The effects of stride technique and pitch location on slo-pitch batting

Abstract

In slo-pitch softball, the ball is delivered in an arc trajectory with a moderate velocity; hence, batters have time to adjust their stride technique based on the pitched ball location. The purpose of this study was to examine the influence of stride technique and pitched ball location on the mechanics of slo-pitch batting. A two-way ANOVA of two locations of pitch (inside and outside) x three strides (open, parallel, and closed) repeated measure study was conducted in this study. The results showed that the stride technique and pitched ball location did not have a consistent impact on the participants across different batting conditions, so the study recommends slo-pitch batters to explore different stride techniques when striking the ball. Further, to better understand the generalizability of the findings, the results indicated that participants were quite homogeneous as a group. Hence, coaches and educators may apply the findings from this study to other players with similar skill level.

The Examination of Slo-pitch Hitting Movement Coordination

“…The degree of dissimilarity enabled us to assess if the group mean performance could be generalized to all participants. The rescaled Euclidean distance analysis was the measure of distance between dependent variables for individual performance versus group mean performance, and it ranged between values of 0 for no dissimilarity to a value of 1 for maximum dissimilarity [11]. The results of two-way repeated measured ANOVA (2 locations of pitch x 3 strides) statistical analysis revealed that there was no statistically significant difference in combined percentages of SPC and RSPC between the lower body and trunk segments for the location of pitch.…”

“…Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the slo-pitch hitting movement coordination using the shared positive contribution technique to evaluate players' movement coordination under different task (stride technique) and environmental constraints (location of pitch). Further, each participant's results were compared to the mean to evaluate the degree of dissimilarity between the individuals and the group using a Euclidean distance analysis [11]. These results enabled assessment of whether the group means performance results could be used to generalize to all participants.…”

“…The size of calibration volume was approximately 2.5m (X-direction) x 2.5m (Y-direction) x 2.5m (Z-direction), and a wand calibration technique was used to calibrate the volume. The calculations of the 3D coordinates for each body segment rotational angles were presented by Wu et al [11]. The data were smoothed with 4 th order Butterworth filter, and the optimal cut-off frequency was determined for each coordinate using residual analysis [15].…”