The Baseball Swing Is Your Golf Swing: Garrett Richards from the Major Leagues to the Fairways

Garrett Richards, ex-Major League Baseball Pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, San Diego Padres, Boston Red Sox, and Texas Rangers, couldn’t have a better coach to improve his Golf Swing than Mike Malaska!

The Malaska Golf Membership has a dedicated section full of content called Sports Connect, where Mike dispels the myth about how the Golf Swing can hurt your Baseball Swing and Vice Versa!

Whether it’s basketball, tennis, or swimming, they all can relate to your golf swing, but this video is all about how The Baseball Swing IS Your Golf Swing!

TITLE: 00:00
Swing the Bat: 00:08
Let’s Hit One: 01:40
Like A Cricket Paddle? 02:47
Your Pitching Hand Is the Club Face: 03:54
Where Golf Went Wrong: 05:58
Get Your Grip Correct: 07:07

Want to Learn More about the M-System? Visit: https://malaskagolf.com/pages/m-system

Don’t just play golf. Understand it.

MIKE MALASKA TEACHING CREDENTIALS
Golf Digest Legend of Golf Instruction
2011 National PGA Teacher of the Year
2021-2022 Golf Magazine Top 100 Teachers in America (Lifetime Achievement)
2020-2021 Golf Digest 50 Best Teachers in America
TaylorMade National Advisory Board Member, 2020-Current
PGA Class-A Member since 1996
Honma US Advisory Board, 2019-2020
Worldwide Director of Instruction at Nicklaus Golf Academies
2017 PGA Southwest Section Teacher of The Year
25 years as a Jack Nicklaus Academies Trainer & Instructor
2017 GRAA Growth of the Game Teaching Professionals Elite Member
TaylorMade National Advisory Board Member, 2015-2018
2016 GRAA Top 50 Growth of the Game Teaching Professionals
Southwest Section Senior Player of the Year
TaylorMade/Adidas Instructional Consultant
Former Director of Instruction at Superstition Mountain Golf & CC,
Superstition Mountain, AZ

[Applause] easy just hit it easy lever hit back to baseball take the bat and swing it what I want you to do is you swing and then you go here and then when you release the bat when you swing after you hit it feel what your left hand does over here see how your left wrist goes this way right it doesn’t go this way that way goes that way do it again okay that’s how your golf swing should work yours doesn’t work that way yours goes like this it’s like playing baseball it’s like you come right here and you do this rolling it over you’re rolling it over okay if you did that in baseball you go right over the top of the ball grounders okay so your left hand has to see how it works MH so now when you hit you release it just like a baseball bat just like that outward so you hit and then this way okay you don’t hit and twist okay okay okay now I’m going to draw in a minute here I’m going to draw some lines on your hand so you remember this okay I love the T finger that’s what I I still love to right there now we’re perfect okay now don’t you dare move that okay now when you hit you hit like this and then the club releases like a base relax this it releases up see the toe of the club releases up uhhuh it doesn’t release over okay okay I hit it about 100 yards for me easy just hit it easy lever hit what didn’t it do it didn’t go up in the air it didn’t hook okay okay so your swing what what you were doing with the face you had so much twist in your arms there’s no way you’re going to be consistent with that right now you you were good enough to have the club come from the inside and you’re good enough with your hands that most of the time you’d catch the face up but if you just catch up a few degrees too much it’s off the golf course that way right next time you hit it you go oh I don’t want to do that so much so you hang on a little bit and then you lose it way right trying to find the middle ground exact which with that much face rotation very hard you’re not going to do it zero consist as good as you are with your hands you could practice every day and not get that now this goes here this hand goes there and that thumb goes right there okay just like that okay that feels a lot more comfortable there we go now lever your wrist hit like a baseball think of a baseball bat with your left hand so it’s more of a chop action and there’s no twist nice and easy just hit it easy that’s really okay but can you kind of concept how easy it’s going to be to hit it straight right yeah cuz now I’m thinking like it’s almost like a cricket paddle and I’m trying to hit it Square you know what I mean that’s what it is okay see everybody used to think set up to the ball here let me show you how a golf club Works everybody talked about open and close the club right so you come to this game thinking I’m going to open and close it well here’s there’s the target line the club face actually goes back like this now it’s opening relative to your target line but it’s staying at a 90° angle to what they call your swing Arc okay and then it comes down and it runs into the ball like this I’ll see it’s closing mhm it hits it and it goes like this but it’s still at a 90° angle to your swing Arc what it doesn’t do is rotate and then turn over that’s a double whammy it’s like a pinball flipper exactly to to try to time all of this you can’t can’t do it tough so here’s where all these tour players are now they get the club right here they go up here they come right back there they turn into the ball and hit it you see how how this is why they say they don’t use their hands boom and then their hands go like this so the face is hardly rotating at all relative to the swing Arc yeah it’s Square for a long time and for you this hand is your pitching hand so you’re aiming at the ball to throw it when you let the ball go your hand doesn’t go unless you’re trying to throw a big curve or something your hand doesn’t do this you release it like this mhm this hand is baseball boom foom boom you’ve been going yeah it’s almost like when I’m back here like I’m reaching back and like I’m grabbing a bell and I’m going to ring a bell like you know what I mean it’s more of a direct path versus before I felt like it was more more this it’s too much now you’re the club goes around you it swings from inside to but yeah you that feels like a more direct path up and directly to the ball versus out and then hoping that all this is on time and then that’s why you said something funny with your lower body trying to we’ll talk about that we’ll do some things with short shots because I’ve got to get you to start to feel with little short shots how you do this okay it’ll make your short game significantly better fast okay and your long game if you keep the grip on there correctly and you start learning how to use and I’m not asking all I’m doing is getting you to trigger something you already know how to do M hi I’m molaska with molas golf.com when it comes to sports connecting they do and when it comes to baseball and golf one of the things you have to understand is that the club shaft is not the bat this is how I’ve always seen golf so there was the bat and so when I set up to the ball there’s right field there’s center field there’s left field so when you’re coming from other sports if you know what connects to golf and what you need to see this is a much much easier game because the ball’s sitting still here’s where golf went wrong they decided and it came from how the golf was the the old Scots when they started the game the balls they had how expensive they were how windy it was they had a lot of twists plus they wore suit coats and they turned the face down because they wanted to keep the ball down they didn’t want it going up in the air and as the game progressed different things started happening and that became less and less important to keep it really low now this new ball where these new guys are in the last 15 years it it doesn’t spin much so you got to hit it higher so you got to stop the ball more with angle of descent than you do with spin so all of this turn the face down rotation of the arms thing is like gone okay so these new guys now they swing so fast but the face doesn’t rotate much that’s why they can hit it so far than the equipment they can hit it far and they hit it pretty straight because the face isn’t twisting I feel like with that what what we’re doing now I I always think about compressing ball and I feel like that is compressing the ball versus like hitting the ball that’s awesome well yeah you will compress it better because you’re there you go this should be if you ever question that all you got to do is go like you’re going to hit a baseball and go okay I put my thumb in there turn it over there we go so you just take it put it up here because you’re going to put it in your fingers and you and and and then if you come out here and then you put your Thumb in and put your hand there and put the thing down you’re going to have see where your my hand is yeah okay this is well I actually started with this when I was a kid then I put this Thumb in then I mov this hand over that’s where I was when I played my best in college and I had some people talk me into doing this this and open the face and that ruined my career okay because they said I was not a golfer I had a shut face with a throw release well now that’s what everybody wants that goes there that Valley fits right there this that Valley fits right there and that Palm now if you took your hand off this Palm this mhm that’s facing the target okay uh if you fell to the ground your hand would go right up against that Force right okay well now Force isn’t coming this way it’s coming back this way it’s kind of how you throw a baseball and you’re lining your arm up so that you use this all this force in this to put pressure into that okay you know if you get your hand off off the side I mean you couldn’t throw it right right all right so we’re doing the same thing here right there right there perfect now just take one back boom just that much swing just go here then just hit a little pit shot okay okay you see the flight how much lower pretty straight with a little draw on it that’s the shot you want to hit right that’s perfect that’s going to be so easy for you to hit now because you did it before with a lot of twist you don’t have to twist at all to hit that shot now okay do it again yeah it feels like the like I said like a Cricut paddle you know okay well then I’ve never had some but that’s fine then if that’s what it triggers for you then think about it that way cuz it doesn’t matter when I show you what to do you get a feel for it I don’t really care what you come up with if you said it feels like my left ear is twitching I’d so we twitch your left ear more don’t even care same thing same thing