Putting it all Together

Since the Fort Myers showcase in early February, it seems like every column I’ve written over the past six to eight weeks has documented, to some degree, my search for better mechanics and the full utilization of my body—not just my arm—when I pitch.

I apologize for the redundancy; if you’re sick of reading about hip extension, back leg drive and stride length, just imagine how I feel writing about it ad nauseum, while simultaneously trying to incorporate a bevy of training tips and fixes into my delivery each time I throw. At times, I feel like Ponce de Leon searching for the Fountain of Youth and, much like Ponce, I worry that I’ll never get there.

However, that’s what makes this dream so fascinating: the process. If it was easy to obtain mechanical mastery of my delivery and throw eighty-eight miles an hour by just getting out of bed in the morning, then this blog would have nothing to do with long bus rides. Instead, it would probably be called Flying High on My G6 as my personal assistant typed out my plan to spend my brand new $60 million contract while flying at 35,000 feet on my private jet drinking Cristal with P Diddy.

I’ve never had to think so much about my delivery before. I always used to just kind of throw. I cared about my craft, but never really threw myself into bettering my mechanics as I have this offseason. Now, more than ever, I realize that true pitching starts and ends with your mechanics. I can be strong as an ox and in fantastic physical shape, but if I can’t harness that strength into each pitch, then it’s all for naught.

At my throwing session on Sunday night, there was a guy with a myriad of professional experience watching my bullpen (I really have lucked out with getting the opportunity to throw in front of talented pitchers willing to help me over the past few weeks).

The first thing he said to me was that I was throwing with just my arm. Obviously, my efforts to derive more power from my hips and legs weren’t working as well as I thought (though my offspeed stuff was still benefiting from my desire to lengthen my stride). He spent some time discussing proper mechanics with me, but he also showed me what he was talking about.

I’m not going to get into the mundane details of what we discussed, but the big difference was the aural, visual and tactile cues he used to get his message across. I ‘got’ what he was saying. It made sense to me. And after some practice, I could feel the difference when I hit the correct mechanical checkpoints and when I didn’t.

The ball just felt different coming out of my hand. It had a little extra pop, even though it seemed like I wasn’t throwing as hard when I typically reached back for a little something extra. I have to learn to throw with my arm last and let my body do the lion’s share of the work.

There are a lot of moving parts to a pitching delivery and there were some movements that I understood better than others, but I feel like I’m closing in on that elusive moment when everything just clicks. I just need to practice. And I’ve realized that I don’t need epic, 300 foot long toss sessions to do so. It’s not a question of arm strength; it’s a question of ingraining the proper delivery into my muscle memory.

Therefore, I’m going to start heading to a local softball field on my own a couple of days a week and throw bag after bag of balls into the fence while practicing my mechanics. I can no longer get to the point I need to be by throwing twice a week off a mound. I need more consistent throwing time. I don’t have the natural talent to throw at the velocity I need, so I’m going to have to get there by sheer volume of reps.

If this quest was a Rocky movie, I would be firmly entrenched in the montage portion of the film right now, about halfway through the beautiful strains of Gonna Fly Now. I know what I need to do to defeat my opponent, now I’m starting to put it together, slowly but surely. Soon, I’ll be climbing a 50,000 foot mountain in Russia just before I fight Ivan Drago in Moscow on Christmas Day to try to single-handedly stop the Cold War. 

Schedule Update

I’ve been trying to plan out my spring travel schedule over the past week to figure what open tryouts I wanted to hit and where until the independent league seasons kick off in May.

There’s been both good and bad news in my contacting teams for more information about their open tryouts. The good news is that I’ll be saving a ton of money on gas. The bad news is that every tryout I was thinking of attending in the next few weeks has pitchers solely throwing bullpens as a means for talent evaluators to, uh, evaluate the talent.

As I’ve stated before, throwing a twenty pitch bullpen is not going to endear me to any scouts as I don’t possess a fastball that will light up a radar gun. Obviously, I’m biased, but if I’m truly looking to measure a pitcher’s worth, I want to see how he reacts in game situations against live hitters and not make a knee-jerk reaction on a guy depending on how hard he throws.

Now, most of the open tryouts are just a filter process for an invite to an independent league team’s spring training, so I’m not saying that teams will sign a guy based solely on his fastball velocity. However, teams will offer a spring training invite to a guy who can hit 89 with no semblance of control, while ignore a guy in the low 80s with control and good breaking stuff.

It’s unfortunate, but it’s the nature of the beast these days. What I really need is a time machine to go back to the 1940s, when the idea of a radar gun to document pitch speed was as fanciful a notion of sending a man to the moon. Then I could just step on the mound and if I could get hitters out, I could get signed; velocity be damned.

Alas, I can’t get my flux capacitor to work, so it appears I’m stuck in 2011 trying to prove myself amidst a sea of radar guns.

Even though I’d love the opportunity to throw in front of as many teams as possible, I need to be smart about the tryout process and not just throw a bunch of tacks against the wall and hope something will stick. No, I need to pick an open tryout that will give me the best chance to showcase my skills in a forum best suited to my abilities. And that is pitching against independent league calibre batters in real game situations with scouts in attendance.

That being said, I am eschewing single team open tryouts and focusing all of my attention on a two day showcase in Brockton, Massachussetts on April 30 and May 1. It will be much the same format as the Fort Myers showcase and teams from the following leagues will be in attendance: Can-Am League, American Association and Frontier League.

Now that the weather has warmed up considerably and the snow has hopefully left for another year, I want to start long toss sessions at least once a week. A fellow pitcher and I are hoping to start throwing outside regularly starting next week.

My indoor throwing session on Thursdays has been switched to Wednesdays at a different facility and I’m also throwing indoors every Sunday night. Truthfully, I’m going a little stir crazy throwing inside all of the time, so I can’t wait until outdoor workouts start so I can throw off a real mound again. February in Fort Myers seems so long ago.

An Alternate Plan?

Over the weekend, I threw a live bullpen session with a team from the Intercounty League, which is a semi-professional baseball association with teams in eight cities throughout Southwestern Ontario.

The league has been around for over eighty years and, in its current incarnation, is the destination of choice for a plethora of top notch collegiate baseball talent looking to play summer ball and players with former professional experience in independent leagues and minor league teams affiliated with Major League Baseball.

After talking to some of my contacts and doing some research on my own, I’ve also found that scouts from professional leagues in the United States regularly attend Intercounty League games throughout the summer. Sure, they are primarily looking for eighteen or nineteen year old Big Men on their respective Campuses and not twenty-five year old lefties making their first foray into pro ball (semi or otherwise).

However, that doesn’t mean that if I played in the league and was able to shut hitters down, I would be ignored because of my age and lack of baseball pedigree. Conversely, I believe that if I did end up playing Intercounty this summer and produced an impressive stat line, in a league that is well-known and respected among the various independent baseball leagues, there is a greater chance of garnering a more serious look from such teams rather than just showing up unheralded to an open tryout.

As I’ve mentioned before, all I need is a chance. You give me the opportunity to step on the mound and I will produce. I have the confidence to get hitters out with my stuff.

As professional poker players say, all you need is a chip and a chair to win a poker tournament. If I can get on a mound versus batters with professional experience, I know, as I proved in the Fort Myers Showcase, that my stuff is good enough to succeed. I just need the opportunity to get on a mound and throw against the most talented hitters I can find. While I may not end up with the necessary velocity on my fastball—not for a lack of trying—a radar gun is not the sole evaluator for pitching success. I want a chance to prove that.

Therefore, I think playing Intercounty this summer would be a good step for my baseball career. That in no way means that I’m giving up on my independent league dream down in the US. I still plan on attending tryouts this spring that will allow me the opportunity to throw in live game situations and not just a twenty pitch bullpen.

Nor does it mean I have a guaranteed spot on an Intercounty roster. I still have to prove myself worthy to the teams willing to give me a look and I plan on doing that once outdoor workouts commence.

Until that point, I will just continue to keep working on my mechanics and strive to be the best pitcher I can this summer no matter where I end up playing.

An Eye Opener

Through a serendipitous sequence of events—I’m not going to bore you with all of the gory details—I was able to finagle myself an invitation to throw a bullpen session at a top notch indoor facility last Thursday with two guys who have a myriad of professional baseball experience. Both of them played A ball last year and this was their last session in Canada before heading down to minor league spring training.

I was there to soak up as much knowledge as I could, receive some advice on playing professional baseball and, hopefully, learn the key that unlocks the door to the wonderful world of greater pitch velocity.

At times, I felt like the old Sesame Street song: “One of these things is not like the others.” These guys threw HARD and were unflinchingly accurate. And this was from the first moment of warm-ups.

I pride myself on preparing my body physically to withstand the rigours of pitching day in and day out during the spring and summer. I spend hours in the gym lifting heavy weights to get my body as strong as possible. I don’t want anyone to outwork me in the gym.

However, in terms of warming up my arm to throw on the mound, I just kind of throw. I don’t really attack the process with the same fervour as I do lifting in the gym. I’ve just never really thought to do otherwise. Throughout my baseball career, all of the teams I’ve been on have used the 10-15 minutes of throwing during warm-ups to basically loosen your arm and socialize. That would be followed by a few long toss throws and then it was time to buckle down and hit the mound.

These guys were completely different. Right from the beginning, each and every throw had a purpose. They tried to throw the ball THROUGH each other, all while hitting their mechanical checkpoints with startling efficiency. At times, I would lollipop a ball to my partner or just solely use my arm to throw and I was quickly admonished.  

They told me that warm-ups were the time to build your arm strength by keeping the ball as low to the ground as possible (think waist height), use your entire body by invoking a short crow hop step, and throwing through your target. This continued even as we stretched our arms out to north of 150 feet (I said it was an impressive facility).

We probably spent at least ten minutes of throwing really hard back and forth to each other from wall to wall in the gym. Then and only then was it time to go the mound. They gave me a few mechanical tweaks to work on—analogous to my desire to lengthen my stride and derive more power from my lower half—while I watched them go through a bullpen session.

The thing that struck me the most about watching professionals pitch up close is their attention to detail and ability to replicate consistent mechanics. I’ve talked ad nauseum on here about lengthening my stride each time I deliver the ball and the difficulties I have in achieving that consistency.

Their front foots landed in the exact same spot on every pitch. Not sometimes, once in awhile or more often that not, but EVERY SINGLE TIME. It was incredibly impressive to witness. That’s the type of consistency I strive for and what I need to compete at higher levels of the game.

When my control is an issue, I fall off the mound sideways instead of driving towards the catcher and finishing my delivery square to the plate. Also, when I miss the strike zone I usually miss high which means that I’m not releasing the ball on a proper plane to throw with good velocity in the zone. I need to think about ‘scraping the dirt’ with my pitching hand rather than have my delivery resemble an unfinished symphony (like Roy McAvoy’s golf swing).

Luckily, I was able to throw three times last week and plan on throwing twice more this week, so I am eager to work on the changes in my delivery so I use every part of my body, instead of just my arm, to propel the ball to the plate.

It's all in the Hips

While trying to decipher the complexities and various explanations for increasing stride length and finding the elusive ‘back leg drive’, I suddenly came to the realization that everything I need to know about maximizing the efficacy of my delivery can be found in the immortal words of Chubbs from Happy Gilmore:

“It’s all in the hips.”

Much like Happy Gilmore needed to use his hips in order to gain some semblance of a putting stroke and snatch the vaunted yellow jacket away from Shooter McGavin’s grasp, I needed to understand that powerful hip extension is the key to getting back leg drive, lengthening my stride and increasing my velocity.

Elongating my stride just for the hell of it is completely useless. I could float towards the plate with a dainty hop and step like I was channelling my inner Natalie Portman in Black Swan and it wouldn’t make a difference whatsoever in my velocity.

Without a violent extension of my left hip, everything else in my delivery becomes an afterthought and I’m forced to rely solely on the amount of arm speed I can generate for pitch velocity. It’s a chicken or the egg type argument. The hip extension catalyzes the increase in stride length; not the other way around.

Two things, besides Chubbs’ words ringing in my ears, helped me to fully understand the mechanics of a powerful pitching motion: analyzing video of top MLB pitchers’ deliveries like I was poring over the Zapruder film and my own knowledge of exercise physiology and biomechanics.

Without getting into too much nerdy detail, to properly lift large loads from the ground to an overhead position one must execute a powerful extension of the hips to move the weight skyward. It takes a tremendous amount of speed and power—not to mention coordination—to rapidly open and close the hip joint. To generate that power, you have to drive your feet into the ground as the hip extends.

That last point is what turned the lightbulb on for me during Thursday’s throwing session. I was toying with that fast hip extension with mixed results. Sometimes it resulted in nice ‘pop’ on my fastball, other times it seemed to hurt my velocity; like I wasn’t fully reaping the benefits from the extension and it didn’t feel all that powerful.

I started to think about driving my back foot into the ground as I extended my left hip and exploded towards the plate. Then the velocity started to come back on the fastball. Plus, my stride increased significantly as a result.

This “new” delivery still lacks consistency—I am unable to replicate it at will—but I now know what it’s supposed to feel like and I can self-correct any mechanical issues that arise. Interestingly, while my velocity fluctuates, depending on the accuracy and power of the hip drive, the control and command of my offspeed pitches have improved greatly.

Although I’m not sure of the exact reasoning behind this (not that I’m going to complain), I’m sure it has something to do with a more consistent, lower release point due to the increased stride length.

Quick tryout update: I’ve decided to wait until April before I embark on any further independent league tryouts. I emailed the team that was holding the March open tryout and didn’t get a good feeling from the response I received.

First off, the tryout is being held in an indoor facility in Indiana, which means that I wouldn’t be throwing in a real game situation like the Fort Myers tryout. Plus, I asked the team if I would be throwing to live hitters or just throwing a bullpen session. The response was the following: “We can see everything we need to see from a pitcher in a bullpen.”

This is basically code for “all we care about is velocity.” Thus, I’m not driving nine hours to throw 20 pitches in a bullpen only to be told thanks, but no thanks because I can’t throw ninety miles an hour.

So, I’m going to wait until April, really work on my mechanics and throw with increasing frequency over the next few weeks, and hopefully hit the road with that elusive independent league calibre fastball up my sleeve.