It was about 15 years ago that I first took a swing at a baseball. “Swing” is probably too generous a word to use in this regard; “swat” might be more apt, “hack” even better.

Batting Improvement System

To say I hadn’t been a particularly athletically gifted child would be a colossal understatement. That first time I swung at a baseball, though, I hit it, purely by luck, right in the sweet spot. When you hit a baseball like that it makes a curiously clean “tock” sound. You barely feel the impact in your shoulders and arms, and oh, it flies! The feeling you get when this happens washes over you like a warm glow. Then you spend the rest of your life trying to do it again.

It’s no secret that hitting a baseball is one of the hardest activity in sports, a notion to which my subsequent trials attest. The narrowness and shape of the bat, the movement of the ball, the pre-committal to the swing, the prediction of where the ball is going to be at the moment of collision rather than where the ball is and the timing required to put the bat in the same exact location in space are all factors that stack to determine whether the batter is cheered around the bases or booed back to the dugout. (more…)