How to Hit the High Strike in Baseball

batting drills high tee drill hitting drills Nov 09, 2020

Hey, guys.

One question I've been getting asked a lot lately is how to handle pitches up in the zone. I've got some baseball players that do a really good job hitting the ball middle, doing a good job going down and getting the ball that's low. But they're struggling on balls up. In softball, I have girls that are great hitters, but struggle with rise balls.

Okay? So two simple drills to help work on being short and quick to balls up in the zone. All right, the first one is just setting up high-tee. If you have a tee, you have a Tanner tee at home that you can adjust. If you don't, you can use a bucket and put the tee right on top. But we have to make sure that our bat path is short and quick, and our move to the ball is nice and compact, and efficient.

We don't want to be long and loopy back here, and lose our barrel. Because there's no way we're going to be able to hit velocity up. And there's no way that softball players are going to be able to hit rise balls. You see videos of Mike Trout doing high tee and trying to stay on top of the ball. They don't do that because they want to swing down in the game. But they want to make sure that on any pitch up in the zone, we're able to work short and quick to it, as opposed to that big, long loopy swing behind us. So one, do high tee. Okay, focus on hitting the bottom of the back net, try to put holes through the L-screen. And then the second one I learned in the minor leagues, and it was one of my favorite drills.

I believe it's an Albert Pujols drill where the batter gets down on a knee. We get to this position kind of to our stride position, where we would it be at launch. And all we're going to focus on is trying to backspin balls towards our second base. Okay? Because most hitters you'll see the barrel collapse. They'll get lazy with this top hand. And they'll hit those little sliced flares out to right field, or for lefties to left field.

So we want to make sure that our move is quick and efficient to the ball, so we're able to backspin balls to our backside or to our opposite gap, as opposed to kind of letting the barrel drag and flaring it up. So again, if you struggle with balls up in the zone, if you're a softball player and you struggle with rise balls, work on it. Get off the tee, work on high tee. Try out this one knee drill. And again, our only focus here is hitting the top inside half of the ball, so we're able to backspin balls and shoot them the other way, instead of hitting those flares.