Are Batting Lessons and Batting Cages Bad for Your Swing?

In this article, I’m going to go over why most batting cage pitching machine setups are detrimental to your baseball swing and an important hitting tip that many baseball coaches fail to recognize and teach during their baseball lessons. batting

One of the most important hitting lessons that will affect your child’s quality of conditioning the correct swing into their body is the type of equipment they use to practice hitting. Have you ever wondered why your son can hit in batting practice when you pitch to him, but when he has to hit from the pitching machine, like during his batting lessons or during baseball practice, he can’t hit free? Well, I have the answer for you. It’s not you or your son, it’s the pitching machine, let me explain.

In a game, the ball travels down from the pitcher’s hand to home plate and therefore you want to have a slight top hit so that the head of the bat is in the same path as the incoming baseball to maximize the chance of hitting. make solid contact. So the one thing you definitely do NOT want to do is practice the opposite of what happens when you practice batting in most commercial batting cages.

The truth is that in most commercial batting cages, the pitching machine sits 3-4 feet off the ground and actually shoots the ball straight up, which is the complete opposite of what happens in a batting cage. royal game. In a real game, the ball falls from the pitcher’s hand to home plate. So if you’re taking your child into a batting cage to condition the proper swing into your child’s body or for batting lessons, you’ll want to avoid pitching machines that are deep in the ground and shoot the ball up. You’re going to want to go to the batting cages so that the pitching machine is level with the ground or slightly above the ground so that the pitched ball follows a slight downward path like it would in a game. Doing this will condition the proper swing path into your child’s baseball swing. This is a great hitting lesson!

Another thing you’ll also want to look for is batting cages that have one-arm pitching machines, which allow you to time the ball as if you were facing an actual pitcher in a game. The other types of wheeled pitching machines do NOT represent how a real pitcher pitches in a game, and you just spit the ball at your kid without really any way to time the pitch and will probably do more harm than good. I highly recommend avoiding those wheeled pitching machines, unless you just want to use them to practice hitting curveballs and can really cut down on time. Otherwise, you’re going to do more harm than good to your kids’ baseball swing and you’ll just be wasting your money on hitting lessons for your child.

By using the baseball practice tips I mentioned above, you will be able to make measurable progress during your batting lessons much faster, instead of taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back, because you will now be using and practicing with the baseball team. proper batting. .

Now that your son doesn’t need to be frustrated during his batting lessons, he can get out there and make solid, consistent contact with the baseball. As well as impressing their coaches, teammates and most importantly impressing themselves.