Ted Williams' Brilliant Insight About Hitting
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Insight from one of the best hitting minds every, I'd love to hear your favorite quote from these: "Think. Don't just swing. Think about the pitcher, what he threw you last time up, his best pitch, who's up next. Think!" — from The Science of Hitting. The single most important thing for a hitter, he said, was to get a good ball to hit. This was the core principle of his entire approach. "There's only one way to become a hitter. Go up to the plate and get mad. Get mad at yourself and mad at the pitcher." "Baseball is the only job or sport where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer." "The hardest thing to do in baseball is to hit a round baseball with a round bat, squarely." "The key to hitting is just plain working at it. Work, that's the real secret." "Hitting is self-education — thinking it out, learning the situations, knowing your opponent, and most important, knowing yourself." On the biggest variable in the game, he said most hitting faults come from a lack of knowledge, uncertainty, and fear — and that boils down to knowing yourself. "Everybody knows how to hit — but very few really do." "Proper thinking is 50% of effective hitting." He meant doing your homework on a pitcher, studying the game situation, and anticipating. "The longer a batter can wait on a pitch, the less chance there is that he will be fooled." He said he never kept a written book on pitchers because he lived one — he could recall the pitcher, count, and pitch on his first 300 home runs. On being a student of the game: he was a pain in the neck asking older players about every pitcher, because he wanted the information and wanted to put it to use. "The style must fit the player, not the other way around." His point: there's no one method, just truths of hitting applied to a player's natural makeup. |
Trey Hannam Training
Written for Hitters, Parents, Coaches. My Goal is To Be The Coach I Wish I Had.
Yesterday I posted two videos. One was 5 minutes, one was 3. Way longer and more in depth than I usually put out. That kind of detail is normally just for the hitters and coaches I train. But I wanted to try something different. Go deeper and longer than what other hitting coaches are posting. A 3 and 5 minute video isn't built to go viral. It won't entertain the masses or fit the 20 second attention span everyone's running on now. (That's fine. It wasn't made for them.) It was made for real...
Matt Holliday said something I always come back to. He tells hitters: if you love to practice, you have a chance. He loved the behind the scenes work. The day to day grind of figuring out how to hit. That was the passion. That's what gave him a career. Most hitters have it backwards. They love the game. The Instagram pictures that come with it. The lights, the crowd, the highlights, the group chat blowing up after they go 3 for 4. That's the fun part. Everybody loves that part. But the game...
I trained 11 conference players of the year this season. (2 more texted me yesterday, I posted 9!) 6 remote, 5 in person. Different states, different levels, different swings, different needs. But they did it. And the number one thing they all had in common had nothing to do with their swing. It was a switch. Most hitters live on one side of it. They're either too hard on themselves to ever trust what they've built, or too comfortable to keep earning it. One side beats himself up before the...