Baseball vs. Golf: The Still Ball Problem

T. Lee, CPA. CA looking to convert from baseball.

Said he wants to learn. Rare words amongst his peers. He keeps the door open.

The key difference lies in controlling face rotation — that dynamic simply doesn’t exist in baseball. In baseball, you just have a barrel with no angle between shaft and face. But the pivot concepts and weight shift have real similarities.

To find his game, he has to develop a new framework, without disrupting his instincts. Intention can be right but lost to equipment or mechanics. 

Initially, the toughest part of the process is finding a takeaway. In baseball, you’re reacting to a moving ball. In golf, the ball is still — you’re initiating the motion. Most players get stuck here because they think linearly. Angles and order are meaningless without integrating the remaining parts of the swing, which you don’t know yet when you’re starting out. It’s a bit of a guessing game of assembling pieces.

You have to fight through. 

T. Lee likely already has plenty of juice — he’s mentioned hitting a good drive every now and then — but power isn’t the priority when first taking up the game. The main adjustment is learning to match face and path to the desired shot shape.

It’s the precision of the face that makes golf truly enjoyable.

Moe Norman, a Canadian professional golfer active from the 1960s through the mid-1980s, took face control to the extreme — he built an entire swing around minimizing face rotation. His mechanics were unconventional: wide stance, hands far from the body, clubhead set way back rather than next to the ball at address. Every move was pure geometry — to him, the face felt like it never turned, even three feet past impact.

A peculiar character, Moe would sometimes fall apart intentionally on the putting green, afraid of award ceremonies and speaking in front of his peers. 

There’s a record of him not going out of bounds in seven years of competition. He controlled the angles of the face like no one else. He said it was the "feeling of greatness" to strike a ball dead straight. 

I will break down Moe’s mechanics at a later date and explain why he favored a straight ball flight over a draw or a fade.

We have another guy who also grew up playing baseball, Derek, but he doesn’t want to golf. He didn’t say why.