My 2017 son, a catcher, made tremendous strides in his hitting by working with a local fellow (and HS hitting guru) for whom I have tremendous respect.For about 18 months pretty regularly. That was until Fall 2017 when a hitch in his swing got him to roll-over to the right side a LOT (say half the time) and then pop-up to the left (1/4th of the time), leaving hard grounders that find a gap and the occasional line drive or deep fly. Went from batting almost 0.500 (slugging 0.700 and OPS >1.0) to 0.100 in one season with no power. Obviously, this became very mental.
Of course, he worked with his instructor who mostly figured out his hands were too high and drifted away from his body and then back to his body (so kind of an arc/slice). Tried to fix it with drills but nothing worked/"stuck" and it got worse and more mental.
In the meantime, he's going to focus on arm conditioning and catcher-related conditioning. I have tremendous respect for hsi coach but I fear we are at an impasse that might require a new perspective in terms of instructor and perhaps technology.
Anyone been through this sort of thing? Another option is stepping back to tee work with same instructor and rebuild the swing and the relationship. But this would be hard to do in the winter and he has no facility per se. Advice appreciated. Thanks.
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I am a catching instructor. I played 7 years professionally, and train all over DFW. When I was growing up, I had multiple instructors. Its a benefit, but the player has to realize that he will have multiple coaches should he continue to play. Thus, a player must learn to take away something from each coach.
The game of baseball is primarily democratic. This is important because the race to advertising and media coverage portray baseball as singular.i.e. "monster homeruns" and "100mph" fastballs. This is a huge part of the game, I am not denying that. However, baseball games are won by 9 players working together for a common good. Yes, Yes, that sounds beautiful right? Well, the problem is that in our capitalist society, we glorify the one player who hits the home run or throws the 100mph fastball, and it will always be this way. And so, our mindset is to strive to hit the ball further and throw it faster. A player needs this mentality to progress to the next level. There lies the paradox.
So, coaching dynamics are different in baseball (its the only sport where you do not have the ball on offense). As coaches, we must push players to achieve their best but also remind them about the necessity of democracy in the game. We had a great conversation with Alex Rodriguez on hitting. I posted it to my facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/abeitasports