At the time of contact with the baseball, the hitter wants his chest on the contact point:

1. ball away, chest away at contact,

2. ball inside, chest on contact point inside

Once you tell players to rotate when hitting, they are going to do that and they are going to figure out a way to rotate and they tend to start rushing their upper body.

With bug squishers for example, you will always see foot down early and a vertical, straight up position with chest facing pitcher. You do not see that vertical straight up position with chest on the pitcher in good hitters.

Instead, in good hitters you will see a lateral tilt in the shoulders. If the hitter does not go in a straight line shift from the back to the front at the start of the swing, and the hitter tries to tilt, the hitter will fall backwards. You cannot get good tilt in your swing without the quality shift in your swing.

If the hitter just sits back on their back foot, and then attempts to tilt like a great hitter, he/she will collapse in the back shoulder and the bat will drop as well have other problems. Instead, with a quality shift, the hitter can tilt properly and have dynamic balance in the tilted position. The hitter can maintain a good stacked position of the bat over his hands and maintain excellent balance in the swing when a quality shift occurs.

A quality tilt does a few really good things for the hitter:

1. It allows the hitter to bring his center of gravity back behind his front side so that he doesn’t get out front over his front side or lunge

One thing you see with Manny Ramirez, Barry Bonds and Cabrera is they help themselves out with the tilt by cheating little bit with the tilt at the beginning of the swing. This is what they do – instead of flattening their bat to get on plane with the pitched baseball, they begin to tilt which brings them more on plane with the ball. Simply tilting at the hip joint, allows the hitter to be more on plane with the pitch. This is a genius move by some great hitters.

2. It allows the hitter to stay on plane with the pitched ball

If a hitter keeps his body vertical, he has got to get on plane with the ball at some point. You will see hands drop and bat drop with kids who stay vertical when hitting a baseball. They have to flatten their bat out to get on plane with the pitched ball.

There is no evidence of level shoulders anywhere. Baseball Coaches will say keep your back shoulder up. But what they are seeing is a flattening of the bat, not a dropping of the shoulders necessarily.

You will not hear coaches say anything about the back shoulders if the hitter is able to keep the bat up and stacked over the hands even when the back shoulder is dropping. The back shoulder will drop as a result of a good tilt, which again has to follow a good shift. Your hands (palms) can still be in a good position with a quality shift and a quality tilt, regardless of the drop in the back shoulder.

The tilt is important for leverage, stability and for cheating to get on plane with the pitched ball.