By Todd Graham
Owner: SwingMechanics

Rotational vs. Linear Swings
This is one of the most mis-understood topics that I see players struggle with. There is a TON of confusion and mis-information surrounding it. Hopefully this will help lead to a better understanding of Rotational Mechanics, Linear Mechanics, and the differences between the two across the softball community.
Most of you guys know that I use and teach a linear swing. That is irrelevant for this article, because I am not approaching this as one is better than the other. This is not meant to advertise or bash either style. I am just going to try to explain each side and stay away from the pros and or cons of each style.

THINGS THAT ARE COMMON TO BOTH STYLES:

Power comes from the ground up. It has to. That is the only way to hit the ball, since the only thing that your body has to push against is the ground. Imagine how hard it would be to hit a ball on ice, or in space where you have nothing to push off of. All power in either style comes from the ground up.
You rotate to hit the ball. With either type of swing, you must rotate your body and rotate the bat in order to hit the ball. It is impossible to hit the ball with any authority if you don't rotate. This doesn't make every swing a 'Rotational' Swing. Remember, these are two hitting styles, and Rotational and Linear are just names of styles. There are many things that are common to both swings. People get confused because they see 'Rotational' and they think that any time you rotate, it must be a rotational swing.
Your front leg opens your hips.. With both swings, when you plant the front leg, and push against the ground with it, that is what opens your hips. This is the same in both swings. In a linear swing, this is what transfers all of your linear momentum into torque. With a rotational swing, this is used to generate torque.

UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES OF A LINEAR SWING:

You build power and momentum in a straight line. In a Linear swing, everything that you do to build power in the first half of your swing, is done in a straigth line toward the pitcher. Everything you do is to throw your body forward.
You let the bat rotate itself. This is sometimes a hard one for hitters to understand. You don't spend any of your effort to rotate the bat. It still rotates, it just does it on its own. You basically use your bottom hand to throw the knob of the bat forward, and you use your top hand to throw the bottom hand. When the bottom hand's arm comes to full extention, the bat has no choice but to rotate around your bottom hand/wrist. All of the momentum that you put into the bat, has the bat traveling forward. Once that arm straightens out, the bat tries to keep going forward, but the fact that you are holding it, forces it to rotate around the point at which you are holding it.
You make contact in front of the plate. With a linear swing, since you are throwing the bat forward, and it is rotating around your front wrist, it makes sense that you would hit the ball further out in front of your body (Closer to the pitcher). A batter that stands in the middle of the batters box will hit the ball 1 to 2 feet in front of the plate, with a linear swing.
Rotation happens AFTER Linear Effort.

UNIQUE ATTRIBUTES OF A ROTATIONAL SWING:

Your Power and Momentum is Rotational. All of the power you build up, and all of the momentum you create, is to rotate your body around its axis (Spine) and to rotate the bat.
You rotate the bat.. Since you don't throw the bat forward, you use your top hand to drive the bat around, out into the hitting position, and through the hitting position into your follow through.
You make contact over the plate. Obviously, this changes with where you stand in relation to the plate. But, if you picture a batter in the middle of the batter's box, with the plate directly in front of his body, he will make contact pretty much over the front edge of the plate with a rotational swing.
The batter builds his swing through Rotational effort.
I hope this clears up some of the confusion surrounding these two styles of hitting. Just about every time that this topic comes up, I see a lot of confusion. I tried not to let my personal bias play into this at all, as I want this to be more of a reference than anything else.