I have come across a ton of great content in the past few months that I'm really excited to share. This is the first post in a four post series of the Best Things I've Seen in the last quarter of 2018. Stay tuned for posts on training, personal growth, and, wait for it...hitting. Hitting? Yes. Hitting.
Here we go:
PITCHING SKELETON
The guys at Driveline are doing some amazing things. For years they have been talking about the elbow spiral as the most efficient way for the arm to move through external rotation into ball release, but now we have this amazing visual of a skeleton throwing a ball with a spiral of light along the path of the elbow. The full animation is also incredible.
PITCH COMMAND DESIGN
Lance McCullers Jr. talks openly in this fantastic article about developing his pitches and creating effective glove targets with his catchers to allow him to better command each pitch.
PITCH PHYSICS
I just came across this great new blog that goes into some detail on the physics behind why different pitches move the way they do. It doesn’t have a ton of content yet, but it’s still worth checking out. This video also does a great job of explaining seam flow control differences between 2 and 4 seam fastballs.
CONSTRAINTS LED APPROACH
The Florida Baseball Ranch held a motor learning conference with Frans Bosch and the guys from Dutch Baseball in September that I unfortunately couldn’t attend. After that conference they wrote a post explaining some of the attractors of the pitching delivery. Many coaches use overweight/underweight balls and constraint drills in their training to create an effective learning environment, and both those who do and those who don’t can benefit from this article on utilizing these and other methods in their coaching.
Stay tuned for another Best Things post tomorrow on training.