The Cutting Edge: Swordsmanship Technique Applied in Baseball

Sadaharu Oh is a former Japanese baseball player who played 22 seasons with the Yomiuri Giants. His career stats include absurd numbers such as .301/.634/1.080 BA/SLG/OPS, 13 seasons with over 40 home

runs, 3 seasons with over 50 (season high of 55), and amassed a total of 868 HRs. You would think Oh was some unit in stature comparable to a guy like Frank Thomas, Barry Bonds, or Aaron Judge, but Oh stood at 5’10 and weighed 170lbs. How did he do it? The Katana Drill.

Just how beneficial can the Katana Drill be? I have never practiced the drill in the sense of baseball but I’ll give my two cents after practicing the South Korean martial art of swordsmanship Gumdo for 3 years while also growing up as a ball player. For this, I will relate it to three well-known baseball drills: Barry Bonds cutting the ball into the plate and two Tony Gwynn drills which are knob to the ball and the palm up palm down lesson.

Barry Bonds drill has players strike the ball into the very tip of the plate on a swing. What this does for the hitter is two things, it allows a hitter to get comfortable with letting the ball travel deep to send it to the opposite field and two when a hitter lets it travel deep and uses this approach, the natural swing path allows for the ball to generate backspin when contact is made. Backspin combined with the right trajectory allows the ball to carry further. Most hitters struggle with having power to opposite field but inducing backspin can make up for this loss of power.

Tony Gwynn’s knob to the ball drill is the drill that bought me out of my senior year slump in high school. The hitter thinks about hitting the ball with the knob of the bat, but when you complete it with a full swing it improves bat path, reduces that “long swing” motion, increases bat speed, and generally leads to more optimal contact and power when making contact.

Gwynn’s other drill is the idea of palm up palm down with the bottom hand being the dominate hand. This drill helps the hitter keep hand and wrist position consistent throughout a swing, allows them to strike through the ball fully and not turnover (similarly to the hitting through two balls drill), and ultimately helps the hitting get through extension without a loss of power.

The Katana drill combines these three drills into one. When striking with a katana it’s usually done on a station object like bamboo but some players like Seiya Suzuki can be see in videos cutting baseballs as a projectile (probably not actual baseballs). If you were to mimic this you would get the part of Bond’s drill where you need to let the ball travel but even on a stationary piece of paper like how Sadaharu Oh did, in order to cut the paper you would need to strike it with the same path that would allow for backspin on a baseball. This is the idea that plays in my mind when I take swings in slow pitch softball that allow me to generate backspin on my hits in which I have to strike slightly on top of the ball but through it. Similarly with the knob to the ball drill, when striking the katana you lead with the bottom end or knob. This is what generates the path in which you are swinging the sword and when followed through allows you to cut through a dense object like Bambo. The last piece is the palm up palm down drill. When striking bamboo it is typically done at a 45 degree angle but contrary to populate belief there isn’t a major pull and push motion of the hands when striking, this push pull occurs at the end of a strike to completely cut through the bamboo. If you think about it in terms of the palm up palm down drill you stay firm full through the ball but you snap the wrist (or push and pull the katana) and the end of the swing to complete it. You to need first strike through and complete that 60-70% of the swing before doing that last bit to complete it.

All in all the Katana drill seems like it has a lot of applicability to swinging a baseball bat and not just in the ways I covered in this article. I would love for a would class swordsman to have a superstar baseball player for a son to see just how much crossover is possible between the two but for now this is what we have.