The 7 Laws of Training According to Dr. Fred Hatfield | Breaking Muscle

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The 7 Laws of Training According to Dr. Fred Hatfield

I recently sat down with Dr. Fred Hatfield, also known as Dr. Squat, to discuss his views on strength and conditioning and how they fit into modern training systems. For those of you unfamiliar, Dr. Hatfield was a great college gymnast and bodybuilder (he was Mr. Mid America, but he didn't compete in the Mr. America competition because of a powerlifting meet).

Dr. Hatfield is probably best known for his world record squat of 1,014lbs set in 1987 when he was the age of 45. He was also the founder of Men's Fitness magazine and the International Sports Sciences Association, and he has written over sixty books. He knows squat and a whole lot more.

The 7 Laws of Training

Dr. Hatfield combed through a great deal of research to best improve his training. Here is what he had to say about seven common laws he found in successful training programs:

If something is called a law then it's called a law for a reason. It means that you've just got to follow the law. If you break the law you go to jail or whatever; or you pay the consequences.
Many years ago, twenty-five or thirty years ago, people began to write about training a lot more than they had in the past, and I'm saying to myself how am I going to judge whether this training program is any good? I scoured the research literature and all of the popular literature for some kind of a yardstick to use to judge the efficacy of these training programs, because Lord knows I didn't have the time or the energy to go on all of those programs.

In reading the works of many sports scientists, Hatfield boiled down their thoughts to seven fundamental laws that apply to all training (although some sports might have additional laws). These are the seven principles that guided him to squat 1,000lbs without the supportive suit technology available now for powerlifters. He indicated that these laws apply to all types of training and not only powerlifting.

1. The Law of Individual Differences

Everyone has different strengths and weakness, which need to be taken into consideration for the training program. No program fits all individuals. This realization really hits when looking at hip structure. In the picture below, the balls of the two femurs extend very differently. You can imagine that these two people will have very different squat mechanisms. The law extends beyond form and technique as people will have different levels of strength, recovery ability, coordination, and mobility to name a few.

2. The Overcompensation Principle

Our body reacts to stress by overcompensating, so that it can handle stress again in the future. This principle is why beginners at any sport see great improvement when starting their programs.

3. The Overload Principle

In order for your body to overcompensate, you must load it with a greater amount than was already encountered. This principle is the reason that people plateau in their gains over time. It becomes more and more difficult to stress the body to a point where it has not been stressed before.

4. The Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demands (SAID) Principle

The basic tenet of this principle is that you must tax your body in the same way that you want to improve. If you want to be explosive, then you must train explosively. If you want to be strong, then you must train for strength. A simple example is the oft criticized high-rep Olympic lifts in CrossFit. These high-rep lifts may help in building aerobic or glycolytic capacity, but they will not assist in building Olympic weightlifting strength.

5. The Use/Disuse Principle and Law of Reversibility

The first part of this principle is that we must continue train the skill or we will lose that capacity ("use it or lose it"). However, the second part of this principle is that once it has been trained and lost, the skill (or strength) will be much easier to recover than it was to originally train. The idea is that we have laid a neurological foundation that makes it easier to recover the function after we have lost it.
A simple example is the skill of riding a bicycle. We may not have done if for years, but we can pretty much get back on the bicycle and relearn it quickly. For strength training, it can take a little longer to recover to previous levels, but recovery is still at a faster rate than for people who are untrained.²

6. The Specificity Principle

Pavel Tsatsouline calls this principle "greasing the groove."⁴ If we want to get better at something, we must do that something. If we want to get better at pull ups, do pull ups. Although leg presses might generalize to the squat, the squat itself will build greater squat strength.
This rule doesn't indicate that we shouldn't do ancillary exercises. For example, we might want to work grip strength outside of the deadlift to better hang onto the bar. However, we don't want to do only ancillary lifts as the main exercise benefits our neurological system the best.

7. The General Adaption Syndrome

This principle might subsume the others as it contains three stages that overlap with other principles:

1. The first stage is called the alarm stage, which is when the body reacts to the application of training stress (similar to the overload principle).
2. The second stage is the resistance stage, which is when our muscles adapt to increasing amounts of stress (similar to the overcompensation principle).
3. The final stage is the exhaustion stage, where if we continue to train we will be forced to stop from too much stress.

This syndrome has been revised and renamed the fitness-fatigue model. Much of the revised model is due to individual differences in how novice and elite athletes respond.¹ Elite athletes fatigue differently and it takes a great deal more stressor to lead to the resistance stage (or overcompensation).
For novice athletes, exhaustion is easier to reach and thus, it might be best to have a wide range of activities to create fitness (to avoid exhaustion in one activity). It might be one reason for new athletes to gain greatly while beginning CrossFit. However, they need to change their training as they begin to respond differently.

Dr. Hatfield's Perspective on CrossFit

Dr. Hatfield was a multifaceted athlete during college and after (participating in national-level events as a college gymnast (pictured above) and being a strong Olympic and power lifter). If CrossFit were around, he probably would have excelled. However, he had some concerns with the current CrossFit training methods:

I like everything about Cross Fit, but it's not a system of training. By putting together all those different sports and activities … it doesn't make any sense because what you do in one sphere is going to take away in another sphere. For example, you cannot become a great marathon runner and an Olympic weightlifter of note all at the same time.
It's not going to work because the kind of training it takes to create great endurance removes from your ability to lift heavy weights, so you're competing against yourself really by getting into Cross Fit. … I took the time to go over CrossFit's methods with a backdrop of the Seven Granddaddy Laws to see what was going on. … they are breaking almost all the laws.

Take Home

In general these principles indicate that we can't blindly follow programs. We all have different technical backgrounds, skeletal structures, and strength levels, to name a few differences. Our programming needs to be tailored to our goals and to us as individuals following the seven laws described above.
One common idea for a solution is to scale the weight in programs. However, that is only one method of trying to create an optimal program. We also need to consider the other laws in making the best possible program to fit our goals.
References:
1. Chiu, Loren ZF, and Barnes, Jacque. 2003. "The Fitness-Fatigue Model Revisited: Implications for Planning Short-and Long-Term Training." Strength & Conditioning Journal 25 (6): 42–51.
2. Hortobágyi, T., L. Dempsey, D. Fraser, D. Zheng, G. Hamilton, J. Lambert, and L. Dohm. 2000. "Changes in Muscle Strength, Muscle Fibre Size and Myofibrillar Gene Expression after Immobilization and Retraining in Humans." The Journal of Physiology 524 (1): 293–304. doi:10.1111/j.1469-7793.2000.00293.x.
3. Selye, Hans. 1950. "Stress and the General Adaptation Syndrome." British Medical Journal 1 (4667): 1383.
4. Tsatsouline, Pavel. 2000. Power to the People!: Russian Strength Training Secrets for Every American. Dragon Door Publications.

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The Berlin Wall’s great human experiment

The Berlin Wall's great human experiment - The Boston Globe

				The Berlin Wall's great human experiment - The Boston Gl... Twenty-five years ago this fall, a crowd of thousands gathered along the east side of the Berlin Wall and demanded, with the urgency of people who had spe...
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The Berlin Wall was more than a symbol, of course. It literally divided a city and represented the divide between the free and un-free worlds. When it fell, it was easy to forget that those two worlds, the free and the un-free, still existed even though the Wall did not. The symbol was gone and so what it represented was forgotten. Suddenly, evil no longer had a familiar form. As 9/11 taught us, the dangers are real even though the battle lines are hazy.... 

~ Garry Kasparov, November 13: Each generation has its own Berlin wall

by Leon Neyfakh

John Tlumacki/Globe staff/file

A boy waved to soldiers on the Berlin Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the wall fell.

Twenty-five years ago this fall, a crowd of thousands gathered along the east side of the Berlin Wall and demanded, with the urgency of people who had spent decades under an authoritarian communist regime, that the border guards let them pass to the other side. That night, the gates swung open and the sledgehammers came out. Soon, the wall was all but destroyed, and the two countries it had kept apart for almost 30 years were finally joined back together.

The collapse of the Berlin Wall, which Germany will commemorate next month with an illuminated display of white balloons where the concrete barrier once stood, was one of the most extraordinary events of the 20th century. Not only was it a crucial factor in the eventual shriveling of communism in Europe, it was also a demonstration of what peaceful protest could accomplish in the face of an oppressive government.

But before it fell, the wall did something that most people never think of: It created a massive laboratory for studying human society.

Imagine this: If you were a researcher trying to determine how a political system affects people's values, beliefs, and behavior, you would ideally want to take two identical populations, separate them for a generation or two, and subject them each to two totally different kinds of government. Then you'd want to measure the results, the same way a medical researcher might give two sets of patients two different pills and then track their progress.

Ethically, such a study would be unthinkable even to propose. But when the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, it created what London School of Economics associate professor Daniel Sturm calls a "perfect experiment." While people in West Germany voted in free elections, read independent newspapers, and protested if they felt dissatisfied with their government, their Eastern counterparts lived inside a surveillance state ruled by a zealously doctrinaire communist party. Where "Ossis"—an unofficial term for those who lived in East Germany—drove famously shoddy Trabant cars, wore drab clothing, and drank off-brand soda, their "Wessi" counterparts enjoyed Pepsi and regularly saw BMWs in the street. The two halves of the country were like a pair of identical twins separated at birth and raised by two very different sets of parents.

Over the past decade, the Berlin Wall has emerged as a uniquely powerful tool for answering questions about politics, economics, and human nature. How well does state propaganda actually work? What role do friendships play in stimulating business and trade? How does living under a repressive regime affect people's inclination to trust strangers and government institutions?

The results have proved exciting for researchers, but their value goes beyond the ivory tower: They're also likely to be important in preparing for real-world situations we may see in the future, like the opening of North Korea and Iran. "Understanding how, say, propaganda created by such regimes affects people's preferences is very important, particularly when these regimes sooner or later collapse," said Alberto Alesina, an economist at Harvard University.

The insights that have piled up since the fall of the wall make it clear how long a single political event can continue to have social and economic effects on the people who lived through it. The marks it left are still being uncovered and measured, more than half a century after the architects of the wall unwittingly made it possible.

The split was formalized in 1949: West Germany became an independent state in Europe; its smaller eastern counterpart, carved from territory the Soviet Union seized after liberating it from the Nazis, slipped behind the Iron Curtain. A little over a decade later, it became clear that unless drastic measures were taken, the massive wave of emigration flowing out of the East would cripple the country. And so a cinder-block wall went up in Berlin, complete with barbed wire and heavily armed guards who would shoot anyone who tried to climb across. Practically overnight, family members who lived on different sides of the wall were separated with no promise of seeing each other again. Grocery stores in the East abruptly stopped importing food from the West. And while there were a handful of checkpoints permeating the wall—which ultimately stretched a total of 96 miles—permission to cross was basically never granted to people from the East.

AP/file 1962

An East German guard carried Anna Szczygielski's luggage as the 70-year-old woman crossed the border to be reunited with two grandchildren. Her husband had died a year earlier.

For the next 28 years, East and West Germany were run about as differently as two countries could be. In East Germany's controlled economy, every citizen was guaranteed a (low-paying) job, housing was owned and allocated by the state, and people couldn't buy Levi's jeans except on the black market. West Germany, meanwhile, grew into an economic and industrial powerhouse: By 1989 it was the third largest economy in the world, producing and selling a panoply of consumer goods. Politically, it was wide open; when a magazine editor was jailed for publishing unflattering articles about the military, public outrage was so intense that the editor was freed and and the country's defense minister resigned.

Alberto Alesina was thinking of none of this when he started working on a question that others in his field had found extremely difficult to answer definitively: How important is a country's official ideology in shaping people's political attitudes? A breakthrough came when Alesina spoke to a colleague, the economist Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln, who had recently used data on post-reunification Germany to study whether all the extra money people in the East were earning after the wall came down had made them more likely to save. The same approach, they realized, could help with Alesina's question about political attitudes.

At first, the researchers didn't know what to expect. On the one hand, East Germans might be resentful of the system that had constrained their lives; on the other hand, it was also plausible that they had become comfortable with the notion that a government would provide for basic needs at the expense of an open society.

Alesina and Fuchs-Schundeln used data from a German survey administered in 1997, and split the respondents into two groups based on where they had lived before reunification. What they found was that, at that point, people from the East still tended to believe in the social-service model. They were also more likely to support a robust government program to help the unemployed, and significantly more inclined to believe that social conditions, rather than individual will, determined a person's lot in life.

"We tend to think of preferences as a fundamental thing that economists cannot explain," said Alesina. "[Our paper] says, 'Look...living under a communist regime changes people's political preferences.'"

It goes the other way too, if slowly: When Alesina and Fuchs-Schundeln looked at survey results from 2002, they found that the two groups of Germans had begun to converge politically. Based on the data, they estimated that it would take between one and two generations—20 to 40 years— for the gap to fully close, and "for an average East German to have the same views on state intervention as an average West German."

The differences between the two Germanys went far beyond economic ideology. West Germans all had access to Western television networks, including one that was American-controlled; they watched uncensored newscasts, shows like "Dallas" and "Dynasty," and commercials for everything from Corn Flakes to Volkswagens. Most East Germans could get those broadcasts too, but a significant proportion of them—between 10 and 15 percent—lived in areas the signal didn't reach. These people, concentrated mainly in Dresden and the surrounding Elbe Valley, were sometimes referred to as "the valley of the clueless," forced to watch "political propaganda and Soviet-produced movies," wrote Leonardo Bursztyn, a management professor at UCLA, and his German coauthor Davide Cantoni.

Western television, Bursztyn and Cantoni found, had an impact on East Germans and how they spent their money: Those who'd had access to it were much more inclined to buy Western products they'd seen advertised than those who had not. (In the ongoing debate about whether advertising works at all, consumption data on post-reunification Germany suggests the answer is "yes.") Television affected people's mindset in other ways as well. In a separate but related study, it was shown that watching Western TV had actually shaped East Germans' views about work and chance, making them "more inclined to believe that effort rather than luck determines success in life."

Perhaps the most horrifying aspect of life in East Germany was the surveillance state. Anyone you knew might be an informant to the secret police, the powerful Stasi, who maintained files on an estimated 6 million citizens and were known to pressure people to turn in neighbors, co-workers, and sometimes even friends and family members as traitors. Economists Helmut Rainer and Thomas Siedler used survey data to try to figure out whether living that way had left a psychological scar. They looked at the results of a Germany-wide survey that had been administered twice a year since 1980: According to their analysis, East Germans were much less trusting toward other people than their counterparts.

Perhaps discouragingly, their mistrust did not lift easily when the Stasi's reign ended. When the researchers compared survey data collected not long after reunification to data collected in 2002, it was clear that living in a democracy for a decade had not made East Germans significantly more trusting of others.

Other studies have shown additional lasting differences. One found that, because in East Germany women were encouraged to work more than they were in the West, East Germans were significantly more likely to believe that men and women are equal. Another found that, because the East German regime ran official doping programs for athletes, East Berliners were much more accepting than West Berliners of performance-enhancing drugs 20 years after reunification. Another paper, by Tarek Hassan of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, looked at how businesses grew and spread when the border fences fell, and found that they tended to follow networks of personal connections. Ossis who did a lot of business with the former Wessis after reunification were disproportionately likely to have had friends, or friends of friends, on the other side of the wall before it was torn down.

These findings might be just the beginning of the Berlin Wall's lessons. "I'm surprised there aren't more people using it," said Daniel Sturm, who coauthored a paper about the economic slowdown suffered by cities that were in the center of Germany before the division but became peripheral afterward. "I think there are lots of open questions that we'll learn more about from observing what happened in Germany."

Thomas Imo/Photothek via Getty Images

People massed in front of the Berlin Wall after the border opened on Nov. 9, 1989.

An event that disrupts the lives of tens of millions of people is, obviously, more than just an experiment, and there's arguably something reductive about treating it like one. The researchers are well aware of this moral complexity.

"People have said to me, 'How can you do it?'" said Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln, who is a professor at Goethe University Frankfurt. "It almost sounds like we're saying, 'German separation was a great idea because it allows me to analyze many things.' That's obviously not what we think. But it's true that as scientists, we want to establish some causality, and to establish causality, you need some exogenous event....Often these events are bad—a tsunami, for instance. But we analyze [them] for scientific reasons. It's not that we don't feel for the people, but it allows us to answer questions that we couldn't answer otherwise."

For anyone who remembers its power as a symbol of the Cold War, it will be no surprise that the legacy of the Berlin Wall can still be measured 25 years later—that many Germans who lived in the East continue to feel separate and different from their countrymen. It is still possible, though harder, to close societies off today; many nations still have limited travel, militarized borders, even closed Internets. And while no amount of expert understanding would be worth what Germans suffered, there is some consolation in knowing that their experience could someday help the millions of people around the world on whom a similar experiment is still being run.

Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail leon.neyfakh@globe.com.

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From 1961 to 1989, the Berlin Wall split a nation in two and stood as the Cold War's most visible political faultline. It created unforgettable scenes of division while it stood, and reunion when it fell.

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  AP/file 1961

  A West German couple and an East German couple engaged in conversation over barbed wire along the border in Berlin, 1961. At left, two East German soldiers.
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  UPI/file 1961

  Two young girls roller skated on an empty East Berlin street. The barbed wire preceded the Berlin Wall.
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  AP/file 1961

  The border dividing East and West in Berlin at the Brandenburg Gate appears as a no man's land in this aerial photo. East Berlin can be seen in the background.
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  AP/file 1962

  An East German policeman kept watch from an open window as two West Berlin police officers manned a post along the wall.
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  UPI/file 1962

  A boy riding his scooter whizzed by a convoy of armored personnel carriers from the Soviet Union at Checkpoint Charlie as a British officer (right) and an American officer discussed an appropriate escort.
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  AP/file 1962

  An East German guard carried Anna Szczygielski's luggage as the 70-year-old woman crossed the border to be reunited with two grandchildren. Her husband had died a year earlier.
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  John Tlumacki/Globe Staff/file 1989

  A boy waved to soldiers on the wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Nov. 10, 1989, the day after the wall opened.
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  David Brauchli/Reuters/1989

  East Berlin border guards looked on as a demonstrator pounded away at the wall on Nov. 11, 1989.

The Fall of the Berlin Wall and Freedom

from econolib.org
https://www.econlib.org/my-vivid-memories-of-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall/

This is a vivid example of what freedom looks like. A former East German guard stationed at the wall chooses freedom by running towards the West side of the wall.

Ironic in that it forever should bury the lie told often that the wall was built to keep West Berliners out, not East Berliners in. This is also the important distinction commonly missed by people who compare it to the US/Mexico wall. The Berlin example was a cage for it's own people.

Let Freedom ring. 

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The Civil War, Civil Rights and Black Baseball | The Hardball Times

https://fineartamerica.com/featured/civil-war-baseball-1863-padre-art.html?product=bath-towel

from FanGraphs:
https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/the-civil-war-civil-rights-and-black-baseball/

The Civil War, Civil Rights and Black Baseball

Shakeia Taylor

Union prisoners playing baseball at Salisbury, N.C, drawn from nature by Act. Major Otto Boetticher (via The Library of Congress)

For many, the conversation of black baseball and civil rights begins and ends with integration. The hardships endured by Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier, along with the slow march to integrate other greats of the Negro Leagues, occupies much of the popular imagination. But the story is much much older than that.

African-Americans were playing baseball at least 100 years before Jackie donned Dodger blue. Baseball, which played a vital role in northern Black communities before the Civil War, and was an important part of camp life during the war, was tied to African-American agitation for civil and political rights following the war.

During the 1840s and 1850s, Black ballplayers shared in the baseball mania that was spreading in the northeast. While many northern Blacks were impoverished, others could afford the time and expense of forming and joining their own ball clubs. In 1859, white, antislavery Republican Joshua Giddings, a congressman from Ohio, showed his support for desegregation and equality in baseball by playing in a game with African-Americans. By that year, African-Americans had formed three clubs in the Brooklyn area: the Unknown of Weeksville, the Henson of Jamaica, and the Monitor of Brooklyn. They were followed soon after by the Uniques and the Union, both of Williamsburgh.

The Civil War didn't disrupt the game; indeed, it spread the burgeoning pastime. The war promulgated the game socially, economically and geographically due to the large number of young men in army camps. Soldiers from different parts of the country taught the game to those from regions the game had yet to reach.

During the War, soldiers often played integrated baseball games to pass the time. Once Black soldiers returned from war, baseball would remain an important site of coming together for Black communities, drawing the notice of prominent leaders and serving as a literal field on which to agitate for change and inclusion.

Famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a fan of the game himself. His son, Frederick Douglass Jr., played baseball with the integrated Charter Oak Juniors in Rochester, New York in 1859. After the war, Douglass Jr. moved to Washington, where he helped found the Alerts Base Ball Club of Washington. His brother, Charles, was the third baseman for the team. Charles Douglass later joined the Washington Mutuals Base Ball Club.

One of the earliest Negro league baseball clubs, was the Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia, founded in 1865. Founded by Jacob C. White Jr. and Octavius Catto — both educators, intellectuals and civil rights activists — the Pythians was primarily comprised of middle class professionals from the Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and New York areas. In the Civil War, Catto served on a committee that recruited soldiers for the Union Army and joined a local African-American militia. He also campaigned for the desegregation of Philadelphia's streetcars and for Blacks' right to vote.

Catto's enthusiasm for baseball and his desire for equal rights intersected. In February 2015, James Brunson, a professor at Northern Illinois and the country's preeminent expert on 19th-century black baseball told philly.com:

Catto's social and political connections with white businessmen and white baseballists were crucial to the team crossing bats with white organizations. … It is important to contextualize these efforts in relation to the efforts of other Black clubs during the period. Catto appears to have played hardball with the white organizers, and they responded in kind. It was as much politics as it was baseball. Many of these white players were hardcore Democrats; Catto was a Republican who pushed for Black male suffrage and citizenship."

Baseball's growing popularity helped drive his civil rights efforts.

During their first full season, just two years after the Civil War ended, the Pythians took on the Alerts and the Mutuals, in a home-and-home series. Frederick Douglass was in the stands to watch the games.

The Pythians were an extremely talented and capable baseball team among Black ball clubs, and they wanted equal consideration from white clubs. In 1869, they issued a challenge to every white team in Philadelphia: play us. Their challenge was accepted and they made history when they played the first documented game of interracial baseball against the Olympics, Philadelphia's oldest white baseball club.

Though the Philadelphia Olympics routed the Pythians, 44-23, The Spirit of the Times of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, declared, "old-time prejudices are melting away in this country." They went on to say, "It is not considered outside our own territory a lessening of dignity nor in the least disparaging to white men that they contend with blacks." That journal hoped that "now that the prejudice has been broken through here, it will be entirely swept away." The Pythians showed themselves to be worthy competitors for white clubs, and they went on to play white teams both locally and regionally.

The game continued to advance for Black ball clubs. In October of 1867, the Brooklyn Uniques played the Philadelphia Excelsiors, in the first recognized "Colored Championship." The one-game championship contest was played at the Satellite Grounds in Brooklyn. In the seventh inning, the game was called due to darkness. Though three different final scores were reported, Philadelphia won the game and became the first "Colored Champion" of black baseball in the United States.

After the war, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments redefined state and federal citizenship and extended civil and political rights, but the amendments included no provisions for equality in private, voluntary activities. The leading Black clubs of Brooklyn, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington sought equal treatment by the white ball-playing fraternity.

The Pythians believed that their club could gain official recognition from the Pennsylvania State Association of Base Ball Players, a subsidiary of the National Association, at its convention in Harrisburg in October, 1867. The Athletics, a white team, agreed to sponsor their application. After being told to rescind the Pythians' application or risk being blackballed, Pythians secretary Jacob White Jr. did just that, but the club decided to try to gain admission to the National Association at the annual meeting held in Philadelphia that December.

By Date and By Slate: When History Meets the Baseball Schedule

by John Paschal

At times, the calendar has space for world events and baseball events, no matter how big or small.

The December 19, 1867 The Ball Players' Chronicle said that the report of the nominating committee recommended the exclusion of African-American clubs from representation in the Association.

The stated reason for this decision was to keep out discussion of any subject having a political bearing; that such an exclusion was itself political seems to have escaped the committee's notice. The Association chose to exclude African-American ball clubs to avoid an uncomfortable conversation, and potentially, political ramifications. The Report to the Committee read as follows:

To the National Association of Base Ball Players:
The Nominating Committee beg leave respectfully to report:

First — That eight State Associations, representing 237 clubs, have applied for admission, and your committee recommend they be elected members, waiving such irregularities as are named in schedule №1 attached to this report.

Second — That they have elected eight clubs probationary members, according to Art. III, sec. 5 of the Constitution, and report favorably upon their election by the Convention, waiving such irregularities as are noted in schedule №2.

Third — That they report favorably upon the admission of twenty-eight clubs whose applications are correct as named in schedule №3.

Fourth — That they recommend the admission of eight clubs whose applications are more or less irregular, particulars of which can be found in schedule №4.

Fifth — That they find two memoranda received from the Recording Secretary (no doubt intended as applications from the Excelsior of Philadelphia and Crescent of — — -), which are too informal to be noticed by your committee.

Sixth — Your committee would beg to add, that it has been quite impossible for them to ascertain the condition, character, and standing of all the clubs, in different parts of the country, as required by the Constitution, and can only assume that the applications made are based upon good faith. It is not presumed by your committee that any club who have applied are composed of persons of color, or any portion of them; and the recommendations of your committee in this report are based upon this view, and they unanimously report against the admission of any club which may be composed of one or more colored persons.

/S/Wm. H. Bell, M.D., Jas. Whyte Davis, Wm. E. Sinn; Philadelphia, Dec. 11, 1867.

The Pennsylvania State Association's decision, however, was not isolated to rejection on a local level. Three years later, the New York Base Ball Association amended its rules for admission to bar baseball clubs composed of men of color entirely. And thus, the color line was born.

In 1871, Octavius Catto was murdered while on his way to vote. He used baseball as a means to accomplish more than wealth; Catto believed Black credibility and acceptance could be promoted by competing against white teams on a baseball diamond. It was sport as activism and activism as sport. It was a rather simple assertion of dignity, in the radical form of Black bodies pitched in equal competition against white bodies.

It would prove temporarily fruitless; the attempt to achieve equality through baseball failed. Author and researcher Neil Lanctot wrote in Negro League Baseball: The rise and ruin of a black institution, "Rather than actively agitate for participation in Organized Baseball … blacks began to build separate institutions of their own, forming their own amateur and later professional teams by the mid-1880s."

The Pythians went on to become a charter member of the short-lived National Colored Base Ball League (NCBBL). Baseball was still a vital part of the community, but the activism of the diamond changed, reshaped in separate leagues where credibility and some wealth and prominence could be obtained, until the day when white baseball had to make room for Black players.

The quest for equality on the baseball field, and in the rest of the United States, would continue for years to come. The slow trudge to Jackie, and Larry Doby, and Hank Thompson was too long a road. But it was one that started not just with Jackie's Montreal Royals, or Doby's Newark Eagles, but in the muddy fields of the Civil War, and Octavius Catto's Pythian Base Ball Club, and a series of dreams and leagues that came and went, but were tied closely to a simple, but clear request to be included. To be thought of as full people, on a green field, with belief that baseball might mean something more. That we might all be entitled to more.

References and Resources

• Zachary Brown, U.S. History Scene, "Baseball and the Civil War: Forging America's National Pastime"
• George Kirsch, The New York Times, "Blacks, Baseball and the Civil War"
• Mike Mencarini, Marquette University, "Baseball and the Negro Leagues: A Symbol of America"
• John Thorn, Our Game, the blog of MLB's official historian, "The Drawing of the Color Line, 1867"
• Ryan Whirty, Philly.com, "Philadelphia's Pythians made baseball history in 1800s"
• American Battlefield Trust, "Baseball and the American Civil War"
• BlackPast.org, "Negro Baseball Leagues (1920-1950)"
• History Detectives, Special Investigations, PBS, "African-American Baseball"
• The History Engine, "Race and Baseball during the Civil War"
• Wikipedia.org

Listen to Dr. Fadde- Professor and Chief Science Officer for gameSense Sports in Podcasts

Listen to Dr. Fadde- Professor and Chief Science Officer for gameSense Sports from Ahead Of The Curve with Jonathan Gelnar in Podcasts.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ahead-of-the-curve-with-jonathan-gelnar/id1256849644?i=1000431745679

Summary:

In this episode of Ahead of the Curve, I welcome Dr. Peter Fadde, pitch recognition expert, Chief Officer and Co-Founder of gameSense, and Associate Professor of Learning Systems Design & Technology at Southern Illinois University. Dr. Peter Fadde breaks down the science of pitch recognition and the valuable methods of training hitters to achieve this skill. Coach Sherman also explains occlusion training, and ways that his pitch recognition product at gameSense is preparing players and coaches to implement it into their training regimens. 

Show Notes:

• Guest: Dr. Peter Fadde, Chief Officer and Co-Founder of gameSense, and Associate Professor of Learning Systems Design & Technology at Southern Illinois University

Dr. Fadde explains the benefits of occlusion training

Dillan Lawson's presentation at Slugfest used a soccer player kicking a goal with the lights turned off 2/3 of the way to teach occlusion training

What is "pitch recognition" and how is it different from "plate discipline?"

Dr. Fadde's occlusion training offers the batter's view point facing the pitcher with a maximum possible score of 250

Video cued tee work is tee work that includes the timing off of the pitcher

Hitting baseballs is not like hitting golf balls or baseballs off of a tee

Vision training focuses on visual skills like dynamic tracking, acuity, peripheral vision, and focus

Pitch recognition should help hitters get the feel of the pitcher's wind-up

If you aren't looking at a pitcher, then it isn't really pitch recognition

Live drills for hitters to call out "yes" or "no" on a particular pitch type before the ball hits the catcher's mitt strengthens pitch recognition

The best form of pitch recognition is standing in the bullpen

Mike Schmidt wrote a fantastic books on hitting

Attention occlusion drills should keep the batter focusing on the pitcher, not the catcher

3 Key Points:

1.    Pitch recognition is the perceptual skill of making an actionable meaning out of the pitch you see.

 Your eyes can't track pitch speeds over 83 miles an hour all the way into the bat.
 Visualize the pitcher. Visualize the pitch. Visualize hitting that pitch.

"Human beings, and other animals, can learn incredible things with repetition, immediate feedback, and progressive difficulty." - Dr. Peter Fadde (5:04)

"When we say, 'somebody has a great instinct for it,' well, that's where we now say, 'ok, let's try to figure out exactly what that is.'" - Dr. Peter Fadde (6:32)

"Some guys like to have success at every level and build it up. And some guys just like to identify the wall they want to go through and then start smacking it." - Dr. Peter Fadde (14:41)

"The best way to practice recognizing pitches is to look at pitches." - Dr. Peter Fadde (30:56)

"A softball hitter really focusing on and getting good at pitch recognition could be looking at at a 20 or 25% improvement." - Dr. Peter Fadde (51:20)

Tweetable Quotes:

• "If you can test it, you can train it." - Dr. Peter Fadde (4:53)

Resources Mentioned: