Adapting to Increased Pitching Velocity: Mastering Your Swing with Efficient Adjustments

As pitchers continue to improve and their velocity surpasses our ability to maintain effective bat speed, hitters need to make crucial adjustments. To stay competitive, it's essential to refine your trigger, setup, and overall swing to be congruent with the ball's flight. This article from Lupos Baseball will guide you through the necessary changes to adapt your hitting technique, ensuring you remain effective against high-velocity pitchers.

Understanding the Challenge

When facing a pitcher whose velocity exceeds your current bat speed capabilities, simply trying harder won’t suffice. Instead, you must adjust your mechanics to stay in sync with the ball’s trajectory. By becoming congruent with the flight of the ball, you can time your swing more effectively and maintain control.

Making the Adjustment: Congruence vs. Incongruence

Congruent Hitting:

1. Timing and Setup: Align your...

How to Hit a Curveball: Mastering the Art of Recognizing and Hitting Breaking Pitches

The curveball is a pitch that many hitters dread. Pitchers love their curveballs and often use them to keep hitters off balance. There are countless videos, books, and tutorials on how to hit a curveball, but in this blog, we will focus on our approach to recognizing and hitting this tricky pitch. We'll discuss why it's essential to work on hitting curveballs, how to recognize them, and provide actionable tips to improve your performance against breaking pitches.

Why Work on Hitting Curveballs?

Pitchers frequently rely on their curveballs to disrupt hitters' timing. A steady diet of curveballs can make it difficult to stay consistent at the plate. Learning to recognize and hit curveballs effectively can significantly improve your overall hitting performance.

The Opportunity to Capitalize

Curveballs are thrown at lower speeds compared to fastballs, offering an excellent opportunity to make solid...

Baseball Hitting Cheats: Strategies to Anticipate and Exploit Pitches

In baseball, the difference between a good hitter and a great hitter often lies in their ability to anticipate pitches and position themselves to exploit them. This blog will explore some of the cheats our hitters use—not to break the rules, but to gain an edge by anticipating pitches and making slight adjustments in the batter's box. These strategic moves can turn the tide of an at-bat and lead to more consistent success at the plate.

https://youtube.com/shorts/zVV_W-v13iY

CHEAT #1: Anticipating the Fastball in a 3-0 Count

One of the most predictable situations in baseball is a 3-0 count. When a pitcher falls behind with three balls and no strikes, everyone in the stadium knows the next pitch is likely to be a fastball. This is because pitchers trust their fastball more than any other pitch to get a critical strike. This predictability gives our hitters an opportunity to capitalize.

The Strategy

In a 3-0...

Dreaming About Being The Best? Here's How You Set Goals To Get There.

Dreaming about being the best is easy–but setting goals to get there? That’s hard. Taking the necessary steps to accomplish those goals is even harder. But it doesn’t have to be.

We’re all guilty of it—especially baseball players—finding ourselves dreaming of the day we drive in the winning run, get the ring, and get awarded the MVP trophy. I bet you have even imagined (or maybe actually practiced) your post-game on-field media interview.  We get this far-off gaze in our eyes and dream of accomplishing these Big Hairy Audacious Goals (or BHAGS) that leadership guru Jim Collins taught, almost as if they are already a reality. 

That far-out gaze you get and that sense of hope for the future aren’t goals. They’re dreams. I know that truth probably stings a little. But if you are confusing dreams with goals, you lie to yourself, and you will no doubt...

Why Motivation Might Be Actually Fooling You

Are you feeling motivated? Ready to take on that goal? Not so fast. That urge or desire to do something might actually be the wrong path toward the goal you set. Motivation can’t be fully trusted. Yet you rely on it. Almost as if it was the sustenance you need for performance survival. Don’t believe me? Google it. 

“How to Motivate Yourself”

"8 Psychology-Based Tricks for Staying Motivated"

"15 Tips on How to Be More Motivated in The Morning"

"30 Tips for How to Get and Stay Motivated"

I could keep going, but for the sake of getting to the point, I won’t. But trust me; there are millions of articles espousing every idea imaginable for how you can stay motivated. The problem is that while motivation sounds nice, we mistakenly believe it will help us achieve our goals. 

It won’t

What’s your favorite sports movie? Take a moment and think about it. Think...

Want To Become A .300 Hitter? Learn Your Swing Feelings

Anyone can swing a bat. But learning how to swing doesn’t make you a .300 hitter. I can still hear those very first instructions from my tee ball coach. Point your shoulder to the mound, feet apart, and put the bat up by your inside ear. Eye on the ball. 

Swing!

Those first few swings were both exhilarating and intimidating. But over time, every young player begins to understand the feeling of swinging the bat. But as you mature, that feeling needs to be replaced with the feeling of hitting. Because swinging the bat and hitting a baseball are not the same thing. 

What would you say if I asked you what your swing felt like? What does a smooth, early building trigger feel like? How about your thoughts on the feeling of a long-full-robust extension after contact? Many of you have never stopped for even a fraction of a second to consider how your swing feels. 

That’s...

How to Move From Belief Into The Kind of Confidence That Breeds Success

In our last post, Belief and Hard Work are Actually Only Part of Athletic Success. Here’s Why.

we discussed the subjectivity of belief. We want to be a great athlete. We can believe that we will win the game, the championship, or go undefeated. But the truth behind belief will only take you so far. 

Your belief may produce the right work ethic, a commitment to the team, and the grit needed to keep moving forward when the obstacles are too much. That’s still not enough. The key is transforming your belief into tangible, measurable, and objective proof through simulated execution.

That objective proof is in the execution and the confidence that comes from consistent and successful execution. In other words, putting the time into practice simulating the circumstances you will have to perform in. Then correct the errors, re-simulate, and prove to yourself, your teammates, and...

How To Avoid The Dangerous Trap That Belief and Hard Work Guarantee Success

“If you work hard and believe in yourself, you can accomplish anything.”

You’ve perhaps seen this on a bumper sticker, read it in a book, or heard a video proclaiming this grand truth. If you’re a parent, you’ve likely repeated this to your kids on more than one occasion. And if you’re an athlete, you’ve tried to convince yourself of this every time you’re staring at a lofty goal you want to achieve. 

Except that it’s not true. Make no mistake. We desperately want it to be true. We want it to be that simple. We want confidence that the playing field is level, that my kid has just as much chance as any other, and that we can simply overcome every obstacle if we just believe. 

It makes excellent movies, bumper stickers, books, and even great T-shirts. But it’s not reality. 

Of course, hard work and believing in...

Choking Up On The Bat Doesn’t Make You A Better Hitter. Here’s Why.

Spend a few minutes watching a little league baseball game, and you will undoubtedly hear the coaches instructing some of the smaller players to choke up on the bat. There is this intuitive idea that when the bat is just a bit too long for the size of the young player, choking up reduces the length of the bat, thereby reducing the amount of time and effort it takes to rotate the bat over the plate. 

That same conventional wisdom has extended through the more advanced ranks of the baseball world. Coach tells you to "Choke up when you get two strikes." This is about changing your grip by moving your hands up the bat's handle toward the barrel. To be clear, I am not talking about choking up and staying there throughout your at-bat—Barry Bonds was famous for doing this—or when we face ultra-hard throwers or a game on the line. On these occasions, some hitters will choke just...