How Your Baseball Swing Affects Your Golf Swing: Tips and Techniques

There is a sound a perfectly struck golf shot makes – a striped drive or a crisp iron that never leaves the target. There, too, is the perfectly struck baseball, right off the sweet spot – a laser back up the middle or blast headed toward the outfield seats.

How a golfer arrives at that point of contact and how a baseball player does can be both incredibly similar and wildly different. So, as the World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Toronto Blue Jays is played, it felt like a good time to figure out what about the baseball swing translates to the golf swing.

And what does not.

“There’s a lot of things that are the same – in terms of pressure shifts, power transfer, how you are using your lower body,” says PGA Coach Evan Lambert, the Director of Instruction at the EJL Golf Academy in Connecticut. “For instance, the kinematic sequence of how your lower body goes first, then followed by your core, then followed by your arms coming through last. Very similar.”

Lambert, who in 2024 was ranked as one of Connecticut's Best Teachers by Golf Digest, actually points to the pitcher’s mound instead of the batter’s box when making the connection between baseball and golf.

"Let’s take a pitcher, for example," Lambert said. “I’ll ask the junior player – ‘Do you pitch?’ He is, say, 12 years old and says ‘Yeah, I pitch.’ The full swing in golf is like coming down off the mound. Sometimes in baseball you are a little more on your back side, letting your hands come through. That’s what I see a lot from former baseball or softball players. They are kind of posting up on their back foot and their lead foot is even coming up off the ground.

"Initially, I say I want you to imagine you are coming down off the mound or you are in center field trying to throw someone out at home. You have to get everything forward. You have to think of throwing the ball when you are swinging the golf club as opposed to thinking you are swinging the bat.

"All of sudden, the golfers realize their body has to move a different way. I have to get all the weight and pressure moving forward."

While there are some things from the baseball swing that have to be untrained when it comes to golf, a background in baseball can certainly help.

“Yeah, it helps,” said PGA of America Golf Professional Rory Maxwell, the Head Professional at Tumble Brook Country Club in Bloomfield, Connecticutt. “Any time that you get any kind of athletic move, somebody with an athletic background, you can coach the athlete as opposed to trying to work through some of the inabilities from somebody who has not played any sports, is not coordinated. Golf has a lot of moving parts, as the baseball swing does, so if you get somebody with some body awareness, it’s a lot easier to get them into certain positions. If you don’t have that athletic ability, it can be a challenge.”

In fact, it’s one of the first questions Lambert asks.

“One of the things that I always ask any player – adult, junior, anybody, really that I am first seeing – what other athletic motions have you done in your life,” Lambert said. “I want to associate something they have done athletically, something they have done in their life, to the golf swing. Then the analogies, the ways we talk about the body, it all comes back to, initially, how do you use a motion that you already do and associate that into golf."

After that, it’s time to learn about the differences between the two swings – and the pieces of equipment.

“You’re taking a bat that doesn’t have a face versus a golf club that does have a face that opens and closes and doesn’t hit square,” Maxwell said. “That’s a challenge with a lot of baseball players; they tend to lead with their hands and have not a high recollection or understanding of where the club is at impact.”

They also struggle with what do with their body. The Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani and the Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. want to load that back leg and keep the weight back before launching a ball deep into the night. In the golf swing, that leads to trouble.

“The kiss of death would be hanging on your back to your trail side, not getting your pelvis through properly, not getting up and finishing in that good finishing posture,” Lambert said. “That really is the kiss of death because it causes so many compensations and you really struggle with poor contact for all of your shots.”

Maxwell agrees.

“You do see a lot of the baseball players hang back, and they keep that weight on their back foot,” he said. “That’s another challenge, getting them through the swing and getting them to post up to their lead foot.”

Because of the differences in the two swings, Lambert is often asked a most basic question.

“I have a lot of parents that ask – ‘Should I pull them from baseball because it’s messing with their golf swing?’ I always tell the parents no,” he said. “The most important athletic development thing for a junior is for them to play lots of sports, for them to be very active, for them to learn to move their bodies in different ways.”

Often Lambert and Maxwell see people walk to the practice range, pick up a club and grab it like a baseball bat. The move, they said, is to immediately change it. They often resist the urge.

“As a young player, if the player is making really good contact with the baseball grip, I leave it alone until they show a certain level of proficiency,” Lambert said. “Then we start to them into the interlock or Vardon overlap grip. That happens with every single one of my junior players at some point. This happens usually from age 6 to 8 where they understand what their hands are doing.”

Maxwell said the baseball grip is a good starting point. Eventually, though, it’ll be time to move in a different direction.

“I kind of like a baseball grip for some players,” Maxwell said. “It gets 10 fingers on the club. We teach the baseball grip a lot — for beginners, juniors, ladies — just to get all fingers on the club and get a little more control of the club face. Once they have control of the club face and stop that baseball pull-through, then we can start to talk about changing.”

Lambert, though, never wants to try to reign in the power a baseball player brings to the golf course.

“If they are firing the pelvis through, if they are whipping the lower body and developing that power … you want that,” he said.