The Epidemic of Misdiagnosis: Solving for Symptoms not Cause
By Ken Cherryhomes ©2025
Why Biomechanical and Psychological Fixes Fail When Timing Is the Real Problem
Introduction
In the industries of hitting instruction, sports psychology, and ecological dynamics, two dominant schools of thought often take turns misdiagnosing the same problem. One blames mechanics. The other blames mindset. But neither addresses the root cause.
When a hitter consistently mistimes pitches, the proposed solutions tend to come from these camps: it’s either a mechanical flaw resulting in a spatial miss, or a psychological issue like stress, fear of failure, or loss of focus. And while these diagnoses may hold some truth—timing failures can certainly induce mechanical compensations or trigger mental strain—they are rarely the origin. The actual failure is temporal.
Timing isn’t just one of many variables. It’s the first-order constraint. The swing must intersect the pitch in both space and time. If that alignment fails, everything downstream starts to degrade. Mechanics unravel in a scramble to catch up. Confidence erodes under the weight of repeated failure. And cognition shifts from informed response to uninformed reaction, replacing control with guesswork.
This creates a reinforcing loop: the batter loses timing, which breaks mechanics, which breeds doubt, which clouds decision-making, which further disrupts timing. Confidence, often cited as the key to hitting success, isn’t self-generated—it’s outcome-dependent. Success breeds confidence, not the reverse. So as timing falters, belief follows.
Until coaches and psychologists recognize timing as the primary failure point, they’ll keep treating symptoms. And hitters will keep struggling to solve a problem that was misidentified from the start.
Timing Is the Intersection, Not the Outcome
Hitting a baseball is a spatial-temporal interception problem. The bat must arrive at a precise location, at a precise moment, against a moving object traveling 90+ mph. When the batter is late, the intersection has already been missed. This failure isn’t caused by weak mental resolve or poor hand path. It’s caused by a misalignment in time.
The sports psychologist’s question—whether poor timing is a skillset or a mindset issue—reveals the flawed binary that dominates hitting analysis. It’s neither. Or more accurately: it’s both after the fact. But temporally speaking, timing comes first. And when it breaks down, both skillset and mindset erode as a consequence.
This can be seen clearly when constraints are reduced. In low-velocity environments—soft toss, tee work, even pre-game batting practice—hand/eye coordination appears nearly flawless. Hitters don’t miss. Mechanics look clean. Confidence is high. Why? Because timing is no longer a constraint. The brain doesn’t have to predict; it simply reacts within a wide margin of error. These practice stations are designed precisely for that reason—to strip away temporal pressure and isolate the motor plan. The goal is to validate whether the biomechanics function well when freed from the demands of precision timing. And under these simplified conditions, they usually do.
In these conditions, swing problems vanish not because the motor plan changed or the athlete suddenly achieved emotional clarity, but because the intersection became easier to solve. The hitter had time. And with time, the system accesses stored references—previous successes, familiar patterns, well-worn solutions. No overthinking. No rushing. No mechanical collapse or compensation.
This is why timing breakdowns aren’t a question of ability, but of alignment. The same hitter who looks effortless in BP can look panicked in-game, not because they lost skill or mental toughness, but because they lost the reference that allowed the swing to self-organize. When temporal alignment is gone, mechanics and mindset follow it out the door.
It’s true that 7PM pressure can amplify a hitter’s internal noise—expectations, tension, and fear of failure. But those emotions are often responses to a degraded task solution, not the cause of it. Batting practice, with its reduced velocity and variability, rarely stresses the timing mechanism. It gives the illusion of readiness, but does little to prepare the hitter for the compounded demands of velocity, movement, and deception under game conditions.
Confidence doesn’t collapse simply because the lights came on—it collapses when the hitter faces a task they are not temporally prepared to solve. That’s when uncertainty creeps in. That’s when reactive swings replace informed decisions. Yes, emotions affect performance, but the spark is often an unresolved timing constraint. Pressure doesn’t cause the fire. Poor timing lights the match.
The task remains the same—intersect bat with ball. But the means to solve it become fragile when the batter must operate ahead of real-time. Experience and reference allow skilled hitters to operate just slightly ahead of the moment. Without those, hitters are forced into reactive swings that feel rushed, improvised, and mentally exhausting.
The Body Defaults to Survival Patterns
When the timing constraint becomes too great—when a hitter cannot reliably align the swing to the pitch—the body does what it’s wired to do: simplify. This isn’t laziness or poor training. It’s a neuromotor fallback to base movement patterns—the kind used when precision is no longer possible.
Under stress, complex movement sequences collapse. The segmentation that gives the swing its leverage—coil, stride, separation, launch—begins to compress. Movements blend together. Load may get rushed or skipped. The hands may cheat forward. Swings become tight, efforted, and less fluid. The body regresses to a reduced, almost defensive posture. It’s a workaround, not a solution.
Importantly, this isn’t a mechanical flaw in the traditional sense. It’s not caused by a misunderstanding of swing mechanics—it’s triggered by the inability to meet the timing demand. The hitter simplifies not because they were taught poorly, but because the pitch is arriving before their full sequence can fire—or sooner than predicted due to decision compensation. The body prioritizes making any contact over making quality contact.
In this state, both mechanical and mental interventions become counterproductive—or at best, incomplete. Coaches may attempt to correct posture, spacing, or path, but they’re addressing surface-level adaptations, not the initiating constraint. Likewise, mental training—confidence-boosting talks, mindfulness routines, meditation—may soothe the hitter’s emotional state in the moment, but none of it resolves the spatial-temporal collision problem. It’s not a temporal solution. The mind might feel calmer, but the swing is still mistimed.
Until the hitter’s temporal alignment is restored, the body will continue to bypass mechanical ideals in favor of survival, and the mind will continue to feel unstable—not because it’s undisciplined, but because it’s repeatedly experiencing failure without identifying and addressing the root cause.
The Compounding Loop: Confidence and Confusion
Confidence is often described as a key to hitting success. But confidence isn’t conjured—it’s earned. And nothing erodes it faster than the helpless feeling of consistently mistimed swings.
That’s the loop: confidence is predicated on success, and success is predicated on confidence. Once timing fails, hitters, trainers, and mental coaches chase mechanical adjustments or try to manufacture self-belief—treating symptoms instead of solving the underlying constraint. But those are just attempts to treat symptoms. The real loss isn’t self-belief—it’s control. And control flows from timing.
This is where mental toughness is often praised—as if it were the solution itself. But mental toughness isn’t a remedy for poor timing. It’s a response to an unnatural condition the hitter shouldn’t be in to begin with. When in the struggle, mental toughness simply appears as anger, aggressiveness, forced indifference or baseless positivity. These aren’t signs of psychological strength—they’re survival behaviors in the face of repeated failure. It helps a player manage emotional strain, endure frustration, or fight through failure, but it doesn’t fix temporal misalignment. Toughness is narrative. We admire the athlete who battles through adversity, but rarely ask why the adversity existed in the first place.
When a hitter regains temporal control, outcomes improve. With better outcomes, confidence returns—not because the hitter became mentally tougher, but because the system re-synchronized. Until that happens, confidence spirals, adjustments pile up, and decision-making degrades—all because timing was never addressed at the root.
The Anticipation-Reaction Gap
When timing is off, hitters fall into a reactive state. They’re no longer responding to a pitch; they’re chasing it. They move from informed response to uninformed reaction. The brain, deprived of early, accurate information, defaults to guesswork. From a neurological perspective, this means less predictive control and more reactive correction—tighter, sloppier, and more error-prone. Coaches often interpret this as indecision. Psychologists might see anxiety or hesitation. But again, these are downstream effects. The upstream problem is temporal.
The Misdiagnosis Epidemic
Just as poor timing is routinely mistaken for a mechanical breakdown, it’s also misframed as a mental one. Coaches cue “stay back” or “quicker hands.” Sports psychologists prescribe breathing techniques and visualization. These approaches are not useless—but they are misapplied when timing itself is the thing breaking down. They treat the stress response, not the trigger. Worse, they teach hitters to fight a problem they haven’t even defined properly.
Symptom Treatment vs. Causal Correction
High-level hitters don’t suffer from a lack of mechanical skill or mental discipline. They suffer when their timing reference fails. And prolonged timing issues often persist because instruction focuses on treating effects—poor posture, low confidence, high chase rate—rather than solving the primary issue: temporal misalignment.
The result is hitters working harder, getting worse, and losing trust in both themselves and their swing—something they’ve relied on for years. When mistimed results are misdiagnosed as mechanical flaws, coaches send the message that the hitter’s trusted swing is the problem. That implication alone can inject deep doubt. The swing is personal. It’s not just a product of instruction—it’s the internalized motor plan that got the hitter to this level in the first place. To have it questioned is to have part of one’s identity as a hitter put on trial. This compounds the psychological strain. The hitter, already frustrated by poor temporal decisions, is now uncertain about the one thing that previously provided confidence and stability. What began as a solvable timing issue becomes a broader crisis of self-trust—an unnecessary insecurity layered onto an already mentally taxing problem. But the real problem wasn’t mechanics. It was temporal misalignment. And by treating the wrong variable, the hitter is left trying to relearn a swing that didn’t need fixing—only re-tuning to match a different timing demand.
Fix First Things First
When hitters swing and miss, the problem is almost always temporal—even if it appears spatial. But instead of identifying mistimed decisions as the cause, the first responders are coaches reacting to the visible effects. They start adjusting mechanics, cueing posture, tinkering with hand path. In doing so, they introduce doubt in the hitter where none may have previously existed. The hitter wasn’t questioning his swing—he was focused on the problem. That swing had gotten him this far. But once the coach implies the swing is to blame, the hitter begins to question the one thing he always trusted. Now he’s no longer just frustrated by poor timing decisions—which is already a mental tax—but he’s also uncertain about the constant that had always brought him success. What begins as a solvable timing issue becomes a deeper problem—one that eventually brings in the psychologist. Now it’s about confidence, emotional regulation, and mental toughness. But these are secondary effects. The first failure wasn’t emotional. It was temporal.
Until poor timing is recognized for what it is—the root of the miss, the start of the spiral—hitters will keep paying the price for a problem they didn’t actually create.