Baseball Hitting

Baseball Hitting At The Batting Cage 

Batting Cages and actual batting practice are excellent for helping your timing and to see the results of how your Baseball Hitting swing is working out. However, one of the challenges to baseball hitting in a batting cage or in live batting practice is how to determine whether you are hitting the ball well. After all, just hitting the baseball hard is not good enough for effective baseball hitting. A hard hit, long fly ball that is caught is the same as missing a pitch completely and striking out on the scoring sheet. A better strategy is to focus on trying to hit line drives or hit the ball on the ground. The reason for this is they are far more likely to translate into hits in games.

One baseball hitting strategy to help keep you focused towards meeting these goals is to score your batting cage and batting practice sessions.  All that is needed is someone to keep tracking of your hitting performance while you bat in the batting cage.  This can be accomplished by: 

1.   Using a three point system for hitting.  The point system should award 3 points for line drives, 2 points for baseballs that hit on the ground or low to the ground, and 1 point for fly balls. 

2.   Create three hitting zones.  In the batting cage and on the practice field, use arbitrary markers for each zone.  Each zone should be separated by about 6 yards.  For instance, the ground ball hitting should have a horizontal zone from the ground to 6 yards straight up in the air.  The line drive hitting zone should be the hitting zone between 6 and 12 yards in the air and finally the fly ball zone should be the hitting zone between 12 and 18 yards in the air. 

3.   Use Arbitrary markers in the batting cage.  If you are in the batting cage, you can use arbitrary markers such as the top of the hitting machine to mark off each section.  Regardless of your arbitrary markers, you want to start scoring each of your sessions. 

4.   Record the results of each session.  Get into the habit of recording these sessions and try to start out-doing your previous best scores.  In this way, you can turn batting practice into a game and get more enjoyment out of it. 

5.   Memory Technique if at Batting Cages By Yourself.  Sometimes you will be alone at the batting cages, in these instances you can focus your scoring by seeing how many times you can get a perfect hit in the middle range.  If your first round had you hit 6 in this range, your goal for the next round should be to get at least 7 hits in this area.  This type of concentrated thinking will not require you to see how you scored in the other areas, but still get the maximum benefit by encouraging you to hit in the main zone. 

This strategy can also be shared with other teammates or even the entire team to encourage each of them to improve their baseball hitting as well.  The results can be posted in the locker room and can be used as a way to encourage more interest in batting practice.  By making it a little more competitive, you will see all the players adjust their hitting to do better.  This will result in a team that hits more line drives and ground balls translating into more hits and RBIs.  

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