BaseballDOJO MINDSET: TINKERING

BLOG POST | October 14, 2024

By: Josh Paul

 

TINKERING

 

You’re out front of a pitch, reach for it, and roll it over weakly to the shortstop.  After running hard down the line, you make a hard right turn into the dugout.  You immediately think, “That was a bad swing.  What do I need to change?”

Stop right there.  Before you start tinkering with your swing, ask yourself a couple more questions.  First, were you on-time?  If not, just be on-time for the next one.  Don’t tinker with your swing!  Second, was it a good pitch to hit?  If not, just get a better one next time.  Don’t tinker with your swing!

The fact is, we take better swings at good pitches.  It’s tough to get your A-swing off if you’re late on a four-seamer on the hands, or out front of a slider down and off the plate.  Your B-swing occurs when you’re on-time to a tough location, or slightly early or late in the heart of the zone.  You can survive either of those scenarios, especially with two strikes.  Neither of those means it was a bad swing.  That’s just surviving, and good hitters do this a lot.

It’s easy to get obsessed with swing mechanics, and we feel the need to constantly tinker with them immediately when a single swing doesn’t produce the exit velocity and launch angle we expect.  Sometimes we even want to tinker when we hit one right on the screws, but right at a defender.  If we don’t get a picture-perfect hit, we automatically think something is wrong, and we have to make changes.  Don’t think about changing your swing until you need to, like if you start missing good pitches you are on-time for.  If you were early or late or chased one out of the zone, it wasn’t your swing.  Leave it alone.

As a kid, did you ever want to take apart your favorite toy?  Not because it was broken, but maybe to make it even “better?”  You had a choice: continue playing with it as it was, or break it into pieces for an upgrade.  Did you second-guess yourself as you sat in front of a pile of pieces that was once your toy, realizing that you didn’t know how to reassemble it?

Do you know how to put your swing back together again?

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