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4.5
My son is making the transition form Little League to 12U travel ball this fall. For the past year, he has taken traditional linear hitting instruction that focused mainly on his timing - load, weight shift, and swing to contact. Although he made significant improvement, it seems that his progress has plateaued and there is nothing in his linear instruction that will lift him to the next level.I stumbled across Positional Hitting completely by accident. Something about the approach made intuitive sense to me so I thought we would give it a try. I just finished reading the book and we have not implemented anything yet, so I will restrict my review to commenting on the credibility of the author and the quality of the presentation. I'll follow-up later with an update on our actual results.For the following reasons, I find Jaime Cavellos to be a credible resource:- His approach is based on exhaustive video analysis of great hitters going back to Ruth ... before weight training, before aluminum bats, before steroids.- His approach yielded tangible and dramatic results for himself (he took his own medicine) and for MLB players.- Although he has developed a training bat (MP30) for the system, neither it nor any other fancy training aids are required. In his Positional Hitting book, he does not even mention the MP30 bat, so you know he's not just trying to hawk a training aid through his book.- Both his website and book are a very "soft sell." He doesn't use a bunch of copy writing gimmicky to lure you in. You can tell he's an evangelist first and a salesman second, if at all. I get the impression he's out to change the baseball world, not make a quick buck, although he will undoubtedly make plenty of those before he's done.Now, on to the book. Its 100 pages in length, but the first thirty pages just seek to establish his credibility. Almost all of that material is available on his website. The next 50 pages discuss each swing position... what each position looks like, the benefits of each position, and troubleshooting tips. High quality illustrations and concise writing make everything very understandable. No jargon or baseball mumbo jumbo here. Finally, he wraps up with 10 pages of drills which allow the player feel and train for each position. In short, you can learn more about the ideal baseball swing in about two hours of reading than I learned in five years working with my son, talking to professional instructors, and coaching youth teams. He also debunks a lot of baseball b.s. that just gets passed on from one coach to the next without anyone questioning it.Of course, all of this is for naught if the approach doesn't get results. I'll follow-up with those in a couple months.Postscript - I also purchased the MP28 youth training bat. It is a short, heavy, wood bat with a thick handle. Its supposed to help the player feel the critical "slot position" and it appears to me that it will be useful for this; however, you could probably do okay with a drop 5 wooden youth bat also. I think the short length helps with the balance, but I haven't seen any comments from Mr. Cevallos on why his MP28 is superior to a standard wood bat for training. I'll let you know how it works later.Also, positional hitting shares some commonalities with Epstein's rotational hitting, but there are key differences. Get the book and judge for yourself which makes more sense.
