Hitting can be taught.
This page is based on the recent on-field experience of two of WebBall's coaches. It's not the typical quick tips page which we offer elsewhere on the site. But based on recent surveys and feedback, there is a segment of our visitors that appreciates the broader picture and greater details on the skills of baseball. This is for them - and, we hope, you.


Every contact turns into an easy, unassisted pop out. Contact hits are infield pop-ups; power swings become close-in outfield fly balls; even bunts are popped up, along with every foul ball. The worst part of all this, is that he had a tendancy to go after the first pitch, so runners could never steal; the hit-and-run was way too risky a call; and there's nothing worse than seeing a bunt turn into a double play, or getting called out on a single pitch popped foul.

The mechanical problems were obvious. He was a classic hitch swinger. He would do his first load position with hands way up at the shoulders, and the bat pointing back behind him (almost horizontal). From this position, if he held to it, you would expect a good high ball hitter who could drive those high pitches into solid singles. But his first move with the ball coming in would always be to drop his hands to below the letters and tilt his bathead away. The result was a severe upper cut that if it was ever in the plane of the pitch would catch the bottom half of the ball, never the top half - sending the hit up in the air (fair or foul) almost everytime.

Part of the problem was the approach to preparation and correction. Though a kean team player who always participated in practices and pre-game tutorials, he did not always approach batting practice with focus and intensity, often taking lazy swings and making little effort to correct the undercut. It was the way he hit and that was all there was to it - he was not aware of his mechanical difficulties, though he certainly wasn't happy with the results.

What was really needed was a way to force him to stay in the high launch position and swing down and through the pitch, not under and up. An Ultimate Batting Tee could do this. In a perfect world all training tools would always be at hand, but there are coaching realities in how many tools you can bring to the park on any given day. In this case, what we did have on hand was an adjustable double tee - a very versatile tool that can help a number of hitters with problems (so a better choice to have available more often.)

By positioning one tee out front and the second tee in line with his back foot and elevated to letter height, we presented a challenge. Both tees had baseballs on them and the objective was to hit the ball off the front tee without the back ball falling off (whether from direct contact or simply air movement or even the vibration from contact with the front tee).

One reason for presenting the challenge this way was to get him to focus on hitting the front ball on the top half - any contact with the tee itself might make the back ball come off its perch. In other words, while trying to get the result he needed, he was locking in muscle memory (neural pathway programming to be accurate) which he would, we hoped, take with him to his at-bats.


As this is written Sky High Guy is still a work in progress; some old habits are harder to break than others. It has been said that you need a thousand swings to set a new it firmly in mind.

But we have seen some good solid hits, some run production, and we hope he continue to work towards his goals.