If you’re trying to improve your players skills, try these baseball batting drills with your younger players. You will see immediate improvement and your players’ batting confidence will soar.
Aligning the Center Knuckles Tip
I was having a tough time during soft toss batting to keep my eye on the batters grip on the bat. I started having the players put a round of surgical tape on each of their pinky and pointer fingers so that I could easily see they were gripping the bat correctly and aligning their center knuckles.
The players can feel the friction the tape touching causes and I can see that they are keeping their center knuckles lined up, thus allowing the players to monitor themselves while freeing me up to observe other aspects of their swing.
Dried Bean Drill
We have taken soft toss of small waffle balls to a new level. We use dried butter beans (50 cent a bag). It gives the kids something different to hit at and trust me, when they can hit the bean, a baseball starts to look like a basketball coming at them. A few of my hitters are even able to use a broomstick instead of a bat to hit the beans. After starting this drill we had 2 consecutive games where the entire line up batted around twice. Not bad for 7 and 8 year olds.
Soccer Ball Drill
I had a problem with my kids not following through with their swings. We had the kids hit two soccer balls off the tee as hard as they could. Next they walk over to the assistant coach who will then throw some soft toss balls so they can feel and see how hard they can really hit the ball.