Analysis of the objective viewpoint of experienced baseball coaches when evaluating batting skills and batters’ swings

Abstract

According to the guidelines on instruction by athletic clubs that the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology established in 2013, it is important that coaches not only depend on their own experiences, but also learn from scientific studies by sports specialists. In recent years, measurement devices have been developed that can immediately give feedback on a batter’s swing; the measurement devices were further refined and were reduced in size by the development of sensor technology. The device then became able to assess the characteristics of the batter’s swing from the measurement data. However, a coaching method based on such scientific data has not yet been established in amateur baseball clubs because of the mixture of rational and practical instruction and the difficulty of the interpretation from calculated numerical values. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the characteristics of a batter’s swing using an evaluation from a baseball coach with a great deal of experience when assessing batting skills.