Fastpitch Hitting - Swing Like "the Best in the World"

Fastpitch Hitting - Swing Like "the Best in the World"
By guest author: Joe M White


Many people who follow fastpitch softball consider Jessica Mendoza to be the best all-around player, and best overall hitter in the world over the past several years.

Mendoza can do it all at the plate. She is a great bunter, a very effective slap hitter, and hits away for a very high batting average and with terrific power. In fact, baseball fans can compare Mendoza side-by-side with most any major league baseball hall-of-famer, and see that they swing the way she does.

Although Mendoza isn't the first fastpitch player to adopt a Rotational swing, she does it at least as well as anyone who's ever played. More and more fastpitch players are turning to her method of hitting. Increasingly, Division 1 college coaches are converting their players to Rotational hitting (for example, Mike Candera, Head Coach at the University of Arizona, whose teams have won 6 College World Series National Championships, is teaching a peculiar variation of Rotational hitting).

While softball players can continue to have success using the Linear method of hitting, there are reasons for the shift to Rotational.

A Very Short History

Many in the fastpitch community are under the impression that Rotational is relatively new, and that Linear hitting has always been the norm. Actually, Rotational hitting was introduced to Major League Baseball by Shoeless Joe Jackson in the early 20th century, and after Babe Ruth copied Jackson's method, it became the swing of about 95% of Major Leaguers until the introduction of synthetic turf on many Major League fields from the 1960's to the 1990's.

Those early synthetic turf fields were nearly as hard as concrete. Major League batting coaches quickly realized that ground balls hit on it moved so fast, that many balls that were routine ground outs on natural fields were hits on 'turf. Many that would have been outfield singles bounced so hard they became doubles or even triples. So many began to teach Linear hitting to their weaker hitters. And in many cases it worked.

(Most of the Big Leaguers who hit over.300 in those years, and nearly all the RBI and Home Run leaders, continued to be Rotational hitters. As synthetic turf disappeared from the Major Leagues, so did Linear hitting. There are very few nowadays, and although many still use Linear terms to describe their swing, they actually use Rotational swings.)

The increasing use of Linear hitting in MLB coincided with the introduction of lightweight aluminum and composite bats. These bats were not only much lighter than wood -- and so could be swung much faster -- they also had more "pop." The ball came off the bat harder and faster, so grounders hit with metal or composite bats got past infielders more often than with the old wood bats.

While MLB rejected Non-wood bats, they were quickly adopted by youth baseball leagues, middle and high schools, and the NCAA. Along with the bats, coaches at all these levels began to teach Linear hitting. Boys and young men who might have struggled with heavy wood bats became good or even above average hitters by using aluminum/composite bats and Linear hitting.

During all this, fastpitch softball experienced a rebirth as a game for women and girls. Fastpitch softball was originally played with wood bats, and Rotational hitting was the dominant method for both women and men playing the game. In fact, relatively few women played fastpitch until the 1970's.

As young ladies took up the game, they used aluminum and composite bats, for the same reason their male counterparts were. Most of their coaches were men -- dads -- who were enthusiastically embracing the cutting-edge Linear hitting movement. So most ladies learned Linear hitting, which tends to create more grounders as we'll see.

Linear Versus Rotational

So what's the difference between Linear and Rotational hitting? Andy Collins has a pretty good definition of Linear hitting: "Linear hitting is a hitting style that has been used for many years in fast pitch softball and by many little league coaches, some high school, college, and even minor league baseball coaches who still prefer this method of hitting instruction.

"It is used to achieve solid contact hitting, producing... sharply hit ground balls which are designed to shoot through the drawn-in infielders on the hard dirt surfaces of softball (and astroturf surfaces in baseball). It is especially useful in slap hitting (fast runners who hit it on the ground and beat it out to first base).

"Baseball players who use this style, do so especially when they use the ultra light aluminum bats and... if they play on artificial surfaces."

A Linear hitter will normally hit ground balls. Most Linear coaches teach "hit the top half of the ball," and "swing down," which naturally produces grounders. They also teach "lead with the hands" or "take the knob (or hands) to the ball," and to set up with most of your weight on the back foot and then shift your weight to the front foot as you swing. All of these work together to lengthen the swing (producing slower bat speed and therefore less power) and cause a lot of ground balls.Read more.

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