Baseball Drills & Tips

Hi, I'm Ricky Scruggs from Centerfield Baseball Academy in Tucson, Arizona and I want to talk to you a little bit about some baseball drills and tips. For this demonstration, we're going to be using a baseball bat. Today's tip is going to be about bat path. A lot of people talk about the path of the bat and where it's supposed to go. A great question to ask someone is, is the swing up, is it down or is it level? If you ask 20 different coaches, you're going to get 20 different answers. Some people think it's up, some people think it's down, some people think it's level.

The reason is, is because it's all three. In actuality, it's all three at the same time. If you're looking from the side viewpoint watching me and you watch the first half of the swing, the swing looks down. If you catch the second half of the swing it looks up. Ted Williams said the swing is slightly up. But as you saw, the first half is down, the second half is up. And you say, well, how is it level? Well, it's also level. It's actually level around a tilted spine. If my pitcher is over here, you're going to see that when I hit my spine gets tilted just like the axis of the picture Saturn and Saturn's rings, okay? So, the swing is going to be here and the swing should go right here and it should be horizontal with my shoulders when I hit the ball and then I finish like this, so it's going to look like Saturn's rings. So, all at once the swing is down to it, up through it and level around a tilted spine. The problem comes when people have, they don't get their spine in the right place and we try to swing down to it and you end up coming across the ball, not hitting it on a direct path. If I can learn to put my spine in the right place, use my body rather than my arms to hit, I'm going to go down to it and then follow straight up through it. So, once you have realized the true bat path and maybe you know that your bath path is chopping down across the ball like this, a great drill to fix that is something I call cross hands.

Most people don't know, but Hank Aaron hit with his hands backwards for the first part of his whole career until he got into professional ball, and what this drill will do, I mean, the first thing you do is just cross your hands and make them opposite from what they should be. I'm left-handed. I've got my hands like a right hander.

The second step is just to have someone throw you a ball and take regular batting practice and make your best attempt to hit it right out here straight off my front foot. What this does is it forces my back arm into the slot, forces my other arm in the right place for a perfect play and then I finish like this. It's really hard to swing down across the ball. You're not going to hit the ball but if you swing here like this, if you swing cross hands, your bat path is going to get corrected almost all by itself. Once again my name is Ricky Scruggs from Centerfield Baseball Academy and those are baseball drills and tips.