Pro Day Prep: Part 2

The Second installment.

Now that we have covered the base level on what I take into consideration for my throwing training, it is time to get a little deeper into the why and when on how things work. 

I had a clear goal for the offseason: throw as hard as I can. I was released by the Mariners because I simply did not throw hard enough and fixing that gives me the highest chance of getting back into pro ball and ascending up the ranks of minor league baseball. 

So what was my lowest hanging fruit for throwing harder?

Last offseason I hammered strength training, and it didn’t quite boost the velocity the way we thought it would, so something had to be in the way. 

Next place we looked was: what did my throwing mechanics look like when I threw really hard? What training did I do to elicit these mechanics and bring about these changes?

What we found was something that I believe almost every parent of a pitcher or thrower of any kind can benefit from paying attention to and learning as it's something that plagues almost every single thrower who struggles with velocity, and it stems from one of the basic principles that applies to the throw in many other throwing sports such as javelin or other athletics.

The biggest leak in power/velocity stemmed from where my torso (upper body) was when my front foot hit the ground in my pitching delivery. Hang with me for a second, because this next point is incredibly important and kind of strays from the point of view that most people follow, but its not as contradictory as some seem to believe. 

“Throwing” is what happens after footplant, you aren't able to apply force into the ball and propel it forward efficiently (aka good) before the front foot boots the ground and gives your body something to push up against and leverage yourself forward. The throw is the contraction and impulse your body sends into the ball, all of which occurs after the front foot hits the ground. 

This is why there are so many ways to pitch a baseball efficiently, because what most people see in the throw is what happens before footplant, not after. Your leg kick, arm action, stride length and everything else has a function of strictly getting yourself into the best possible position at footplant (aka setting up the throw). 

Not to say that what you do before footplant doesn't matter, it very much does. But once I started viewing the throw as what happens after footplant and my “mechanics” as how I set up the throw, things started to really take off from a velocity standpoint. 

This mindset and intentionality in my training led me to make a massive shift away from the standard training method of practicing my pitching in the form of throwing formal bullpens to a catcher.

I took almost 2 months off from throwing a baseball entirely and I made massive velocity gains. 

Yep, I did not touch a baseball for 2 months.

Instead I did something else.

I threw nothing but rubber weighted balls into a net that is 10 feet away and over the 2 month span I improved almost every drill across the board by four miles per hour.

The same drill that usually mirrors mound velocity with a baseball went from 95 to 99 and all my other drills followed suit. 

But why?

As a professional pitcher, my goal when I get on the mound isn't to always throw the ball as hard as I possibly can, in fact it's usually not always on my mind even though it probably should be. Usually I have a few other tasks at hand such as: throw strikes, make the ball move a certain way and to manipulate the spin properly to create ideal pitch shapes. These tasks are not mutually exclusive with throwing the baseball hard, but generally do not promote good mechanical patterns for both. 

So why did I throw fake baseballs into a net?

Because when you take away every aspect of throwing the ball except velocity, you allow yourself to truly commit to changes. 

I had thrown off a mound with a baseball to a catcher no less than 3-4x a week for over a year when I chose to take this path, and it was evident that I was getting nothing from bullpens because of this. 

After you do the exact same task for as long as I was doing, it becomes almost impossible to make significant changes because the body becomes so ingrained in its movement patterns that changing them is so difficult. 

View mechanics as a river flowing through a river bed, the longer the river flows through the area the more and more sediment gets washed away and the more embedded said river gets in its ways.

Mechanics get ingrained, just like the river. And it was time to switch things up if I wanted to get better. 

Now how does this apply to you? Well it's quite simple: do different types of throwing other than strictly baseball off a mound to a catcher that is sitting behind a plate. 

99% of parents of youth pitchers won't commit to a few months of throwing training away from the mound, something that could catapult their athletes careers forward and allow them to improve dramatically. 

Do you think that if your son doesn't touch a baseball until after the new year that he will suddenly forget how to pitch? 

*even when they are going to be doing incredibly similar drills off of a mound during that timespan?*

I have a story of a pitcher not touching a baseball for the entire offseason, literally showing up to MLB spring training without playing catch or touching any form of weighted ball for an entire offseason. 

Said pitcher is currently on a contract for over $200 million and had yet another Cy Young candidate quality season. 

Your athletes are way better than you think they are. Something that is funny to me to see is that most parents/coaches believe in their players less than other parents/coaches believe in their kids.

Back to the training.

Taking away the distractions of other tasks and allowing yourself to focus on just ripping and getting to the right spots in the delivery can make all the difference, as it did for me. 

It allowed me to get into a completely different position at footplant and, in turn, shot my velocity up with these newfound mechanical improvements.

And it took about 2 days of throwing a baseball again for me to feel comfortable and throwing strikes. This is normal, and pretty much the same things a lot of my trainers told me would happen when I made this switch. 

The offseason is a gift and your best chance to make a change in your career/talent level, take the necessary steps to get the most out of it. 

Being conservative in your athletes training at young ages is a huge misstep and leaves a lot of gains on the table that could set themselves up for later in life. There's only so much time that humans have as children to develop the quick twitch and explosive skill sets that transfer to high level play. 

While I went super anti sport specific in some ways, I got exceptionally more specific in other ways. 

I went from picking 4-5 drills every day out of a pool of 8-10 drills to just hammering down the same 3 drills every single day. This helped me realize something about what drills really mean and what their purpose is: to improve the throw.

It sounds simple, but how many times do you pick up a few extra drills and you aren't really sure how they transfer to the throw and what their specific purpose is? Probably more than you should, I know that I certainly did. 

Taking out a few drills and hammering home the drills that really enforced the basics of a high quality throw allowed me to really propel my skill forward as a thrower. Unfortunately, there aren't that many ways to throw really hard. Not only that, but the harder you throw, the less ways there are to reach that level and beyond, which is pretty much the same thing for any high level achievement in life, throwing is no different. 

My thesis as a thrower and a coach stems from the idea that about 99% of throwers an athletes need to work on the very basics of throwing, and I'll say it till I am blue in the face but “staying back” and “staying closed” are pretty much the two major building blocks of the throw that high level athletes build upon. 

If you are wide open at front footplant, meaning that your glove arm and torso are already rotated through, you aren't going to be able to apply force to the baseball for as long as you would if you stayed closed. (Hint, the longer you apply force to the baseball the better. Velocity = force applied to baseball)

If your torso and shoulders are angled toward the ground in front of you and not the direction in which you want to throw the baseball, you aren't going to be able to apply force to the baseball for as long as you would if you stayed level with your target and didn't dump forward.

I generally hate coaches that make it as cut and dry as I am, because 99% of the time it's more complicated than what they're saying. But when you’re talking about two major pillars of the throwing delivery, it’s pretty much that simple.

Obviously there is more to it than just what I said, but it's sort of like trying to take algebra 2 before you take algebra 1. You wouldn't try and walk before you ran, so why would you try and work on absurd minutia before you hammered down the basics? It's like telling your buddy he needs to learn how to putt when he can't make it to the green before taking 3 mulligans and 2 drops. (Golf analogies forever).

If your kid is trying to learn throwing, it's better for them to try and take a break from the same exact thing they have likely been doing nonstop since March. Give them a chance to get better and don't worry about if they lose control or command for a very short period of time, there are no games of value being played in December and January, and if there are you probably shouldn't be playing them anyway.

Finalizing prep:

As we inch closer to the big day, there is a need to become more polished and fine tuned in order to look professional and compete for a job. During this time it's important to start blending towards the mound and making training more game-like once again. As you take a few months off from throwing bullpens and to a catcher, there will certainly be a bit of rust but it gets knocked off way faster than you think. 

My first time throwing to another person at all was quite brutal, in fact I don't think I hit my partner in the chest more than about 15% of the time. It was quite the day of catch play, but the very next time I played catch it felt like I never lost a step. 

The point being: do not be scared to take time away from throwing baseballs. ESPECIALLY if you are still training in some way shape or form, it will all come back way faster than you think. It is almost never that bad, and my first time throwing off the mound I was able to fill the zone up with strikes on my fastball. 

We are currently 30 days away from ProDay as I write this, and my plan is still having almost half of my high effort days not being thrown to a catcher, but rather still hammering away at my movement quality and mechanical efficiency. I throw one bullpen on Tuesdays at about 85-90% effort which is very game like outside of the intensity, and on Fridays we do a 100% effort velocity focused day into a net, with maybe a few throws to a catcher at the end just to help blend it all together. 

The next few weeks will be more of the same, with a slight progression towards more and more game-like situations and training as we focus on being more and more fine tuned and refined for ProDay. 

This week will be roughly 40% of total mound throws to a catcher.

The next week will be roughly 55-60% of mound throws to a catcher.

Following week probably 75% of mound throws will be to a catcher.

I don't believe I will ever get to more than 75-80% of mound throws being made to a catcher, as even during the season it is incredibly important to try and hammer down mechanics. The season is long and grueling, and lots of people don't really recognize how much your body and mechanics can break down. I see tons of pitchers every year having their velocity drop and they don't know why. Playing six days a week for almost 7 months in a row is traumatic to the body, and being able to handle the workload is one of the most pivotal points of a pitchers season. So many overwork or underwork during the year, leaving them to be sore and tired when they have to compete and forcing them to try and compete against the best in the world at 85% of their best. 

Not only do they not feel their best, but these sore spots can inhibit performance. If you lose just a little bit of mobility in 3-4 different places in your body, your pitching delivery can be dramatically impacted, and you can in turn lose 1-2 ticks on the radar gun, even more in some instances. 

One person in particular who I played with this year went from 95-97 to 91-92 in a few weeks just from his body being beat up and not knowing how to deal with it. He is an unbelievable talent but became an incredibly mediocre pitcher for about three weeks before getting it together and finishing strong. 

The gap from great to “bleh” is so small that you cannot afford to give away anything in pro athletics, you must keep everything hammered down or you risk a serious slippage in performance. 

Tangent over.

Point is, even in season it is important to take a certain portion of your mound throws and have them directed at something other than pure command and in game effectiveness. 

80% is more than enough to be sharp, and the vast majority of your inability to be sharp will probably stem from the mental game and performance based anxiety instead of actual physical mechanical breakdowns on the field. 

FINAL POINT

For ProDay, you need 15-20 good pitches max. My last pro day I threw the lowest amount of pitches of any pitcher and I believe my performance was probably the best relative to skill level. (Meaning: there were better players than me at the pro day, but I believe I maximized my performance the most.) This is primarily in fact to the fatigue that comes in after 20 max effort throws. 

If you are trying to force more than 20 pitches in a pro day session, you are likely trying to make up ground from your first 15 not being very good. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to make up for a bad 15 pitch start, not to say you can't have a few bad here or there, but 15 pitches is a lot of pitches.

I believe I threw about 7-8 fastballs, worked up to a max fastball velocity before showing 3-4 of each of my offspeed. Then I finished with 3ish more fastballs, and cut it immediately once I realized I wasn't going to peak in velocity again. 

I worked up to 95 miles per hour in the beginning, and at the end I finished right around 93. This next piece of advice is probably the most important thing I will ever tell someone about to throw in a pro day or tryout: It is more important to pack it in and leave them remembering the 95 mph heaters before you get tired and throw one 91-92 and leave the last memory being exceptionally less impressive than the beginning. 

Get in and get out, keep it quick. 

This is hard to do mentally, as we almost always want to end on a perfect note, but if you don't cut it you run the risk of showing a lower floor than you already have.

Even though I talk about how great I did, I too didn't cut my bullpen quick enough. My last fastball brought my average fastball velocity from 94.0 to 93.9, which while that isn't a big difference in reality it's a crushing difference in my heart. 

I hope this helped. Don't be scared to do something unorthodox in order to improve, it might just be the thing you need to do the most. It is important to remember that it is really hard to actually improve more than your competition if you are doing the exact same training as them. If everyone does the same training, the ones with the best genetics will win out and most of us aren't gifted enough to want that as the outcome. 

Next week's newsletter will continue to hammer down on velocity training, and what you can do to help it. I'll probably talk more about what I have talked about today in regards to early torso rotation. I might even touch on the incurable throwing disease that is ETLB (early torso late block), and give you a few specific drills to hammer this down that are easy to do and you can do every single day without anything more than a baseball (or **literally** anything you can throw).

Best of luck,

John Creel