Drills are a huge part of being a hitting coach. Coaches have an enormous library of drills they have done as a player or coaches from over the years. As a society, we are always looking for the golden nugget that is going to take what we’re doing to the next level. We can see this in quick fix examples such as rapid weight loss, add 10 mph to your fastball in 6 weeks, and make money while sitting at home! This happens with hitting drills and it happens from the big leaguers all the way down to little leaguers. Here is a video of Christian Yelich doing just that, saying a drill helped shape the path of his career. 

This blog is going to be about thinking outside the box and trying to realize that career altering moments (personally and professionally) are about much more than a singular moment. I do love drills, and I think that they have a significant place in our game. However, I also have the belief that we give way too much credit to their power at times. This realization happened for me around this time last year. I had time to be our full time strength coach while also being our hitting coach. During this time, I made many connections on how we can create better hitters in the weight room and not just solely in the cage. Here’s the video of one of the first swing changes I made with my players at Maryville College.  

Can a hitting coach make this change? Yes! I just happened to be with this athlete more in the weight room versus the cage. This got the ball rolling on programing single squats and PVC overhead squats for our guys every day. We know how important it is to use the posterior chain in any athletic endeavor- but what does that mean to our athletes? Nothing. We have to create the change without them realizing what is going on sometimes. Why do I tell you this? To make you realize that changes to the swing don’t always come directly from drills. They can happen by creating better movement in the weight room and all aspects of life. 

Now let’s talk about if a drill gives you good initial feedback. You may give credit to the drill for your success at the plate. What happens when you start to struggle? Do you blame that same drill for your struggle at the plate? More often than not, I would say you wouldn’t. Why is this? If we give this drill too much credit and start performing it too much, what’s going to happen? My opinion is that you start to lose the attention to detail that you first had with this drill. When you start losing this attention, you then start sacrificing movement quality. Once that movement quality of the drill goes down, there’s a good chance that the poor movement quality is the real culprit. Let’s talk about how we can combat/overcome this. Here’s a clip from the Last Dance where Michael Jordan talks about being in the moment: 

This is huge in understanding that the drill is a piece of the puzzle but far from the entire puzzle. To understand that we should have a daily checklist, to realize what we need for that day. Here’s a blog I wrote on how important a checklist can be to daily performance, How a Checklist Can Improve On-Field Performance in Baseball. A checklist can help understand that you might be tired, by looking back at what you did or plan to do. If you’re tired, then maybe you should perform less reps of your favorite drill. This would be an easy assessment if you can live in the moment. If you credit all your success to that drill, then you might try to push through fatigue and take many sub par swings.

The last portion of this blog will be on an awesome drill that we used the other day. I got this from the great hitting coaches of the Baltimore Orioles Organization. It’s a Plyo ball HR Derby. Plyo balls are often used just in the cage and I love the idea of taking them out to the field to see the entire flight of the ball. I also wrote a blog about how taking these practices from the cage to the field can be beneficial,On-Field Blocked Training. I’m adding this drill to the blog, because a player can be bad at a drill and still be going in the right direction. As a coach you have to communicate this, because it can be detrimental to a player’s mindset if the drill isn’t going well for them. I want to take the chance to applaud one of our players for staying with the process, Kolton Hicks. Here is a video of him struggling with the Plyo ball HR Derby, then hitting a HR in the first scrimmage of the year.

I believe that him struggling with this drill may have derailed him a bit. That’s not the case this year. He knew that we were making strides with his swing and was finally rewarded with an absolute tank. In conclusion, drills have a place in hitting instruction but we need to do a better job of letting the athlete know that there are many other reasons why they progress as a baseball player.