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Page 2 6. Weight transfer =keep your head down on the ball.
Shift, carry and slide your weight from back to middle to the point of contact as you keep your head and eyes down on the ball. I'm swinging down on the ball as if I'm chopping down a tree with an ax—taking the knob to the ball, keeping the barrel of the bat above the hands. Gripping The Bat—The Creation Of The V-Grip Design
Grip is the key to success or failure with any bat. When I was coaching my kids back in Evansville, Indiana, I noticed that they would always squeeze the bat too hard rather than apply a relaxed grip. What's more, kids can't understand the concept of putting the bat in the fingertips and lining up the knuckles. For proper knuckle alignment, you want to line up the middle knuckles of your fingers on both hands. I started wondering about the possibility of a bat design that would automatically set the right knuckle alignment and fingertip grip. The Evolution of the V-Grip Bat
It all started when a company came to spring training one year and they had made a bat with an ax-handle grip. I loved the way it felt in my hands. It put the bat right in my fingers, and I was a guy who had a tendency to press the bat back against my thumb; I wore a thumb guard to actually push the bat into my fingers. It's an essential element of a proper grip to swing a bat with that relaxed swing we strive for. Unfortunately, the bat this company produced with the ax-handle grip was like hitting with a two-by-four. The back part of the bat had that grip so it was almost square—it just buried my thumb, so it was impossible to use in game situations.  An American League MVP and Player of the Year, Don Mattingly was one of the greatest offensive ballplayers of his generation. I filed this bat idea away for many years without giving up on the goal to produce a bat that would line up with the knuckles and protect the thumbs from punishment. I had retired from baseball and was living in Evansville, raising horses and enjoying spending time with my family, when one day a friend of mine—Ferry "Peanut" Gaines, a sheriff from Bowling Green, Kentucky, stopped by to tell me he knew a carpenter who wanted to show me a special bat. I wasn't interested in his bat but he clearly knew how to work with wood, so I had a good idea: I asked him to make a bat that would automatically put the knuckles and fingertips in the right place. He came back two weeks later with a prototype; we tweaked the design, and it was pretty nice. I started hitting with it a little bit, just to try it out, to see if I was going to hurt my thumb and figure out if it fit right in the fingertips. I liked it. I asked him to make me a few of these bats for the kids, so they could give it a try, and I also had him make some shorter bats (thirty inches) for short-bat drills. That's how Mattingly Baseball got started. Once we had the prototypes figured out, we got a patent and decided to move forward with the idea of making bats to get more kids to try this new design. It's funny because I started this company out of a simple idea to help my kids use their hands better on the bat, to make hitting easier and more comfortable. But you put the bat in your hand and the first thought that pops in your head is, "This is perfect. It fits right in the fingertips. You don't have to think about what you're doing; the bat does everything for you." Comfort, Grip, Batting Gloves
The V-bat is a useful tool to improve your grip on the bat in much the same way that batting gloves protect your hands from injury and slipping off of the bat. I didn't start wearing batting gloves until I was drafted by the New York Yankees and shipped out to Oneonta in the New York-Penn League. Part of my reason for going with batting gloves was the switch from aluminum bats in high school to wooden bats in pro baseball. With aluminum bats, you don't have as much of a need to wear batting gloves. If your hands get all sweaty in the hot, humid summer weather, then batting gloves would make sense to give you a firm grip. If you don't feel comfortable with the batting gloves, though, you should not force yourself to wear them just because you think it's the right thing to do. It all comes down to comfort and grip. Keep in mind that, whichever bat you use, batting gloves will protect your hands from blisters, injury, and discomfort over a long season of games, practice and drills. All players have their own likes and dislikes in glove design. I prefer gloves that fit tight, with no loose fabric hanging off the end of the fingers. Look for gloves that are perfectly aligned to the contours of your hands; excess fabric will move around on your hand while you swing the bat. Aluminum vs. Wooden Bats
There's no question that you have to make an adjustment when going from aluminum to wood. I believe that you are better off learning to hit with a wooden bat; you can feel it when you hit the ball dead on the nose. With aluminum, you can make mistakes and still hit the ball hard. But the popularity of aluminum bats has more to do with economics than performance. With aluminum, you can be sure that you'll use only one bat the entire baseball season. An aluminum bat virtually takes away the ability for a pitcher to bust you inside. He can jam you with that inside pitch and, thanks to your aluminum bat, you'll still be able to do something good and make contact. Aluminum bats have created a generation of hitters who dive out over the plate and a generation of sinkerball specialists who try to induce batters to swing at pitches in the dirt. In college baseball, you see a lot of hitters who dive out over the outside pitch; they can go the other way with authority and hit with power to the opposite field, but they can't handle the inside pitch. And by the time they make it to pro ball, it's an adjustment to face a pitcher who knows how to pitch inside. The truth is, you have to go back to basics when you switch from aluminum to wood, as the days of getting by on those aluminum-bat fluke hits are long gone. Jim Rosenthal is the author or co-author of several books, including Ichiro's Art of Playing Baseball, Randy Johnson's Power Pitching, Leo Mazzone's Pitch Like a Pro, Tony Gwynn's Total Baseball Player, Nolan Ryan's Pitcher's Bible,
and Kiana's Bodysculpting.
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