pitch

In 2010, Coach Ron Wolforth coined that phrase, and it changed the way I practice physical therapy and forever altered the way I train throwing athletes. It just made sense. You see, in the Ranch System, pain is neither good nor bad. It is simply information  -- a beacon that lights the way toward dysfunction. Continue reading →

When I was a coaching in college, I held a meeting with all my pitchers the day before our first practice. The purpose of the meeting was to cover the basic housekeeping rules, such as how practices were to be conducted, how to read and follow the practice schedule, what our expectations were, to discuss the philosophy and plan for pitch utilization, and, finally, to present what came to be known as the Ten Commandments of Pitching. Like most good ideas, this was not original with me.  Rather, I learned the T.C.O.P  from Randy Mazey (now the Head Baseball Coach at West Virginia University) when we coached together at TCU. Continue reading →

Pitchers and hitters alike are told from the time they start playing the game of the importance of the ball/strike count. Hitters are often told to work the count in order to make the pitcher labor and throw more pitches, while pitchers are often told to get ahead in the count or that they should focus on throwing a first pitch strike. Regardless of your position, all players are concerned with the count and this is rightfully so. But often, this becomes simply second-nature to baseball players. They know they want to get ahead in the count if they are a pitcher or be ready to swing away in certain hitter’s counts. But many athletes I talk to don’t actually realize WHY they are so focused on the count. Hitters know they desperately want to stay away from 0-2 and pitchers want nothing to do with 2-0 or 3-0, but they sometimes don’t stop to think about the reason why such counts are bad. Continue reading →

In this blog I want to discuss a few exercises and devices that can help improve the trajectory of pitches in a pitcher’s arsenal. For those of you who read my last blog or are familiar with the importance of pitch trajectory you already know that pitchers who can throw all of their pitches on the same plane as one another will more easily deceive the hitter and generally experience more success than pitchers who can not. This is because the flight path of the ball is the first thing a hitter processes and if a pitcher throws his breaking ball on a higher plane, meaning the ball pops out of the hand and has a larger arch on its way to the catcher’s mitt, then a hitter will quickly realize an off-speed pitch is on the way, giving him a better opportunity to be on time at contact. Continue reading →

Pitch trajectory is an extremely important but generally overlooked aspect of pitching. Most pitchers and pitching coaches spend their time focused on mechanics, velocity, or command and don’t think about the significance of how their pitches appear to hitters they face. For those of you wondering what I mean by pitch trajectory I’m talking about the path that a ball takes from the pitcher’s hand at release point to the catcher’s mitt. Continue reading →