Pro Day Prep: Part 1

My prep for professional tryouts in January.

As I said in the last newsletter, my life over the next 6 weeks is in preparation for my pro day tryout in front of all 30 MLB teams. As any off season goes, me and all of my colleagues will be bidding to win jobs playing for whoever of the 30 teams views them to be worthy of a place on their major or minor league rosters.

This goes for players of all ages, but the most important thing that you can have going into an off-season idea is a plan. 

A plan doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, it doesn't have to be fully laid out on the day of off-seasons beginning, but you do need to have a goal and a general plan to get there before your serious training begins.

Without a plan, you can find yourself working in the wrong directions, on the wrong things and looking in the wrong areas for guidance. With clear goals and a well put together plan you can make the most out of your off-season and get yourself to improve as much as possible. 

When I was released from the Mariners, the main reason was my fastball velocity. As a relief pitcher who has formerly thrown in the mid to upper 90’s, my fastball was averaging around 91 miles per hour this past season. 

A lot of people hear this and have all sorts of confusion regarding 91 miles per hour not being good, but everything is “good” or “bad” within the context of that player's other capabilities and their career.

As for me, I am a 26 year old reliever with mediocre command. 26 years old is getting up there for a minor league baseball player, and my command is “good enough” to do the job, but nothing exceptional (which it would need to be to be a reliever throwing 91, at any age). And 91 is below average for the major leagues in regard to fastball velocity, and if you look into the average fastball velocity for relief pitchers, it's even further below average. 

My slider is exceptional, grading out at well above Major League average by almost every scale you could grade it on. This tool kept me around longer than I would have if I didn't have a really solid slider, but the bread and butter of any pitcher is their fastball and nowadays the main separator for relievers is velocity. 

So going into my first off season as a Minor League Free Agent, it was very clear what I needed to do and thankfully I was clopped in July and got a head start. I needed to throw harder, and I needed to throw harder fast. 

So it made my goal for the off season pretty clear, but now I had to put together a way to make that happen. 

When looking at a goal like this, it was on me to figure out what actions I could take to improve my chances of throwing harder come the new season. When looking at pitching velocity, there are three major components I wanted to focus on while prepping for pro day. 

Throwing ability, Overall Strength and Mobility, & Arm Health. 

Or as I commonly refer to them as: Skill, Body & Health.

Skill:

No matter what you want to believe about training, the purpose of it is in fact to be good at the thing you are training to do. If you are the best athlete you've ever been physically and explosively, but your actual throwing ability is in a bad place then it doesn't matter.

If that's you… you're not alone, that's actually exactly where i have been the last year and a half. I was stronger than I have ever been, super mobile and was as explosive as I had ever been. 

Yet, I sucked. 

I was grunting fastballs at 90 miles per hour and was a shell of who I’d been in the past. Its because other things got in the way, and I lost where I was as a thrower. While i had raised my ceiling with improving physical traits, I didn't actually get to reap the rewards because I had gotten away from what made me good at throwing which was: being good at throwing. 

It seems sarcastic, but it's a really important point. The only way to be better at throwing is to get better at throwing. The old saying goes “you cant dead lift a baseball”, and boy is it true. 

And while I love dead lifts, they're wonderful for athletes: if you suck at throwing but dead lift 600 pounds….

You're just a strong dude who sucks at baseball.

I'm not perfect, and I certainly make mistakes… but I don't think anyone is reading this to find out how to become a strong person who sucks at baseball. 

So when I got fired, and had to go back to the drawing board I needed a change of direction.

I decided to focus my efforts more on throwing capabilities and things of that nature and let my strength training be a close second priority. It is always important to keep hammering away on your strength training, as it's super important to hammer down on building your metaphorical engine. 

Finally I figured out the throwing thing, and saw great improvement on that front. In addition to this, my strength and explosiveness improvements finally paid off, as I was able to really unlock all of my abilities by being actually good at the throw. 

It was frustrating, as it felt like I was consistently running into a wall with my training for a year straight trying to get better. But the payoff was great, and finally figuring it out made it all worth it.

But a gradual improvement over a year would be much more enjoyable than a month of wild personal records after personal records. 

BODY:

While I just spent an entire section working on why skill is more important than Body, it's not quite that simple. The body allows the skill to be learned and completed in the first place, and if you do not have the strength or stability to compete at the highest level…. You can try all day to be good enough but your body will never let you.

Or worse, you will achieve what you want and your body will break down immediately. 

It is paramount to take care of your body, and thankfully I play a sport and a position where the stresses you sustain on a daily basis are pretty consistent and controllable. The stresses of throwing a baseball are similar from pitch to pitch, where a running back can prepare their body to be as durable as humanly possible, but if they catch a helmet to the knee there isn't much they can do to prevent the injury that is coming their way.

On a separate front, not only do you need to be strong and mobile to avoid injury, but it is extremely possible that they do not have the capability to achieve the ideal mechanics they want and need to perform at the highest level.

They might be physically unable to do these things because they lack the strength and mobility to move into the positions required of them in the throwing delivery. 

In addition to these facets of the body work required of you to perform at your best, the more simplistic answer is that the stronger and more mobile you are the more force you are able to apply to the ball when you throw it. 

More mobility allows you to apply force to the ball across a larger range of motion, and stronger muscles allow you to apply more force to the ball over said longer range of motion. 

It sounds simple, but overlooking these facets is something a lot of professional athletes do and it puts them behind the curve. Plenty of professional athletes don't take their corrective movements or their strength training as seriously as they should.

Health

This one sounds like a no-brainer, but I think that everyone can attest to the idea that health is easy to take for granted until its gone. 

When I was first training for velocity, I gained about 9 miles per hour in less than 2 years. Not the easy miles per hour that come in the 70s, but the hard fought ones that come from 88 to 97. These were extremely stressful miles per hour that totally torched my arm and left me unprepared to deal with the newfound stresses.

I was doing some mobility work and some strength work, although it wasn't nearly enough for the stress I was putting my body under. I didn't prepare myself to be an upper 90s thrower, and it showed when my arm fell apart a little less than a year after gaining all the velocity. 

Everyone knows that arm injuries are common in pitchers, but less pay attention to the fact that arm pain and discomfort can take away from the velocity gains you can make as a pitcher. 

If your arm doesn't feel good, you're not gonna be throwing the way you want to. And you certainly aren't going to be throwing with as much intent and aggression as you need to be throwing at your hardest.

This newsletter is free, and it always will be.

BUT

If you become a paid sub….

You automatically opt in to our personal mentorship and guidance program

Where you and your athletes receive direct 1 on 1 guidance from me, a professional pitcher with experience as high as AAA.

and more importantly, my network of friends and family that coach professionally, and at they college level.

From the highest levels of professional baseball to the lowest levels of the amateur and collegiate game.

Every possible level you need an answer on, we find for you.

And more applicably:

Someone who struggled at a young age

Death with scholarships being taken away and forced to transfer.

Things that all of you deal with.

I am always here to help.

John Creel

Professional Baseball Player

TRS Founder.