Smash Factor Balls
6 Reasons Smash
Factor Balls Help
Hitters Crush High
Velocity Pitching
How good could your hitters be if they could confidently handle the highest velos they face?
Transferability
That single word encapsulates one of the foundational principles of baseball training: for training to be effective, a significant portion of it needs to mimic the conditions of actual games as closely as possible.
For example: while mashing against a coach lobbing BP is fun, it’s pretty useless to you when you step into the box against a pitcher bringing real velo.
So how do you create transferability in hitting training? The answer is obvious: take lots of high velo machine BP. Right? Sure. But there’s a problem: taking high velo BP sucks. It blows up your hands. It breaks your bats. It’s exhausting. All of which is why lots of guys avoid it. Which means they don’t get better against velo.
That’s not acceptable. Velocity is rising everywhere and it’s not going to stop any time soon. Hitters must be able to handle it. So at Driveline Baseball, we came up with a solution: Smash Factor Balls.
Here are 6 reasons we use them with every hitter at Driveline Baseball
1. Smash Factor Balls don’t hurt your hands.
Think right now about the feeling of hitting serious velo off the handle. You can feel the pain in your hands even when it’s imaginary, right?
That never happens with Smash Factor Balls because while they’re the same size as baseballs, they’re softer and squishier. Get jammed on twenty straight pitches and you still won’t feel any sting.
Say goodbye to the #1 source of fear and frustration hitters have with high velo BP.
2. Smash Factor Balls don’t break your bats.
How much does it suck to break a perfectly good wood bat in a cage? How much does it suck to ding up a metal bat on dimple balls or even with endless reps with a baseball?
A lot. And it’s expensive. Smash Factor Balls are too soft to break bats, so this just won’t happen.
Grab your game bat. Get in the cage. Go to work.
3. Smash Factor Balls fly true out of a machine.
We’ve heard that a few times and we’ve seen it ourselves. Which is why we took pains to engineer Smash Factor Balls specifically so that they don’t have this problem.
Then to make sure, we studied it in our lab, and here’s what happened: Smash Factor Balls mimic the flight of a baseball very closely while being slightly nastier.
Which only makes them more useful: if you’re dealing with high velo and serious movement in a cage, you’ll be prepared for the best stuff you’ll face in games.
4. Smash Factor Balls work for every level of baseball
You’ll notice we haven’t said anything about how high of velo we’re talking about here. That’s because Smash Factor Balls work at high velo no matter what “high velo” means for your level of play.
We’ve got coaches using Smash Factor Balls to train 8 year olds who are terrified of the ball. We’ve also had orders (and reorders) from multiple MLB teams using them at triple digits, and our hitting trainers use them with our big league hitters in-gym at Driveline all the time.
That also means they work in every pitching machine we’ve seen. The “intimidated & overmatched by velo” problem exists at every level of baseball. Smash Factor Balls are a solution at every level too.
5. Smash Factor Balls give excellent contact quality feedback.
Square up a Smash Factor Ball and it absolutely takes off. Miss underneath and it goes straight up. Miss above and it will top spin straight into the ground. The hook and slice are extreme.
Here’s why that’s good news: every time a hitter barrels a ball, the exaggerated feedback will cue him that he did something right. And because the mishits are extreme, the opposite is true when he does something wrong.
The immediate feedback quickly teaches hitters how to make adjustments from swing to swing. And what could be more transferable than that?
6. Smash Factor Balls are fun as hell.
There was a week in our Arizona facility where our hitters were having a terrible time. After a ton of high velo BP with baseballs, they were exhausted and had destroyed hands.
So one of our trainers decided to end the week with a Smash Factor Homerun Derby, and it turned the whole week around. Why?
Because of the tape measure tanks they were hitting. Like we said: square up a Smash Factor Ball and it absolutely launches. High school & college hitters were putting up 110 mph+ Smash Factor exit velos and watching as balls flew out of big league stadiums on the HitTrax. Suddenly, they didn’t want to stop.
Don’t underestimate the value of this: how good could your hitters get if they loved taking high velo BP?
A Special Offer On Smash Factor Balls
Smash Factor Balls have become such a staple of Driveline’s hitting program that our Director of Hitting, Tanner Stokey, has said that he never wants to train hitters without them again. Now you can see why.
Ready to get some for yourself? Great: we’ve got a special offer for you: take 10% off when you buy your first bucket or 20% off when you buy two buckets.
Don’t wait. Order today and start incorporating Smash Factor Balls into your training program as soon as they show up.
“I’ve seen products like this before. It’s a good idea, but they fly all over the place out of a machine. The flight path is totally unlike a baseball.”