Does Hand Speed Matter?
When I was a little kid playing baseball you had a ton of different cues about how you need to use your hands. Coaches fathers and many others preach the importance of using the hands. The difficulty when talking about hands in hitting is that it is often talked about in the wrong way. Coaches are often thinking of hands first (which when looking at the chain is inefficient). But I don’t believe that the discussion of hands goes far enough. The hands are part of the swing.
I really like the way that Dan Heefer puts it during his ABCA Main Stage talk saying “The hands are not just along for the ride. They are active participants during the swing.” This got me thinking that even though we don’t want to me building swings that work from the hands first it doesn’t mean that we can’t add value to our swing by examining them.
Before we dig into what we might know about the information available to use as coaches lets first discuss the fact that there is a chain of energy that runs through the body. From the ground to the hips then the torso through the hands to the bat as the “final lever”. This is important to think about because we the energy moves up the chain we need to consider the fact that the hands are one of the final links to collect the distribute the incoming energy from the other body parts. If the hands are just along for the ride…it doesn’t matter how fast your body is rotating.
Here is one chart looking at the golf swing. The important thing here is to look at when the different body parts fire. Small bumps at first that grow more over time until we finally have impact at the highest point. This should be our goal to move the different parts of the swing more and more as we begin to get closer to contact.
When we look at rotational velocities and when things rotate we can see that from the data that is available to us we find that the movements of the swing start from the ground up. The importance here is that the hands are going to one of these last movements to transfer the energy into the bat. One of the most interesting things about the swing is that there is a great jump in how fast everything moves. Slowly going up the chain into bat. I would think that the hands would rotate at velocities above the shoulders but slower than the bat. Most research that I have come across works in rotational velocities and not MPH. Most technology that is available to us today uses MPH. So we don’t have a clear line to work from but I think we can still take some information when looking at data that looks at the hands.
What does the data tell us?
The data is very interesting to look at. It makes sense also when you examine the chain in the body. The hands fire fast the barrel fires fast. So we are going to display a couple different graphs that are going to show pretty decent evidence that there is some connection. Or that the connection at least will lead us to examine this topic more.
First lets throw the data out there without really commenting at first. All data is taken from the following spreadsheet. Created by David Marshall Fangraphs Contributor. I believe the data is reverse engineered from Statcast Data but I can’t confirm his. The graphs are Barrel speed across the Y Axis and Hand Speed across the X Axis.
So I didn’t even put trend lines because their does seem to be a correlation without really even knowing anything further than the information which is given. So it seems that in order for create bat speed you need to have an effective final lever to the swing. The importance of the final lever I’m not sure that it is the end all. I would be interested in looking at how hip rotation velocities and shoulder velocities correlate with barrel speed. But non the less it seems that having fast hand speed does have some connection to bat speed.
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