The inception of Swing Authority began in The Grind House in March of 2018. Since then we have trained nearly 100 hitters in our program. We thought we would let you in on what we are doing since you may be seeing the hashtag #DoublesandDingers fly around social media from some of our members.

Most are accustom to lessons that usually take place once a week, only after a player begins to struggle after their 3rd game of their respective season. The lesson then begins off the tee trying to hit a line drive back to the cage. After every swing, the instructor takes about 2-4 minutes to explain what he wants the hitter to try and change the next swing. Some cues commonly heard at these lessons are “stay inside the baseball. Usually said after the hitter rolls over to their pull side. What then happens is the hitter flairs a baseball now in the air to their oppo side. So now what you typically hear is “stay on top of the baseball”. Now the hitter lunges forward to hit the top half of the baseball and hits a ground ball to their pull side. Here is where you will here “stay back” and BOOM! Line drive to the back of the cage! Now heading into front toss the hitter is getting stuck on their backside and rolls over the first pitch… do you see where I am heading with this?

Hitting is much more complex than just one magical verbal cue that can fix or what we like to call maximize a hitters abilities. We say maximize because we get all different types of athletes to enter our facility. Different athletes possess different movement profiles, therefore not one should be cookie cut into doing something one way. What we do say though is, there is a common denominator between every successful hitter, they create speed, adjustability, and possess dynamic balance. Our focus for our hitters is a long-term success. This means not robbing them of their future potential for them to get away things right now because they are just physically advanced for their age. There comes a time for every athlete that the playing field evens out from a physical standpoint and thats where mechanics and movements really become maximized and exposed.

Lets start with Data, its a hot topic in baseball right now. I will start by defining the terms given by MLB.com’s StatCast

Launch Angle – represents the vertical angle at which the ball leaves a player’s bat after being struck. Average Launch Angle (aLA) is calculated by dividing the sum of all Launch Angles by all Batted Ball Events.

As a guideline, here are the Launch Angles for different types of contact:

• Ground ball: Less than 10 degrees
• Line drive: 10-25 degrees
• Fly ball: 25-50 degrees
• Pop up: Greater than 50 degrees

Exit Velocity – measures the speed of the baseball as it comes off the bat, immediately after a batter makes contact. This is tracked for all Batted Ball Events — outs, hits, and errors.

These are the main two we commonly hear of.

Then we get videos like these… It kind of amazes us on how clueless some of these analysts are when it comes down to things like these.

Finally, hitters are getting some data to combat pitchers and their consistent 97mph fastballs, tunneling, and pitch design, trackers. Yet we still want to fight data. Here is a graph of the correlation between exit velocities and launch angles and a hitters batting average.

Here is what few understand, but most don’t. All data is a meaningful use for measurements and fact checking. If your not using data, you’re pretty much guessing on your development as a hitter or relying strictly on feel. This why we use FlightScope Strike to ensure we are making the appropriate changes for our hitters.

We heavily believe in feel, which will bring me to my last hot topic in this post…

Swing Up or Swing Down?

I am going to make this brief… BOTH. Like I stated in the beginning of this post, every hitter is different. Meaning their feeling of what they are doing may also be different. A hitter such as Mike Trout who creates a lot of lateral tilt in his movements will have to tell himself to swing down (as we all saw in his recent video with Alex Rodriguez). You will then have hitter such as J.D. Martinez who is much more upright (and had an extremely steep path before changes) has to think much more of an upward plane to create his ideal angles. In the end, they both create a positive Attack Angle to the point of contact of the ball. The last two measurements I am listing below are from Blast Motions Bat Sensor which we use in our initial evaluation of our hitters and throughout our program to capture data.

Attack Angle – is the angle of the bat’s path, at impact, relative to horizontal. A positive value indicates swinging up, and a negative value indicates swinging down, where zero is perfectly level.

* Professional: 2 to 16 deg
* Minor League MiLB: 1 to 15 deg
* College: 0 to 14 deg
* High School Varsity: 0 to 14 deg
* High School Junior Varsity: 0 to 14 deg
* Middle School: 0 to 14 deg
* Youth: 0 to 14 deg

Last but not least, probably the metric we focus on the most is,

Swing Speed – Your swing speed will depend upon age, strength, skill level, and the length and weight of your bat. Ultimately, you want it to be as fast as possible without sacrificing time to contact or efficiency. Our testing shows the typical swing speed ranges for different age groups and skill levels.

• Little League: 42-56 mph
• Senior League: 48-62 mph
• High School: 55-71 mph
• College/Pro: 62-78 mph

Our average gain in Peak Swing Speed through our program is 3-4mph. How we tell our hitters how meaningful it is to create speed is, for every 1 mph we can gain, we are looking at an extra 5-8ft of ball distance we can gain!

Find out more on how we are doing this by submitting an evaluation below