Here are the best baseball batting aids for youth players that won’t break the bank.
There are many baseball batting products on the market that claim to improve your son’s swing mechanics and cure every bad habit. Some are crazy expensive and don’t work, while others are pretty cheap (or free) and do the job.
The big thing when looking to buy a baseball batting aid is to find one that your kid will actually use. If your kid hates it, then he’ll fight you every time you try to incorporate it into your workouts, and you’ll end up ditching it.
Out of the countless hitting products I tried with my son, here are the ones that actually worked and that he liked (or tolerated) using.
1. Baseball Rebellion’s Rebel’s Rack is a Great Hitting Aid For Hip Rotation
The Rebel’s Rack is a great tool to teach your son hip rotation as part of an efficient rotational swing. It’s basically a sturdy metal strip with a curve in the middle. It fits over your kid’s chest. He pulls his arms back on the metal (not inward), and then gets into his batting stance and rotates his hips fully.
They claim it greatly increase bat speed and exit velocity. But I look at it more as teaching the basic mechanics of the rotational swing. My son had a habit of not finishing all the way with his hips on his swings, and this product really addressed that issue.
It’s true that the rack is a souped-up version of a PVC pipe (which is a lot cheaper, of course). But my son never took the PVC pipe. It’s more cumbersome than the Rebel’s Rack, and kept dropping to the ground when we used it, frustrating him greatly.
Baseball Rebellion has a number of YouTube clips (see below) showing you all the drills you can do with the Rack.
You can buy accessories for the Rebel’s Rack, like resistance bands, and a “Rack Bat” that attached to the rack and acts like a bat for soft toss. I didn’t get any of these. Like I wrote above, I just use it to remind my son to fully rotate his hips.
The Rack comes in three sizes. My son is an average-sized 11-year old, and the small one fits fine.
2. Use Masking Tape to Cure Your Kid’s “Stepping in the Bucket” Problem
Like many youth players, my son struggled to step straight during his stride. Instead, his front foot would move back and away from the plate (AKA “stepping in the bucket”). He had this problem as a 6-year old, and he was still doing it at 10. As a result, he wouldn’t be able to hit the outside pitch. He’d also pull off the ball when he did make contact and hit a lot of weak grounders to the left side (he’s a righty).
I tried everything to correct this problem, including:
- Placing a glove to the left of his front foot during batting practice to remind him not to step out
- Shortening his stride
- Weighting down his front foot with a dumbbell during batting practice
- Having him take “air” swings while looking at himself in the mirror
Nothing worked. Then I bought masking tape. It sounds too good to be true, but simply placing a straight line down for him to stand on when we practiced with a tee cured the issue. He could see himself when he was stepping out, and wound up self-correcting. See below for the line on our floor that we used.
Putting down a line like this is also a great pitching aid to teach them to step straight.
For our tips on increasing pitching velocity, see 4 Ways To Increase Your Kid’s Pitching Velocity
3. An Old Rubber Tire is Great for Increasing Rotational Acceleration and Bat Speed
I actually learned about the tire drill from a private instructor (and former Minor Leaguer) who had a small facility in an industrial park outside Philadelphia. The place was on the water, and very popular with feral cats. We’d show up with four kids, and he’d rotate them in and out of his batting cage. When the kids weren’t in the cage, he had two of them work with the tire.
One kid would hold the tire steady from one end, while the other took hard cuts against the other end of the thick rubber for about a minute until the kid was totally exhausted. Then they switched places.
The other kids were more advanced than my son, and I could hear it in the sound of their swings against the tire. My son vibrated the tire, while the others delivered sharp resounding blows. When my son’s bat started sounding more like theirs, I knew he was improving.
After we stopped going to that instructor, I longed for a tire to use when practicing with my son. I finally went to a local tire shop, where the guy looked at me funny when I said I wanted a discarded tire for baseball purposes. He then told me to go around back to a dumpster and pick anyone I wanted for no charge. Turned out they actually paid someone to take the tires off their hands.
Don’t get a Prius tire. Go full-sized SUV, and one that’s in decent shape.
Obviously don’t use your good composite bat for the tire drill. Use a cheap metal one or a wood bat. Have you son work with it for a month, every other day, and I promise you’ll see results at the plate.
Out of all the batting aids, though, my wife hates this one the most. I thank god every day I married a woman who lets me keep an old tire in the family room!
You can also use the tire like a makeshift gym. See all you can do with one in the video below.
4. Blast’s Swing Analyzer Allows You to Track Bat Speed Progress Over Time
This one’s not cheap (about $125), and it gives you a lot of metrics that aren’t helpful for youth players. I also probably would never have bought this if my son’s club hadn’t required it. But I have to say we use it almost every time we go hitting, and I think it’s good for charting improvement.
What is Blast Motion
Blast is a sensor that fits onto the knob of your kid’s bat with a cap they provide. It monitors certain metrics for each swing, including:
- Bat Speed
- Rotational Acceleration
- On Plane Efficiency
- Attack Angle
- Early Connection
- Connection at Impact
- Vertical Bat Angle
- Power
- Time to Contact
- Peak Hand Speed
But according to our club, the only metric they care about for younger kids is bat speed. Blast has an App that synchs up with the sensor, and delivers the information to your phone. It all works pretty easily, as long as your remember to charge the sensor every week or so.
My Son Likes Blast Motion the Best Out of All the Batting Aids
I have to say my son likes this one the best. It’s like a video game to him, and it brings out his competitive side. He asks me to download the data after each hitting session, and he really strives to beat his numbers from the previous session. And like I wrote above, if it’s something your kid like, you’ll keep using it.
I try to make the connection to him that if he incorporates the lessons from the other aids (stepping straight, rotating hips, etc.), it will show up in his Blast numbers, and his batting average.
You can go crazy trying to figure out all the other metrics, and what they should be for a kid your son’s age. I spent many nights on Google trying to make sense of it all. If you can, I’d just stick to the one bat speed metric, like our club does. If it keeps going up, you know you’re doing something right.
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