Making Sense of Your Miss

One of the most common questions I hear from hitters after a rough round of BP or a frustrating at-bat is some version of, "What's wrong with my swing?"

It's a reasonable question. Most hitters have spent a considerable amount of their careers being taught that when something goes wrong, there's probably a mechanical fix for it. Naturally, they want someone to identify the problem and tell them how to fix it.

Sometimes those explanations are correct. There are plenty of legitimate mechanical limitations that can negatively affect a hitter's performance, and identifying those limitations is an important part of player development. I've become increasingly convinced, though, that we spend too much time trying to fix swings that aren't necessarily broken.

A hitter can feel fantastic one day and terrible the next. They might have a great first at-bat, take a couple of ugly swings in their second, and suddenly feel like something they've been working on for months has disappeared. Yet if we compared their mechanics using three-dimensional motion capture, we might find that very little has actually changed.

That's a possibility I've become interested in through coaching, not something I think the available research has conclusively established. A hitter's experience of their swing can change for any number of reasons, and we shouldn't assume that every change in feel corresponds to a meaningful change in movement. What interests me is how often hitters respond to that feeling by searching for a mechanical fix when what they might actually need is a better understanding of where their barrel is in space, how they're delivering it to the baseball, and what kind of ball flight that swing is producing.

Your swing doesn't have to feel good to work

Hitting is an incredibly variable task. Pitchers throw different velocities and shapes to locations the hitter can't anticipate, forcing them to make decisions under harsh time constraints. The relationship between their swing and the incoming pitch is constantly changing, so even when a hitter's mechanics are relatively consistent, the contact they produce can vary considerably.

That's part of what makes hitting so difficult. It's also why I think becoming dependent on a particular mechanical feel can be a problem.

Most hitters know what their swing feels like when everything is going well. We've all seen those days when the barrel seems to find the baseball effortlessly. Everything feels comfortable, and the hitter starts to believe they've finally figured something out. Unfortunately, that feeling doesn't always last.

Factors like fatigue and recent performance can influence how a hitter experiences their swing, as can the demands of a particular matchup. A hitter might feel uncomfortable or off even when they're moving virtually the same way they were when they were having success. If their response is to continually search for the feeling they had yesterday, they can spend an entire game, and sometimes much longer, trying to solve a problem that might not actually exist.

I don't think the goal should be to make a hitter feel mechanically perfect before they're capable of competing. I'd rather give them a way to compete regardless of how their swing happens to feel that day.

Understanding your miss

This is where calibration comes in.

When I talk about calibration, I'm referring to a hitter's ability to understand where their swing is on a particular day, recognize the ball flight it's producing, and make adjustments that bring the results closer to what they're trying to accomplish.

The process starts with knowing what you're trying to do with the baseball. The more specific, the better. There's a meaningful difference between trying to hit a ball toward center field and trying to drive one over the center fielder's head. The second gives the hitter a much clearer picture of what they're trying to produce, which makes it easier to evaluate what actually happens.

Let's say a right-handed hitter is trying to hit a line drive back through the middle of the field but keeps getting jammed, producing weak ground balls toward the right side of the field. They might be consistently late getting the barrel to the baseball. One approach would be to examine their mechanics and try to identify what's contributing to the problem. There may be a legitimate mechanical explanation worth investigating, particularly if the issue persists.

The hitter doesn't necessarily need to understand that explanation to make an adjustment. We might simply ask them to try pulling the ball as high as they can over the left fielder's head instead.

That might sound like an unnecessarily large adjustment, especially when the hitter's original goal was to hit a line drive back through the middle of the field. In my experience, though, hitters often recognize the adjustment they need to make without committing to it enough to produce a meaningful change. They make a small adjustment, get essentially the same result, and conclude that the idea didn't work.

Sometimes the adjustment needs to feel ridiculous.

A hitter who's constantly getting underneath the baseball might need to feel like they're trying to take the pitcher's shins off. Someone who's cutting across the ball and producing excessive sidespin, causing it to slice like a bad drive in golf, might experiment with trying to hit pull-hooks. A hitter who's repeatedly chopping down on the baseball could try launching one over the center fielder's head.

None of those instructions should be interpreted as universal solutions. The same miss can have different causes, and changing what a hitter is trying to do won't always produce the desired result. What matters is that the hitter has a way to experiment with the relationship between their swing and the ball flight they're producing or attempting to produce.

An exaggerated adjustment might produce exactly the result they were looking for. It might also produce an entirely different miss, which gives them more information to work with. Over time, those experiences may help a hitter develop a better understanding of how to deliver the barrel where they want it.

Let the task influence the movement

There's a tendency in hitting instruction to assume that changing a movement requires consciously thinking about the movement itself. I don't believe that's always the case. A hitter can change how they move by changing what they're trying to accomplish.

This is one of the ideas behind constraints-led coaching and ecological dynamics. Rather than prescribing a particular movement pattern, we can manipulate the task or environment to encourage the athlete to explore different solutions.

Research by Gray (2018) provides a useful baseball-specific example. In a study comparing different approaches to increasing launch angle, hitters who trained with manipulated task constraints demonstrated greater improvements in several batting measures than hitters receiving conventional internal or external cues. Gray (2020) also found that constraints-led training improved opposite-field hitting performance in a simulated batting environment, with changes in movement variability that appeared functional for the task.

Both studies are interesting, particularly because they examine baseball rather than borrowing conclusions from unrelated sports. They're also relatively small experiments conducted in simulated batting environments. They don't establish that changing what a hitter is trying to do with the ball will reliably produce a particular mechanical adjustment, much less improve performance during a professional game.

There's another distinction worth making. Manipulating the constraints of a batting task isn't necessarily the same as asking a hitter to visualize a particular ball flight. The studies investigated specific training interventions, not the exaggerated verbal instructions I've described here. I see those instructions as a practical coaching application of a related idea, rather than something the experiments have directly validated.

What the research does suggest is that prescribing a movement isn't the only way to influence how a hitter performs a task.

If I suspect a hitter is extending their hips too early, I could tell them to maintain their posture or explain what their pelvis and torso are doing during the swing. There may be situations where that instruction is useful, especially when paired with objective feedback that helps the hitter understand whether they're actually making the intended adjustment. I could also give them a specific ball-flight target that might encourage a different movement solution and see how they respond.

Regardless of which approach I choose, I want some way to evaluate whether it's working. If I ask a hitter to drive the ball over the center fielder's head, and they begin producing the ball flight we're looking for, that's encouraging. It doesn't necessarily tell me what changed mechanically, though. Their improvement could reflect a change in their movement, timing, or how they're delivering the barrel to the baseball.

This is where I think objective feedback becomes particularly valuable. We can use ball-flight data to evaluate whether the hitter is producing the intended result, bat-tracking data to understand how the barrel is moving, and three-dimensional biomechanics to investigate whether the mechanical characteristics we're interested in are actually changing. Not every situation requires all of those tools, but the information can help us distinguish between an adjustment that merely feels different and one that's producing a measurable difference.

I don't see perception-based interventions and objective measurement as competing approaches. Ideally, they work together. The hitter can focus on a simple, actionable task while the coach uses more sophisticated information to evaluate the response and guide subsequent decisions. We should still be careful about drawing conclusions from a few successful swings, but examining changes across repeated attempts gives us a much better basis for deciding whether an intervention is useful.

During competition, I generally prefer to keep the hitter's attention on the task rather than on consciously monitoring individual body parts. That doesn't mean mechanical information is irrelevant. It means the information I use to make a coaching decision doesn't always need to be the information I give the hitter.

There is research relevant to that preference, although the broader evidence is less definitive than it's sometimes presented. Castaneda and Gray (2007) found that highly skilled baseball hitters performed better when directing their attention toward the ball leaving the bat than when focusing internally on their hand movements. Interestingly, the results differed for less-skilled hitters.

Research across motor learning has frequently reported advantages for directing attention toward the effects of a movement rather than the movement itself. However, a more recent systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis by McKay and colleagues (2024) raised substantial concerns about reporting bias in that literature. After accounting for potential publication bias, the estimated average benefits of external focus were small or negligible.

That doesn't mean external cues are ineffective. It means we should be careful about treating them as inherently superior, regardless of the athlete or situation.

For me, the practical question isn't whether a hitter should always think externally or internally. It's whether the information we're giving them is useful for the problem they're trying to solve. During a game, asking a hitter to drive a ball over the left fielder's head may be more actionable than explaining the specifics of their bat-tracking data. During training, there may be good reasons to approach the same problem differently.

Learning to recognize a trend

I don't want hitters making a new adjustment every time they take a bad swing. One miss doesn't necessarily tell us very much.

A hitter can get jammed because their barrel is late, but that doesn't mean every jammed swing reflects the same underlying problem. A ball that slices toward the foul line might be the result of how the barrel moved through the ball at contact or the demands of the pitch itself. Sometimes a hitter simply makes a poor swing.

What interests me is whether the same kind of miss keeps showing up.

If a hitter spends an entire day of BP cutting across the baseball and producing balls with excessive sidespin, that's useful information. If the same thing continues for the next 2 weeks, we have more reason to experiment with an adjustment.

Recognizing that tendency, though, isn't quite the same as knowing what to do about it.

Research on motor learning offers an interesting connection here. In an experimental study, Patterson, McRae, and Lai (2016) examined whether asking participants to estimate their own performance errors could improve their ability to evaluate subsequent attempts. The findings suggested that engaging learners in estimating their errors could benefit performance appraisal and learning.

The task was a laboratory timing exercise, not baseball, so I wouldn't assume the results transfer directly to hitters. Still, the distinction is useful. Rather than simply telling an athlete whether an attempt was successful, we might ask them to evaluate what happened relative to what they were trying to accomplish.

There's also a limit to how much information a hitter can extract from an unsuccessful result. Someone might recognize that they're consistently getting jammed without understanding what's contributing to it. Even if they identify a useful direction for an adjustment, they may not know how to produce it.

That's where coaching and feedback become important. We can help hitters recognize things they haven't noticed and guide their experimentation when they don't have enough information to find a solution on their own.

Sometimes the information needed for an adjustment comes from somewhere other than the hitter's own swings.

Imagine a hitter who's making excellent contact during pregame BP. Everything feels good, and they're consistently delivering the barrel where they want it. Then they look at the scouting report. The opposing pitcher has a high-spin fastball, frequently attacks the upper part of the strike zone, and consistently generates swing-and-misses underneath the baseball.

That information might influence how the hitter approaches their first at-bat. They may decide to feel slightly more over the top of the baseball than they normally would, anticipating that the pitcher's fastball characteristics could make their usual approach less effective.

They haven't identified a mechanical flaw, and they haven't even experienced a problem yet. They're simply using the available information to prepare for the demands of the matchup.

To me, that's an important part of calibration. It's not always about reacting to something that went wrong. Sometimes it's about anticipating what might happen and making an adjustment before the problem appears.

Pregame should prepare you to compete

I think this has some interesting implications for how we approach pregame preparation.

If a hitter is having a ton of success and their current routine consists solely of hitting a few balls off a tee, I'm not particularly interested in convincing them to change it. Ride that wave for as long as possible.

Most hitters, though, aren't performing as well as they'd like. They're trying to improve and looking for ways to become more consistent. For those hitters, I think it's worth asking what we're actually trying to accomplish during pregame work.

Are we simply trying to make their swing feel good, or are we trying to prepare them for the demands they're about to encounter when they step on the field?

If a hitter is preparing to face a pitcher throwing 95 mph, there's a reasonable argument for exposing them to comparable velocity before the game, assuming the equipment and circumstances allow it. Matching velocity alone, however, doesn't necessarily recreate the demands of facing a live pitcher.

A small study by Kuo, Cheng, and Lee (2021), involving four professional baseball players, identified differences in batting mechanics and timing between hitting against a pitching machine and facing a live pitcher. Four players is far too small a sample to draw sweeping conclusions, but the findings illustrate why the information available to a hitter matters, not just the speed of the incoming baseball.

A machine can provide useful preparation, particularly when it allows a hitter to experience relevant velocity or pitch shapes. It may not reproduce the visual information available from a pitcher's delivery, though, and we shouldn't assume that making practice more game-like in one respect automatically makes it more effective overall.

There are also logistical limitations to what teams can accomplish during pregame. Access to equipment and available space influence what's realistic, as does the amount of time players have to prepare. The point isn't to prescribe one ideal routine.

It's to consider whether pregame gives the hitter useful information about the task they're about to perform.

Maybe a hitter discovers that a particular pitch shape is causing them to get jammed, or that the ball is coming off their bat differently when they face higher velocity. That creates an opportunity to experiment before the game begins, rather than waiting until a few unsuccessful at-bats convince them something is wrong with their swing.

The problem with always looking for a fix

One of the challenges with this approach is that hitters and coaches are often accustomed to interpreting poor outcomes as evidence of something mechanically wrong.

A hitter struggles, someone looks at video, identifies a movement they don't like, and suggests an adjustment. The hitter squares up the next pitch, and everybody assumes the problem has been solved.

Except we don't necessarily know that.

We don't know whether the mechanical characteristic was responsible for the original miss, whether the intervention meaningfully changed it, or whether the next successful swing happened because of the adjustment.

This is the kind of situation where confirmation bias can become a problem. Once we've identified what we believe is causing a hitter's struggles, it's tempting to interpret subsequent outcomes as evidence that our explanation was correct.

Video can make this particularly tempting. A two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional movement can be misleading, especially when the person interpreting it doesn't have a strong understanding of biomechanics. Camera perspective and the orientation of the hitter can influence how a movement appears.

That doesn't make video useless. It can be a valuable tool when used appropriately. Being able to see something, however, doesn't necessarily mean we understand what's causing it. Having more detailed biomechanical data doesn't automatically establish what intervention will improve performance, either.

I think objective data can be extremely helpful in this process. Bat tracking and three-dimensional movement data can help us develop better explanations, particularly when we examine them alongside the ball flight a hitter is producing. The question is how we use that information.

A coach might recognize that a hitter is producing an attack angle that's contributing to an undesirable ball flight. They might have a reasonable biomechanical hypothesis about why that's happening. That doesn't mean the hitter needs to hear a detailed explanation of their torso orientation or hip extension before their next at-bat.

Sometimes the most useful instruction is simply, "Let's try to take the pitcher's shins off." In a different situation, it might be, "Put one over the left fielder's head."

The coach can understand the complexity behind the problem while giving the hitter something simple and actionable. To me, that's an important part of good coaching.

Developing hitters who can adjust

Something I've noticed throughout my coaching career is that some hitters seem to have an exceptional awareness of where their barrel is in space and what kind of ball flight their swing is producing. They're able to recognize how they're missing and make an adjustment almost immediately.

Sometimes they don't even realize how impressive that ability is. You might ask a hitter why they tried to hit a ground ball after popping up a few pitches, and they'll look at you like the answer should be obvious. They were getting underneath the ball, so they tried to stay over the top of it.

Other hitters struggle to make that connection. They recognize that the ball isn't coming off their bat the way they want, but they don't know how to change it without someone telling them what to do mechanically.

I believe that awareness can be developed, although I wouldn't claim that we've established one universally effective way to teach it. Sometimes I intentionally give hitters time to struggle with a task because I want to see what they recognize and how they attempt to solve the problem. With other hitters, particularly when our time together is limited, I'll provide more guidance.

There's also an important difference between helping a hitter make a successful adjustment today and developing their ability to make adjustments by themselves in the future. A particular cue might produce an immediate improvement without necessarily teaching the hitter how to recognize or solve a similar problem the next time it appears. To understand whether we're developing that ability, we'd need to see how they respond over time, particularly when the demands change and the coach isn't there to guide every decision.

With hitters I've worked with for a while, the conversation might be as simple as asking where they're trying to hit the ball, what their miss looks like, and what they think they need to change.

There's no universal amount of guidance that's appropriate for every hitter. The objective is to help them become increasingly capable of making those decisions themselves.

That might mean manipulating training environments to expose their weaknesses and give them opportunities to explore new solutions. It might mean using objective feedback to help them understand something about their misses they haven't recognized. Sometimes it simply means asking a question instead of immediately providing an answer.

The important thing is that we're not developing hitters who can only succeed when someone else is there to tell them what to fix. We're helping them develop a process they can use independently.

You don't have to find your swing

I think one of the most frustrating things about hitting is how quickly a hitter's confidence in their swing can disappear. They can spend weeks making progress, have a couple of bad at-bats, and suddenly feel like they've never played baseball before.

The temptation is to search for whatever feeling or movement was working before. Sometimes, though, there's nothing to find. Their mechanics might be almost identical to what they were yesterday, and their movement might be perfectly capable of producing the ball flight they're looking for.

They just haven't figured out how to get the result they want under the demands they're facing.

Even when there is a legitimate mechanical issue, consciously trying to fix it in the middle of a game isn't necessarily the best way to respond. I'd rather see hitters develop an understanding of their misses and have a few simple adjustments they know how to use.

Pay attention to how the ball is coming off your bat relative to what you're trying to do with it. If you notice a consistent miss, experiment with an adjustment in the opposite direction. Don't be afraid to exaggerate what you're trying to accomplish, and pay attention to whether the ball starts coming off the bat differently.

Sometimes it works immediately. Other times, the hitter needs to experiment a little longer. There will also be situations where the problem is more complicated than changing what they're trying to do with the baseball can solve.

The point isn't that calibration guarantees success. It's that the hitter has a way to respond when things aren't going their way. In a sport where so much is outside of the hitter's control, I think that's an incredibly valuable skill.

You don't have to feel like you have your best swing to compete. You just need to understand how to use the one you've got.

Research references

• Castaneda, B., & Gray, R. (2007). Effects of focus of attention on baseball batting performance in players of differing skill levels. Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology, 29(1), 60–77. https://doi.org/10.1123/jsep.29.1.60
• Gray, R. (2018). Comparing cueing and constraints interventions for increasing launch angle in baseball batting. Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/spy0000131
• Gray, R. (2020). Comparing the constraints led approach, differential learning and prescriptive instruction for training opposite-field hitting in baseball. Psychology of Sport and Exercise. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2020.101797
• McKay, B., et al. (2024). Reporting bias, not external focus: A robust Bayesian meta-analysis and systematic review of the external focus of attention literature. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000451
• Patterson, J. T., McRae, J., & Lai, Q. (2016). Accuracy of subjective performance appraisal is not modulated by the method used by the learner during motor skill acquisition. Perceptual and Motor Skills. https://doi.org/10.1177/0031512516640676
• Kuo, Y.-C., Cheng, K.-B., & Lee, Y.-J. (2021). Differences in baseball batting movement patterns between facing a pitcher and a pitching machine. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. https://doi.org/10.1080/02701367.2020.1741499