Stay Connected To Consistently Hit Balls Harder

A lot of coaches love to talk about connection, but few will describe what it actually is. It’s a term I heard all the time from coaches growing up but never understood what it really was. They would just say it and then that was the end of it, leaving me confused and back to doing what I was doing. It is not enough to say “HEY, stay connected longer”. That cue is meaningless if one: you don’t know what it means and two: if you don’t know what it feels like to really be connected. Hitters don’t swing disconnected because they want to, they do it because of years of bad habits and trying to reach for the baseball. 

If we reach for the ball, not only will we be losing power because we’re now pushing with our upper half, but we also lose time in the zone. The goal of staying connected is to allow our turn to work the barrel into the zone and be powerful, but to also keep us in the zone. We want to work behind and through the ball rather than reaching for the ball and forcing our contact point to be perfect. 

I like to use the Rebel’s Rack with my hitters because it allows them to feel the changes in their turns that are needed to access their power potential. This work will go to waste if as soon as we get back into the box, we begin to push our barrel to the baseball rather than turning it. This push to the ball is the loss of connection that I’m talking about.