How To Properly Grip A Baseball Bat

Hey, what's up fellas? How you doing? Manettinelli here. Okay. So today I want to talk about the grip. The grip is usually the first thing that most coaches will go to, especially at younger levels. I remember as a young player, you go to a camp, you go to a lesson, although back then there weren't really very many lessons. And the first thing that would happen was the coach would say, okay, grab onto the bat. And he'd come around and he'd look at your, your hands and you make sure that you're knocking knuckles were all lined up. So you could get into a good hitting position. And so for me, I do it a little bit differently. Do I think the grip's important? Yes. I think the grip can be important, but I go to the grip if a hitter's not able to get into position to launch the bat correctly. So we always start with the four core principles when I'm teaching. If a hitter isn't able to get into a strong, what we call a second core principle where the hitter gets their upper body ready to hit and pull back and they're not in the right position, then I'll go to the grip and make a change if needed. It's not always needed. And so let's talk about some of the things that I look for with the grip. And then what is that position that I'm trying to get players to get into? So the first thing is, where are we going to hold the bat in our hands as far as out in the fingertips, deep in the palm or somewhere in the middle? This is probably the first thing that most coaches go to. What I see a lot of is I see a lot of players, especially softball players that I've worked with want to have the bat way, way out in their fingertips, way out here because they've been told to pretty much every player that does that I feel like has been told to do that. For me, that's not a great position to be in with both hands, especially. Have I seen some players that get a little bit more out in the fingertips in the top hand? I've seen some players, but I've never really seen a high level hitter get the bat out into their fingertips like this. And when I get out here, I just don't feel like I have a good grip of the bat. All right. So that's the first thing. The easy one for me is the one that's deep in the palm. And I don't think that's a good spot either because same thing. I don't feel like I have a really good grip of the bat. When I grab onto the bat, I want to be able to use my hands to be able to turn the bat. I need to be able to feel the handle of the bat and I need to be strong enough that I can turn the bat back. And if you talk to any high level hitter, they're going to talk a lot about using the hands, right? The hands are an important part of the swing. And so I need to be able to feel when I get ready to hit that I can at go, I can use my hands, feel the handle to get the bat working. So where do you grab the bat? Simple thing that I, that I've seen someone do is just take your finger, take your bottom hand that you would hold the bat with, put your finger in your hand. Where will you put it so that you can't pull your finger out of your hand? If you take your finger and you put it way up here at the top of your hand and try to grab onto that and now try to pull, you can pull your finger out. If you put it way back here in the very back of your hand and try to grab it there, you can pull your finger out. But if you take your finger and put it right here where your palm meets your fingers, right where these calluses are, grab that. Now try to pull your finger out. It won't move anywhere. That's where you get the best grip. If I were to give you a hammer, you would take the hammer. You wouldn't hold it way out in your fingertips to try to hammer a nail. You also wouldn't put it way back in your palm to try to hammer a nail. You'd grab it right in that same spot. So that's the position where in my opinion, you have the best grip and the best ability to feel the handle and get the barrel working. So that's the first thing. The second thing about positions, I see a lot of players get into certain positions because of how they grab the bat. The biggest one that I see is hitters that are told to have the bat way, way out in their fingertips and make sure that they're knocking knuckles are aligned, right? And so any position, I think that is a forced position, right? If I were to just give you a bat, in my opinion, as a young kid, and I have a seven year old, if I gave him a bat for the first time, he would never take the bat, put it way out in his fingertips, put his knocking knuckles together and get ready to hit. He wouldn't do it. This does not feel comfortable. It doesn't feel natural. Okay. When I see players do that, what happens is we talked about not getting into good positions to hit. When a player tries to knock, line, they're knocking knuckles up. Almost all of them, when they line, they're knocking knuckles up, both elbows come down and they get into a stance where the rear arm is straight down. A lot of times you'll see the lead arm straight down, right? And so if you watch any of our videos, you know when our upper body gets ready to hit, we're trying to get into a position that our rear arm is somewhere behind our rear hand. And we've made this move where we've pulled back, right? And so if you're trying to get a player to line up their knocking knuckles and where it typically forces the player to have their arms down by their side, basically the rear arm pointed down, it's really hard to get pulled back unless they're going to then change that position. Now there's been a few hitters in the major leagues that I've seen where they'll have their knocking knuckles lined up or close to lined up. But what they do, and it just makes it a little bit more difficult, is that they'll still get their rear arm behind their hands. They'll just have their knuckles lined up and I'm probably close to lined up, not exactly lined up, but I can get here. It just is a little bit of an uncomfortable position. I have to really take my top hand and feel like I'm putting the back of my hand on my wrist to get there, right? So can you do it? Yes. But most hitters are going to be in this position and now they're no longer in the right position to hit. So that's a big one. The other one is if the bat is usually, this will be accompanied with putting it deep in the palm, not always, but where the knocking knuckles of the top hand get way on the other side of the knock of the big knuckles on the bottom hand, right? This position. Okay. And what I see a lot with this position is when the hand, the top hand gets way over the big knuckles of the bottom hand, the back elbow gets into this position right here where it's no longer behind the hands. It comes up above the hands in this position. And so when hitters that I've worked with get here, they either usually will push their hands forward and not turn the bat back or they have this move where they lower, they have to lower this hand, this arm all by itself independently way down here and then they'll start to swing. And so both ways, whether you're pushing or needing to try to get this arm back out of the way, it's taking time and it doesn't allow me to turn my bat back like this. And again, when I grabbed the bat naturally for me, I grabbed the bat and most players, if I just give them a bat, they'll grab the bat naturally. Young players, especially like I said, because they haven't been told anything. They'll grab the bat. It'll be on their calluses. They probably don't have calluses at that point, but if they were older on their calluses, they're going to have the knocking knuckles of their top hand be somewhere in between the knocking and the big knuckles. If you watch most major league players, most older players, you're going to see that a lot of them are very close, very close to lining the knocking knuckles up with their big knuckles. For me personally, I fall close to that, but I'm just slightly knocking knuckles slightly inside of big knuckles. Okay. So those are the big things for me. Get the bat somewhere on the calluses where the palm meets the fingers. Get the knocking knuckles somewhere in between. If you're able, if you go knocking knuckles together and you're able to get in this position, that's fine. I won't say anything, right? But if you can't get into that position because the knocking knuckles promote this, which most of the time it does, if you're going to feel just natural and loose, well then that's a problem. And same thing if you're on the other side, right? You're way over here. And now your rear arm is in this position. That's a problem because it's not letting us get into a good position to launch the bat properly. So hopefully that all makes sense. Let me know if you have any questions in the comment section below, subscribe the channel, hit the little bell icon, all that good stuff. We'll talk to you later. If you've enjoyed this video and want to learn more about building the elite swing, check out our new course. We have over two hours of content, almost 30 hitting drills. We break down the exact mechanics that you're going to want to implement into your swing. I've put the link in the description. If you want to go check it out.