Inside The Ballpark - Baseball Humor Blog

From Hunter: More About Hitting

by Hunter Pence on February 1st, 2008

Well, hello again.

It’s been another solid week of workouts and practice for me. My swing is finally starting to feel good. I haven’t had a chance to hit on a field yet, which is an entirely different feel than hitting in a cage. Our workouts at REPS are starting to tone down. We are doing a lot of running and coordination drills and less of the heavy weight power lifting.

Basically, we are trying to just maintain until spring training and the season, and get our bodies in condition to handle the every day running that baseball entails. It’s only two weeks until I head to spring training and I cant wait to get back into it again.

One of the questions this week was if I get to face any live pitching? The answer is yes. Every year, I hit off the owner of Cover All Bases, Chris Gay. He was a pitcher at UTA and made it to AA with the White Sox. I’ve been hitting at his batting cage since I was 13 years old, so as I’ve said before, it’s my second home.

Chris throws us all batting practice until the end of January and then mixes us up in February. This is great for me because when I go to spring training, I’m somewhat prepared for off-speed pitches and it helps me make some adjustments to my swing that I can’t get off machines. It’s all about balance, timing and your eye.

The other thing I’m doing this year is working off a machine that shoots tennis balls up to 120mph with numbers on them. The numbers are either red or black. The point of the drill is to read the color first and as you get better, start seeing the numbers. It’s amazing how much better you get from day to day. That’s the jist of my hitting training before I go to spring training.

Until next week …

Hunter

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