Ted Williams wrote in The Science of Hitting that the “slightly upward swing is the ideal path.”

It took years for Williams’ theories to be embraced but he has largely been vindicated in the modern era: Hitting the ball in the air has proven to be more impactful than driving it into the ground. 

(If you think otherwise, you can yell at me on Twitter.)

Understanding a hitter’s swing path is one way to tell if they are capable of getting the ball in the air on a regular basis. 

Experienced coaches will be able to tell from swings what a hitter’s path is (up, down or level), however, by using a bat sensor from Blast Motion or Diamond Kinetic, you can obtain a metric called attack angle and have certainty of where in the swing path the hitter’s bat is making contact with the ball.

Certainly you don’t need to invest in the tech but, as this clip below from Driveline Baseball’s hitting trainer John Soteropulos shows, a hitter’s swing can have all three elements in it. With a bat sensor, you can isolate the data point that will tell you if a hitter is swinging uphill, level, or downhill at the moment of contact. 

If the attack angle number is positive, a hitter is swinging with an upward plane. If a hitter’s attack angle is in the negative range, they are swinging down on the ball. A measurement of zero is a swing that is parallel to the ground. 

Read the rest of the post at Get Better Baseball.