 swings over the course of two Cubs games.  The film we broke down on a computer to map out the timing sequence while looking at the charts for pitch speed, location, type of hit and where the hit went.
Negative Move
The part of the study that showed the greatest differences was the timing of the negative move.  Because the negative move differs in style from hitter to hitter, the start time of the negative move will too.  Hitters with a larger negative move, start it sooner than those with a more traditional load.  What was common in the study was hitters that used a toe tap, knee tuck or lift as a negative move, generally started it on the pitcher’s advance.  A traditional load started at pitcher’s footdown.
Positive Move
Again because style differs on the type of stride a hitter uses, timing of the positive move will differ as well.  But one thing that was interesting was that the body’s forward advance (IE the center of gravity gaining ground) was very close to release of the ball regardless of what style a hitter used in the stride.
Footstrike of the hitter
Just like in the previous two segments, footstrike can be dependent on style. Some players do an early stride, and shift to center, while others land more centered.  See the table below for specifics, but the range at footstrike was from 28 feet out of the pitchers hand to 41 feet in.
Launch of the swing
Launch of the swing varied from the ball being 17.4 ft to 20.75 ft from home plate.  Here is a bit of the chart from last night and what it all means.  The recognition part of the swing is during the stride.  If a player only has 2/3 of the ball flight distance to decide to commit the swing or not, then the stride needs to be controlled by good tempo to put the body in a good position to hit at footstrike.  This gives the hitter only .2 seconds in the recognition phase.  Hitting is done on a time line from the pitcher’s start to the contact.  A hitter wants to make that timeline as long as possible while still maintaining momentum and flow in his sequence.  (IE it would be obvious at first thought to stride extremely early and stop, thus to increase the timeline, but if momentum and flow of the hitter are stopped, the hitter has to fire from a dead standstill, often causing the sequence of the swing to be ruined to restart the swing.  There are still some hitting instructors that teach this, much to the demise of their hitters).  Timing is the hardest thing about hitting.  It is much tougher than mechanics, so it has to be taught and practiced correctly.  Most youth hitters start the process when the ball is on its way, which is much too late and ruins the mechanics of the swing.  But as mentioned above, starting too soon can cause just as many mechanical flaws.  Look for our new video training system this fall which will include much more on timing and drills Elite Baseball Training uses to correct timing flaws.

Tags: elitehittingplan.com, hitting, Justin Stone, timing, video analysis