Swing Until You Decide Not To Swing

“To swing or not to swing, that is the question.”

– what William Shakespeare would have written had he ever seen a baseball game and subsequently been inspired to write The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of the Diamond.

Seven-time American League batting champ and Hall-of-Famer (as well as 18-time All-Star, the 1967 Rookie of the Year, and 1977 AL MVP) Rod Carew once estimated that when facing a 90 mph fastball a “batter has two-thirds of a second in which to uncoil and get good wood and full body into the pitch.”

Two-thirds of a second. Think about that for a moment.

That’s not a lot of time.

In watching and listening to youth baseball players from a coaching perspective for more than a decade, I believe the predominant mentality when a young batter comes to the plate to hit is “if I like the pitch, I’ll swing at it”. It’s as if the batter intends to watch the pitch for a bit, decide if it’s worthy of trying to hit, then swing to try and hit it.

I don’t think there’s enough time to actually do this however. “If I like the pitch, I’ll swing at it” shouldn’t be the mentality when a batter comes to the plate to hit.

Consider this passage from the book The Sweet Spot In Time (1980) by John Leonard:

“A 90-MPH fastball should reach the plate 0.4 second after the pitcher lets it go. The batter has about 0.1 second to pick up the incoming pitch visually and “recognize” it – discern whether it is fastball, a curve, or slider and where it is likely to be headed in relation to the strike zone. (During that tenth of a second the pitch travels almost one-third the distance home.)

“The batter has another 0.15 second in which to decide whether or not to swing (or whether to get out of the way of a wild pitch.) He loses sight of the ball thereafter – it is almost two-thirds of the way home – but he has another 0.15 second in which to start his swing and guide it to the spot where he thinks the ball is headed. To hit a fair ball he has to meet the ball within about 15 degrees to either side of a dead right angle to the direction the pitch is traveling, which means within about 14 inches of the ball’s total travel. That means he has to have the bat there during the time the ball is passing that 2-foot arc. The passage takes 0.013 second. One study indicates that if the batter does not have the heel of his forward foot raised by the time the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand, he’s already missed the pitch.”

I don’t think a batter has time to actually hit the ball when the approach is “if I like the pitch, I’ll swing at it”. With this mentality, the batter will never get the bat around in time to hit the ball. “He’s already missed the pitch.”

This past week during practices our team worked a lot on hitting. Coach Brent, coach Eric, coach Jay, and myself did multiple rounds of live bp with our players, soft toss, situational hitting, bunting, and more. It was the first week this season, given the weather we’ve had, we’ve really been able to spend quality time on the varied aspects of hitting.

When it comes to hitting, every player has his own idiosyncrasies. But the fundamentals for each hitter are essentially the same. As coaches we find ourselves telling our players things like “keep your hands back”,”widen your stance”, “explode with your hips”, “pivot your back foot”, and more. We seek to find the right tweaks that will make each individual player a little bit better.

One thing I find myself telling our players (my own son in particular) is to “be ready for every pitch”. To me being “ready for every pitch” isn’t simply about putting your body in a quality hitting position at the beginning of each pitch. Being “ready for every pitch” means you stride on every pitch, you flex your muscles to ready your swing on every pitch, you track the ball with your eyes on every pitch, and so on. It also means you’re mentally ready and focused on every pitch. It means you do everything you would normally do when you fully swing to hit the ball, even if you don’t fully swing to hit the ball.

While I was pitching live bp during a practice this past week, I heard coach Jay use an interesting phrase while talking to a couple kids who were hitting. “Commit to the pitch,” he said.

Commit to the pitch.

It seemed to me a pretty good phrase. It covers both the physical and the psychological aspects to hitting. Commit your body. Commit your mind. A player need not blindly swing at whatever pitch comes toward the plate. But a player should swing (i.e. commit) until he decides not to swing.

Ted Williams, the last player to hit .400 in a season, once said “when a pitcher has a great fastball, you can’t wait until you see the ball to get started. You have to anticipate what area the pitch is going to be in and approach that area. You can adjust some after you see the ball, and you can stop if it isn’t close to where you anticipate.”

Swing until you decide not to swing.