The Missing Key to Transforming Baseball Player Development
By Ken Cherryhomes ©2025
Preface
This article is written with one objective: to facilitate a paradigm shift in how baseball understands and develops hitters. It aims to reveal what everyone in the game already knows but has been conditioned to overlook or accept: that timing, not mechanics, is the key factor determining whether a swing succeeds or fails. Over decades, this truth has been buried beneath layers of mechanical obsession and technological investments that measure outcomes but provide no corrective path. What follows is an argument for seeing timing clearly, accepting its centrality, and finally acting to train it.
The Objective
An MLB team decides it wants its hitters to launch more fly balls and score more runs, so it implements an organization-wide swing philosophy designed to achieve that outcome. The analytics department analyzes batted ball data and determines that an attack angle of around 18 degrees produces the optimal launch angles for home runs. This directive is formalized by the general manager and passed down through the director of player development and hitting coordinators. Specialized coordinators and coaches interpret the data, translating the technical concepts into practical coaching cues. Hitting coaches then use these cues to train players to adjust their swings to achieve steeper bat paths that match the prescribed attack angle. This process creates a unified, organization-wide swing philosophy, ensuring that by the time the information reaches the players, it is clear, actionable, and designed to develop swings that drive the ball in the air and maximize offensive production.
The Reality
The plan works. More home runs are being hit, but fewer balls are put in play and strikeouts skyrocket. These undesirable outcomes are written off as the cost of doing business. The data over the past decade in Major League Baseball supports this pattern. MLB set home run records in 2017 with 6,105 homers and again in 2019 with 6,776, coinciding with widespread adoption of uppercut swing paths and attack angle training. Alongside these rising home run totals, strikeouts per game also climbed sharply, reaching all-time highs each year from 2008 through 2019, culminating in 2019 when there were more strikeouts than hits for the first time in league history. Meanwhile, balls in play dropped as hitters swung harder and missed more, which reduced action and contact rates. Despite the surge in home runs, runs per game have not increased proportionally. In 2019, the league averaged 5.04 runs per game, actually below the 2000 peak of 5.14 RPG despite far more home runs.”, and scoring has since trended downward with 4.53 RPG in 2021, 4.28 in 2022, and 4.62 in 2023. This shows inconsistent or declining run production relative to increased power. Even though swings are producing more fly balls as intended, they were also designed to reduce ground balls, yet teams are often hitting more grounders than before despite the plan’s goal of eliminating them in favor of more productive contact. This is because steep swing paths have two probable outcomes when the ball is struck: fly balls or grounders, and mis-hits above the ball’s equator produce topspin and ground balls. The optimal outcome requires razor-slim margins. These contradictions are excused by attributing them to pitchers simply getting better. Is this really the strategy, to rigidly pursue an idealized swing plan, watch it backfire in key areas, and then dismiss the shortcomings as unavoidable consequences of facing tougher pitching?
Resignation and Rationalization
Everyone seems to be resigning themselves to this reality. They have been convinced that these outcomes reflect the natural state of the modern game, rather than recognizing that the underlying approach itself may be flawed. The perception that pitching has simply become overpowering serves as a convenient explanation, allowing organizations to avoid challenging their own assumptions. As a result, hitters, coaches, and executives accept rising strikeouts, inconsistent scoring, and increased ground balls as inevitable, instead of considering whether the strategy itself has boxed them into these results.
The Elephant in the Room
Yet glaringly absent from this entire process is any serious effort to address timing, the elephant in the room that everyone knows matters, but no one dares to confront. Organizations pour millions into refining swing mechanics, analytics, and measurement technologies, but ignore the single factor that determines whether any swing, no matter how mechanically perfect, actually connects: the hitter’s ability to time their decision and synchronize it with the pitch. It is astonishing how willingly teams spend vast sums to maintain a failing status quo, yet shy away from investing in solutions that could actually deliver the consistent, productive contact they claim to seek. This collective blindness persists even though the feasibility of training timing has been clear for decades, and advances in technology have made once-theoretical solutions practical and actionable. Technology’s purpose is to make the imaginable possible, yet despite the evolution of tools capable of addressing timing directly, the industry remains paralyzed, unwilling to acknowledge the core problem or the fact that someone identified and began solving it more than twenty years ago. Baseball’s greatest flaw isn’t that the problem is unsolvable, but that the people entrusted to solve it refuse to even name it.
Timing’s Untapped Potential
Timing is recognized as an innate skill, and to a great extent it is, but only because baseball has never developed a systematic way to improve it for either the naturally gifted or the elite athletes who have yet to solve it. This resignation has frozen player development in place, forcing hitters to either possess timing intuitively or fail despite every other physical tool. Imagine how radically player development could change if timing could be trained, refined, and measured with precision. Prospects could live up to their projected ceilings, translating raw physical talent into consistent performance and unlocking enormous on-field and financial value for organizations. Technology exists to make what was once theoretical possible, yet the industry refuses to seize that potential, clinging instead to outdated beliefs and investments that have already proven incapable of delivering the offensive outcomes teams seek.
A Path Forward
Baseball’s greatest flaw isn’t that timing is unsolvable, but that the industry refuses to name it as the core problem. For decades, timing was treated as innate because no one had a systematic method to train it. That is no longer true. Through years of research, experimentation, and technological advances, a solution now exists—protected by patents covering the real-time integration of individualized swing metrics with pitch data to deliver precise, actionable timing guidance. Unlike AI trained on swing outcomes or tools that only analyze mechanics after the fact, this system merges a batter’s unique swing profile with live pitch characteristics, producing alerts that guide hitters to initiate their swings at the exact moment needed to achieve optimal contact. This is not theory; it is a practical, proven path to transforming player development, unlocking potential, and realigning investments with actual performance gains.