Speed is a tool that shows up in all the other tools

Speed is the direction baseball is going in the so-called "post-PED period". Power is out, speed is in. We are trading infield hits for HR's and wondering why increasing numbers of people are turning the TV to another channel, another sport. It would be like if the NBA banned the dunk, like college basketball did at one point.

The game IS tedious to watch now, too many no-hit, no-run games into the fifth and sixth innings. Who wants to watch futility? It not even like watching paint dry, which would be bad enough. It's like watching paint peel. It's not the pace of the game so much as the lack of action contained within the game. It doesn't take 2-3 hours to recognize boring.

Maybe we ought to have a "home-first speed derby" and see how many folks show up for that one? Maybe see how many hamstrings we can blow out?

Anyway, speed is the tool that makes the other tools better, it is multi-dimensional, so here we go:

Here is the 8 point system some organizations use: 

80 - Exceptional 
70 - W. Above Avg. 
60 - Above Avg. 
50 - Average 
40 - Bellow Avg. 
30 - W. Bellow Avg. 
20 - Poor 


60 Yard time: 
80 - 6.4 Less 
70 - 6.60 - 6.51 
60 - 6.80 - 6.61 
50 - 7.00 - 6.81 
40 - 7.30 - 7.01 
30 - 7.50 - 7.31 
20 - 7.70 - 7.51 


Home to 1B LHB 
80 - 3.9 
70 - 4.0 
60 - 4.1 
50 - 4.2 
40 - 4.3 
30 - 4.4 
20 - 4.5 


Home to 1B  RHB 
80 - 4.0 
70 - 4.1 
60 - 4.2 
50 - 4.3 
40 - 4.4 
30 - 4.5 
20 - 4.6 


Steal of second base 
80 - 3.00 Less 
70 - 3.10 - 3.01 
60 - 3.15 - 3.11 
50 - 3.25 - 3.16 
40 - 3.30 - 3.24 
30 - 3.40 - 3.29 
20 - 3.60 - 3.48

Grand Theft Baseball?

It sounds like a video game, but this article featuring A's Coco Crisp is loaded with great tips for improving your chances of stealing bases. Enjoy.

Grand Theft Baseball

				Grand Theft Baseball Oakland's Coco Crisp brings us deep into the mind of a base stealer.
				View on grantland.com	Preview by Yahoo

Jonah Keri on the art of stealing bases - Grantland:

[Crisp looks closely at the video for about a minute and has me replay it multiple times, a pattern he repeats with each one.]

I try to pick up something off of every pitcher. It might be different, it might be a move with his front foot, or something else. With lefties obviously it's a little more tricky. With this particular situation, I believe that I was looking at his head. And that was his first movement home, was when he gave a sharp, quick look home, which gave me a few ticks before his front foot lifted. And as soon as he picks up his foot, I take off … or I try to take off. Normally on this particular play it's a slide step. I wouldn't go unless I caught a sign that was a little earlier than his front foot going toward home.

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SITUATION — June 29, 2010: Orioles left-hander Brian Matusz is pitching, Crisp is on first, top of the first inning, zero outs, 0-0 tie. (Click for video.)

In the video of this play, Jim Palmer's saying you're going on first move. Is that what it looks like to you?

I believe with this, it was his first move, yes. But here, if I saw he was standing with an open crotch, where I could see the inside of his thigh, that means he's going home. Versus when he's coming over to first, he closes up. Sometimes that varies with different pitchers. Some pitchers are more closed when they come home, and leave it open to come over to first.

There's also the back toe with lefties. And this is one of the most common mistakes they make. When they go home, they dig in their back toe. When they come over, it lifts up. They come up on their back heel to come over. You can see that if that's what you're focusing on, if you don't have anything else to go off of. Sometimes you'll see the front toe of a pitcher pointed down when he's coming home, then if you see it up, it's more relaxed, that means more likely he's coming over to first. There's also, like I said, the crotch, you can look for that. But there are definitely some things you can look for if you want more than just to focus on first move.

Why High-Speed Throwing Is Uniquely Human - Made to play Baseball

We are apparently built for high-speed throwing. Many credit this ability as part of the reason for our survival back in  the day. And by back in the day, I mean WAAAAAAY back in the the day.  Hyperextendible wrists!! Didn't know about that one, but OK. We also have the opposable thumbs thing going for us, for gripping tools and implements like a baseball bat as shown further in the article below.

Form follows function and we have all the necessary raw materials to make us uniquely equipped to be throwing and hitting machines. Therefore, wonderfully made and endowed by our Creator for the great game of baseball on at least two unique levels.  

HOW ABOUT THAT!! 

from the Institute for Creation Research:
Why High-Speed Throwing Is Uniquely Human:

What body structures uniquely equip humans to throw objects frequently, at high speeds, and—for the practiced—with great accuracy? Research has revealed that if the throwing motion depended directly on muscle, we could only generate half the force that the human frame can actually muster. In the course of answering the question of where the rest of the throwing force originates, one recent study stumbled on a number of reasons why the human body looks like the product of specialized and intentional creation.

Publishing in the journal Nature, four scientists led by Harvard's Neil Roach examined the human mechanics of pitching a baseball and compared them to the chimpanzee's anatomy.1 A chimp's long-armed frame is well-suited for climbing and hanging from tree limbs, but this diminishes its potential for sustained, accurate, high-speed throwing. The researchers identified several uniquely human features that helped solve the mystery of mankind's expert throw.

First, humans have longer legs. Taking that first, long step when we begin the throwing motion stores a measure of elastic energy, later to be released. Second, we rotate our hips with a greater range of motion because of, in the Nature authors' words, "the tall, mobile waists of humans."1

Third, the study authors found a uniquely human angle between the head of the humerus (upper arm) bone and the axis of the elbow. So the overall shape of human arm bones helps store energy used for throwing. A fourth feature also has to do with angles. When throwing, the human frame aligns the upper arm with the orientation of the pectoralis major muscle, and these also align with the torso's rotation angle. This arrangement permits multiple forces to align, producing the fastest motion in the human body—the "rotation around the long axis of the humerus," which rotates more than 9,000 degrees per second!1

Last, humans have "hyperextendible wrists" that store and release even more energy.1 Altogether, the stored energy from the legs, hips, torso, shoulder girdle, and wrist loads its force to that of the appropriate muscle energies onto the projectile.

The end result? Professional pitchers can throw baseballs at close to 90 mph over 100 times during a three-hour baseball game.

References

1. Roach, N.T. et al. 2013. Elastic energy storage in the shoulder and the evolution of high-speed throwing in Homo. Nature. 498 (7455): 483-486.

1. Guliuzza, R. 2009. Throwing Darwin a Curve. Made in His Image: Examining the complexities of the human body. ICR: Dallas, TX. p. 22.

* Mr. Thomas is Science Writer at the Institute for Creation Research.Article posted on July 19, 2013.

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That's a Fact - Throwing a Strike from Institute for Creation Research on Vimeo.



Evolution of the human hand: the role of throwing and clubbing

Richard W Young

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1571064/

Conclusion

It has been proposed (Young, 2002) that the earliest hominid specialization was aggressive throwing and clubbing, and that this behaviour increased reproductive success during a prolonged period, driving natural selection that progressively improved its effectiveness. If these assertions are correct, the evolution of the human hand should provide evidence of this process in its anatomical structure.

The fossil record indicates that adaptation for throwing and clubbing began to influence hand structure at or very near the origin of the hominid lineage and continued for millions of years thereafter. During this prolonged period of evolution, the hand underwent a profound remodelling that increasingly adapted it for grasping spheroids in a manner that allows precise control of release and for gripping clubhandles with strength sufficient to withstand a violent impact. Two unique human handgrips were thereby produced. Called the ‘power’ and ‘precision’ grips by Napier (1956) who identified and described them, they can also be referred to as clubbing and throwing grips on the basis of their evolutionary origins.

  http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Evol/opposablethumb.html

Importance of the opposable thumb

The thumb, unlike other fingers, is opposable, in that it is the only digit on the human hand which is able to oppose or turn back against the other four fingers, and thus enables the hand to refine its grip to hold objects which it would be unable to do otherwise. The opposable thumb has helped the human species develop more accurate fine motor skills. It is also thought to have directly led to the development of tools, not just in humans or their evolutionary ancestors, but other primates as well.[6][7] The thumb, in conjunction with the other fingers make humans and other species with similar hands some of the most dexterous in the world.[8]

TRAINING DIFFERENCES OF BASEBALL PLAYERS

This is a reprint of an article that appeared in Coach Peter's Baseball Tips Web Site. The site contains quite a few informative articles from baseball coaches from around the country. The site is a good resource for players and coaches alike, especially the Instructional Articles section.

http://www.baseballtips.com/playertraining.html
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Training Differences of Baseball Players vs. Other Athletes

Charles Slavik, President of Eagle Baseball Club
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George Carlin did a classic bit of comedy on the differences between the sports of baseball vs. football, giving the impression that the two sports couldn’t be more opposite in terms of pace, terminology and other factors. We agree and would add that the training for each sport has to be different as well. Both sports are power oriented sports, but there are differences in how that power is expressed and trained.

Sport & Athlete Needs Assessment
The trainer has to assess the unique needs of the sport and allocate time to improving each quality within the athlete. Athletic abilities assessment should be made for each athlete to match the athlete’s needs to the sport based on the level of competition. Then the athlete has a clear roadmap of where they are and where they wish to go based on their motivation and goals.

All sports differ in terms of the relative importance various physical skills contribute to the game and to individual athlete’s performance. The movements in baseball are ballistic in nature and involve full-body activity. The ability to repeatedly perform near maximal level with limited rest bouts is necessary for baseball players.

Baseball players should not be trained to build excess bulk or muscle mass. They should focus on improving quick, reactive movements, increasing explosiveness and injury prevention, as well as improving speed and trunk rotation. This will lead to improved bat speed and ball velocity.

Energy Systems
Because of the anaerobic nature of the game, baseball players use the phosphagen system as the primary source of energy. About 80% of the body’s metabolic energy will come from the phosphagen system. Training programs involving sprinting and plyometric exercises under 10 seconds in duration that provide complete recovery are indicated. This type of training will improve speed and power development.

Rotational Movements
One of the key differences in baseball is that the main activities of hitting and throwing occur in a rotational plane of movement and are very ballistic or explosive in nature. Therefore, baseball players need to train rotationally with light weights and high speed. Exercise that emphasizes rotating the hips and torso using resistance from cables/pulleys, dumbbells and medicine balls are effective.

Players often lack abdominal or core strength. Abdominal crunches and various rotational twists with a medicine ball should be used to develop a strong muscular base in this area. This will focus on improving strength and power in the rotational muscles of the core area that are vital for swinging a bat or throwing a ball.

Shoulder Stability & Rotator Cuff Work
Another key difference is the unusually high stress placed on the shoulder joint generally and the rotator cuff muscles. The act of pitching occurs at an angular velocity at the shoulder joint approaching 7,000 degrees per second (almost 20 full circles) and is one of the fastest human movements. This places the shoulder joint and surrounding muscles at significant risk of injury from repetitive stress.

Exercises that strengthen the anterior and posterior shoulder muscles in a balanced manner are vital. The shoulder should be flexible to allow for adequate external rotation necessary to throw at high speeds. Deceleration is the phase of pitching most associated with injury. Specific exercises to develop the muscles responsible for deceleration (mainly the rotator cuff and scapula muscles) are crucial.

Plyometric exercises for the shoulder and upper body are useful due to the explosive nature of the pitching motion. Exercises for the rhomboids, lats, pectorals and shoulder area are necessary to throw at high speeds.

Bat Speed Training
Swinging the bat is a skill that is unique to baseball. Players need good lower body and core strength to develop power in the swing. These muscles need to be trained rotationally in a high-velocity, explosive manner.

Strong hip and leg muscles will initiate the swing, the core area then sequentially transfers the rotational speed to the torso and the arms to complete the swing. The efficient transfer of force from the lower body to the upper body, known as the kinetic chain principle, requires that there be muscular balance for optimal sequential transfer of forces.

Strong lats, triceps and forearms will help to continue bat acceleration through ball contact. Squats, bench presses, pull ups, forearm and triceps exercises will develop the potential for power. Bat Speed Training with heavy and light bats within a prescribed range will transfer that potential to the actual sports skill in a specific manner.

Ball Velocity Training
Throwing a baseball with high velocity is an explosive, full-body movement that requires total body development. Strong leg, hip and core muscles are crucial to transfer power from the ground, through the lower body to the torso and eventually to the arm and hand to provide a fast, whip-like release of the ball. The efficient transfer of force through the proper sequencing of body parts through the legs, hips, trunk, and upper limb to the ball is crucial.

In addition to strength training, a weighted ball program or medicine ball throwing progression can be utilized to improve velocity. This will improve the ability to generate power in the throwing muscles. The combination of a heavy load to build power and a light load to build arm speed, thrown in a prescribed manner, has been shown to improve throwing velocity safely.

The athlete should train for proper trunk rotation during arm cocking as well as strength and flexibility in order to generate angular velocity within the trunk for maximum ball velocity. Training should involve trunk rotational exercises to develop the obliques so that maximum arm speed can be generated.

Biomechanical Analysis
We use video analysis of the pitching and hitting mechanics of each player for technique analysis, fault correction and feedback, as well as for assessing progress at a later stage of the program

Visual Skills Training
We also incorporate visual skills training for batters since the ability to accurately track the baseball and predict where it’s going to be is crucial to a hitter. Without this unique skill, all your other training can be rendered useless. Many of the exercises are easy to perform and do not require expensive equipment.

Mental and Emotional Skills Training
We introduce mental and emotional skills training to help players deal with both success and failure, as well as to deal with game pressure. Baseball is unique in that being successful three times out of ten gets you to the Hall of Fame. Players have to deal with consistent failure and still remain confident.

The following are the basics for a Baseball / Softball Conditioning Workout:

Cardiovascular Training: Sprints and interval training, not long distance running
Stretching: Important for increased flexibility and injury prevention.
Strength Training: Important for increased maximum strength. Begin with bodyweight exercises and progress to weights.
Medicine Ball Exercises: Important for rapid powerful upper body movements to develop increased explosiveness and rotational forces.
Plyometrics: Used in conjunction with strength development in an integrated program to improve the link between the strength developed in the weight room and the ability to develop explosive power, speed and agility.
Speed, Agility and Quickness Training: When it comes to baseball, speed and agility are important on both sides of the field. Speed is important in the field where hit balls must be defended. On offense, speed puts pressure on the other team and distracts the pitcher and catcher; this help the hitter get better pitches to hit. The development of speed and agility is as vital as the development of batting power and throwing arm stability.

When you translate the strength developed in the weight room with the speed developed during the plyometric training and then add proper batting and pitching mechanics, you will have a stronger, more powerful, more productive player.

All training needs to be integrated with sports skill training. You cannot do either area in isolation without leaving the player's development lacking. Trainers need to work closely with the team coach and medical staff to ensure a balanced, effective training program. Nutrition and diet and various recovery methods should be discussed with appropriate professionals in those fields.
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Charles Slavik is the President of the Eagle Baseball Club in South Elgin, Illinois. Coach Slavik has helped his players' maximize their athletic performance and avoid injuries by combining his 16 years of experience as a youth baseball & softball coach with his advanced and practical knowledge of the strength and conditioning field. Charles is a Certified Personal Trainer by the National Strength and Conditioning Association and a member of the American Baseball Coaches Association.

Using Test Protocols for Evaluation of Players

One of the things that has always fascinated me about baseball, and sports in general, is how players get better. What is it about the superstars that elevates them above the average players? What are the physical attributes, the mental and emotional requirements? In baseball, what are the visual skills that are necessary for success at the highest levels? When I was a player, the emphasis was on using this information to become a better player. When I became a coach, the emphasis changed to learning and developing the most effective methods to allow upcoming players to succeed.

Along the way, I saw examples in football, beginning with Gil Brandt of the Dallas Cowboys, using test protocols to more effectively identify talented college players for his team to draft. It was fascinating to see him use these physical tests, as well as mental and emotional tests, like the Wonderlich test, to identify the players with the highest chances of success, more efficiently than his competitors.

It seemed like a no-brainer intuitively, but in most sports, the coaches and administrators still use hunches and intuition and gut instinct to make these important personnel decisions. There was a great reluctance to use modern tools and knowledge from other fields to aid in the decisions. Baseball men feel that what was done 50-100 years ago to judge and draft players works just fine, thank you very much.

My gut instincts and intuition have always led me to believe that the things that have worked in other sports to improve scouting, talent identification and player development would also work in baseball.

The player draft in all sports that have one is a prime determinant of which teams will be successful in the future and which ones will fail, so the stakes are high. In spite of drafting lower than most of his competitors, a result f the Cowboys success, Brandt’s scouting department consistently identified and drafted better players in the later rounds of the drafts than some teams did in the first and second rounds. Clearly, he was doing things better and more efficiently than other teams in terms of scouting and talent identification.

As front office and scouting personnel left the Cowboys for other team’s years later, the rest of the NFL learned that Brandt was a proponent of using certain physical tests and measurements to compare players at similar positions. For lineman, he wanted large strong men, the larger and stronger the better. So rather than simply compare how well a player performed he would find out how many times the players he was interested in could bench press 225 lbs, for positions where speed was a large component of success or failure, he measured them in the 40 yard dash and so on. He felt that simply judging collegiate players by how they performed in a limited number of games, many times against inferior competition, was inefficient. Most of these test and procedures he developed have since shown to be effective at a statistically significant level. There is a strong correlation between the ranking of players in the battery of tests and future success in the NFL.

The crux of Brandt’s theory is if you give your coaches the players with the best athletic skill sets to succeed, then it’s the coaching staff’s job to teach them the specific sports skills to succeed at that level. That’s what coaches are paid to do.

Most sports teams are copycats, when one team is successful using a certain method or procedure, others begin to copy in droves in hope that the success would follow. The cost of failure in drafting unproductive and players in sorts is too high both economically, in terms of the amount of bonuses paid to high draft picks. Today, almost every team in the NFL participates in the NFL combine, however baseball has stuck with its tradition based scouting methods.

It’s my opinion and that of other coaches and trainers that I work with that the time has come for baseball to start using this type of approach to evaluate the players it chooses. Many top draft picks receive million dollar plus bonuses. With that financial windfall and the notoriety of being a high draft pick, comes a lot pressure. Many players who have the requisite physical skills wash out because they are not mentally tough enough to handle failure. Some don’t have a strong enough work ethic and succeeded at lower levels on the basis of their superior physical gifts. There are tests that other sports have used to identify these traits in athletes.

Once you have the battery of tests that correctly identify the physical, mental and emotional qualities you need in an athlete, you should be able to use that tool to more efficiently identify which players would make your team in a tryout setting or which players to draft in the professional setting. In both cases, the problem facing teams and coaches is there are simply too many players to evaluate in a limited amount of time. The inefficiency is that the scouting department is using poorly defined or subjective parameters to identify talent. In baseball, many scouts still used the old hand-me-down term “he has the good face” to describe a prospect they like and they believe has a high probability for future success. The problem being fifty different scouts are likely to give you fifty different opinions as to what the term means. It’s too subjective and vague. The tests bring a level of accuracy and precision that baseball has never had before.

Scouts and baseball men are very guarded about their traditions and procedures. It’s safer for them to fail “going by the book” than to fail doing something outside the box. That gets you fired. It will take an organization with guts to change the culture in their scouting and player development department to make the change. Or maybe we simply need a man with the courage and conviction of Gil Brandt. So far, I have used the same methodology at every level through high school baseball with excellent results. I would like to see it eventually make its way to the professional level. It would be simply revolutionary.