Baseball Hitting Drills You Can Do at Home

This COVID-19 pandemic brought baseball to a screeching halt for a while - and not just for Major League Baseball - but for youth and high school baseball as well. Regardless of the pandemic, there are still a ton of hitting drills and exercises you can do at home. Best of all, you can do all these drills and exercises at home whether you're in the middle of your baseball season or not.

Hit Wiffle Balls Against the Fence

This is one of those "too easy to think of" drills: just take a wiffle ball, throw it up in the air, and hit it with your bat up against a fence. Do this over and over until you feel like you've improved your swing, or until you've worked yourself out. Best of all, you can give it a full swing and the noise is pretty minimal (a lot quieter than hitting a real baseball against the fence - and a lot less destructive, too). Beyond just throwing it up in the air and hitting it, try these drills to improve your contact at different pitches, too:

• Throw the wiffle ball a little out in front of you and about where the inside corner would be, then practice hitting that pitch hard down the third-base line (or the 1st base line for you lefties). This will help you practice keeping your hands inside the ball to keep those pitches fair.
• Likewise, throw the wiffle ball right over what would be the outside corner of the plate. Make sure you hit that ball hard the other way (right-field line for righties; left-field line for lefties).
• Throw the ball a little bit higher than usual - somewhere around the stomach to the chest - and practice hitting that high strike. We all know those umpires who like to call the high strike, so practice hitting the ball hard when it's high in the strike zone.
• Instead of tossing the ball up, let it drop out of your hand a little more than usual and practice hitting the low strike. Just like the umps who call the high strikes, there are some who call those low strikes. Make solid contact on the ball when it's between your knees and your ankles.

Here's one for practicing hitting changeups and other off-speed pitches:

• Toss the ball a little higher than usual, then get your hands ready to hit like you normally would... then wait for the ball to come down a little longer than your usual swing. You'll have to track the ball longer with your eyes which helps with contact, and you'll also need to patiently wait with your hands back for the ball to come down into the strike zone.

         (NOTE: you can even combine this off-speed/changeup drill with the location drills above. Toss it inside, outside, hit it higher than usual and lower
         than usual.)

Hit off of a Tee

If you have a net to hit into, that's great: you can hit real baseballs into the net. If you don't have a net, don't worry about it: you can hit wiffles off the tee, too. If you hit off of a tee, make sure you're not just placing the tee in the center of the plate and belt-high every time. Position the tee in the different places where you know umpires may call a strike:

• To practice hitting an inside pitch off the tee, set up the tee about 1-2 feet in front of the inside corner of the plate and practice hitting the ball hard down the 3rd-base line (1st-base line for lefties). Make sure you're leading with the knob of the bat in order to keep that ball fair. Leading with the knob of the bat will help keep the barrel through the strike zone longer so you can hit that inside pitch hard and keep it fair down the line.
  
• To practice hitting an outside pitch off the tee, set the tee up directly over the outside corner of the plate. With a normal swing, you should be able to hit the ball hard the other way, but make sure you're hitting it with the sweet spot on the bat.
  
• Set up the tee in different positions of the plate (inside, outside, middle) and adjust the height of the tee to its highest and lowest adjustment. Practice hitting high strikes as well as low strikes, then also practice hitting high and low strikes on both corners of the plate.
  

When hitting off of a tee, it's important to think of every location as if you were a pitcher. Think to yourself, "If I was pitching, would I want the umpire to call that a strike?" When you do this, you'll find yourself placing the ball on the tee a little bit out of the strike zone. We've all been called out looking at strike 3 and gone back to the dugout saying, "That was outside!" or, "That pitch almost hit me!" Whatever, bud. You know deep down inside that if you were the one pitching, you'd want that called a strike, too. So practice taking that pitch away from opposing pitchers by being able to hit it and hit it hard!

Find Your "Sweet Spot"

When you're young and playing youth baseball, you don't really know what your "sweet spot" is, or better said, your favorite pitch to hit. Personally for me, I didn't know I was a low-ball hitter until I crushed a low and inside pitch to the fence when I was a scrawny 12-year-old. I dropped the bat on a pitch just below my knees and on the inside part of the plate and I killed it. And even then I didn't really know it was my sweet spot... until it happened again a few games later.

Remember that every player is built differently. Long arms, short arms, skinny, chunky, strong but slow, weak but fast, tall short, stocky, lanky, etc. This means that your favorite pitch to hit is going to be very different from someone else's. But doing all the drills above will allow you to find your own, personal sweet spot: the pitch that, when you see it coming in a game, your eyes light up, your confidence shoots through the roof in an instant, and you absolutely crush the ball, hitting it so hard that you don't even feel it hit the bat. When doing the wiffle ball toss-up drill, take note of which pitch placement was the easiest for you to hit hard and get in a groove with; same with hitting off the tee. If you notice that there's a consistency between what felt good hitting off the tee and hitting in the toss-up drill, that, my friend, is your sweet spot.

Do I Need a Bunch of Hitting Gear to Hit at Home?

Do I need to buy a bunch of gear and gadgets and swing trainer tools and stuff to hit at home? No.

Heck, if you hit bottlecaps or wadded up pieces of paper with a broom handle, that's fine. Anything you do will help. But, if you do want to get some gear, you can. Our Skinny Barrel Wooden Swing Trainer is probably the best contact trainer bat on the market. It feels properly-weighted like a game bat but a little bit heavier to build swing strength, but it also has a skinnier, 2-inch diameter barrel so you really have to concentrate on making solid contact. It's also made of solid maple just like our game bats.

Have More Hitting Drills to Share?

Feel free to send us any feedback you have on these drills and any other hitting drills you might be doing at home. Hopefully, these all translate to you being a better all-around hitter when you get back on the field, too.