Hitting Tips from Carlos #4: Distance from the Plate

"Hey guys what's going on. Its coach Garcia and today we're going to be talking real quick about the most common bad habits that I see with youth hitters when they walk into a batting cage. Okay, a bad habit that I see a lot especially with young hitters is how close they are from the plate. They don't have a good understanding on how to measure the distance that they need to have in between the plate and them. So, when they start working with batting practice especially when they're working with soft-toss and even with the batting tee they love to be super close from the plate and every single pitch that they get is going to be inside which is going to cause bad habits. Something that I preach a lot is how to start batting practice on hitting the ball to the middle part of the field and hitting the ball to the other way to start working with direction first instead of just coming with a pull swing when you first swing out of the practice. A thing that I do is to measure how far or how close I am from the plate is to take my bat and cover the outside part of the plate with the end of my bat like this and wherever the knob of the bat lands into the ground that's the distance I want to have in between the plate and my feet to be able to cover every single part of the strike zone when the outside corner, down the middle, or inside." - Carlos Garcia