Thank you for visiting this blog and taking an interest in learning more about the fundamentals, mechanics and key elements of baseball with an emphasis on children. The intent of these writings is to provide the interested reader articles, stories and videos related to the developing, young ball player, how to improve their game and make their experience, and yours, memorable and fun for many years.

I welcome your feedback on my posts and hope that I bring a positive influence to your learning experience. I can be contacted at
david@gazellebaseball.com.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Mechanics of Rotational versus Linear Hitting


There are really only TWO methods of hitting. A hitter is either Linear or he/she is Rotational with their swing mechanics. Now both techniques have elements of the other in them. Linear has some rotational and Rotational has some linear. The fact that each has elements of the other makes all of the other "techniques" or really names that people are calling baseball swing mechanics simply irrelevant and fictitious.


So let's define the Rotational Swing and the Linear Swing:


A rotational hitter establishes a stationary axis with the dropping of the front heal and with the front leg and they rotate around that stationary axis. This hitters "stays back" with their upper body. The head and chest do NOT come forward. They a very steady and do not lunge forward in the direction of the pitcher. You will occasionally see this happen is when a hitter is completely fooled by a pitch and they break through their axis lunging forward in an awkward attempt to make contact. So the rotational hitter rotates around a stationary axis and stays back.
The linear hitter does not establish a stationary axis and they do not stay back. The linear hitter continues moving forward throughout their swing in a straight forward (linear) movement finishing their swing out over the top of their front foot or even slightly forward of it. The linear hitter typically swings in a downhill plane while the rotational hitter is typically taught to swing on the plane of the pitch because those swing planes match each technique. A linear hitter trying to swing on the pitch plane is very awkward and doesn't work well with all of the moving parts of this technique. Likewise, the rotational hitter swinging on a downhill plane is also an awkward unproductive swing.

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