Rational Youth Baseball

Stance at the Plate

The batter is required to be inside the batter's box (on one side of the plate or the other) when hitting the ball. If either foot is outside the box at contact with the ball, the player is to be called out. Within that limitation, the batter may stand anywhere in the box he likes.

Needless to say, some places in the batter's box are more desirable than others. Usually there will be two pits of varying depth in the box about 30% of the way from the home plate side of the box to the dugout side of the box. This is where most players have been standing and digging those holes for their feet. Unless coached to do otherwise, players will stand in those holes or perhaps a little further back away from the plate. Unless you have an unusually tall player with long arms and a long bat, these pits are a bad place for your batters to stand.

Home plate is 17 inches wide at every level of baseball from the major leagues down to the "T-ball" leagues. The average youth player will swing a bat less than 32 inches long. The major leaguers are mostly over six feet tall and swing bats about 34 inches or more long. Yet their feet are about 30% of the way from home plate just like those pits in your youth league batter's boxes. This means that in order to get plate coverage, the youth league player needs to stand with his feet in or near the chalk line close to the plate.

Standing too far from the plate is the most common error youth players make in hitting. Then, the error is compounded by the player moving one or both feet even further from the plate when the pitch is thrown. From the coach's box or from the dugout the coach cannot easily see how close to the plate the player's feet are positioned. This is part of the problem. The other main part is that the coach cannot easily see how far off the end of the bat the ball was when the player swung and missed.

Players who take a called third strike will often come back to the dugout saying that the pitch was outside. Certainly, it looked too far away to be hittable. Sometimes, the reason the pitch looked outside was because the player was too far away from the plate.