Today I want to show a drill that we came up with. To work on our hitters, getting their hands out, there are a couple of different ways you will hear it saying, stay inside the ball, and get your hands out. I find that most common with younger players is that they use a lot of arms and not as much hands. So the key to this drill is really getting your hands out.
So we are going to have Tanner, using an ordinary tennis racket, bring in the tennis racket, I would to set the station up as a station drill on a lot things when we are hitting. When we are not hitting live, or if we are hitting live on the cage, not on the field. This is another drill that we use. What we do is that we turn the pitching screen and put it inside our hitting cage that goes over home plate. And what we are going to do is have tanner set up only about 15 feet away. You are going to be real close. You are going to be on top of the hitter, and the pitcher is that they will go behind the screen and they will use tennis balls or even whiffle balls. And we are going to throw balls in on his hands and what we really want the hitter to concentrate on is popping the hips and getting his hands out. And we are going to teach front elbow has to fly here to get to these balls, to hit these balls.
So, another way to teaching it is to back foot is “squashing the bug”. It is another cliché that we will here a lot in the baseball field is the back foot on a left handed hitter, it looks like this, and he is “squashing the bug” and popping the hips. The front side gets stiff, so you will see tanner when he does this without his hand on the tennis racket, he will get stiff on the front side, and he will “squash the bug” on the back foot and will just get his hands out.
We will show you how that looks like, and what you can do is that you can use either one hand or two for the hitter. We will start with one hand and the first time they will do this is that they will struggle. I can guarantee you, but after two or three times, the hitter learns to get his hands out and you will see they turn on the ball pretty well. so we will just do a one hand, pitcher is right here and he is throwing balls on the inside and what we are trying to do is to step up a little bit closer so hit it right into the screen so we can collect them. So you how he is popping the hips and getting the hands out and that are a great drill for having them get their hands out and really work on turning on the ball with the pop of the hips.
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