It was my junior year of college when I had a profound experience that impacts my coaching style today.
The year, up until then, had largely been a disappointment for myself. The winter prior, I experienced and had success using new training tools. Of those included weighted baseballs. I decided to double down the following winter and introduce plyo ball throwing into my warm up routine. I read blogs online and learned about concepts that correlated to throwing velocity, such as lead leg blocking. All winter I threw the heck out of those plyo balls. I worked on my block. I tried to get my arm up quicker. But whenever it was time to pick up a baseball and hit a target that mattered, I seemed to default back into the same bad habits.
Feeling a little stuck in the middle of our season, I read an email from a coach I had started following online. His name was Lantz Wheeler (God rest his soul). I enjoyed the simplicity of his messaging and the metaphors he used to explain pitching in ways that made sense. In this email, the metaphor he chose was thinking of the pitching delivery the way you’d anchor a hammock. You need two stable points to hang a hammock from. During the pitching delivery, Lantz argued you also need two stable points: Your back foot anchored in the ground and your eyes anchored on your target.
Having nothing to lose, I decided to try it out later that day at practice. I can remember those exact throws almost ten years later. The difference was immediate. My body felt more stable. Everything felt more in control moving down the mound. Little did I know, that singular email helped spark the best stretch of pitching in my baseball career. I threw six innings that spring against the best team in our conference. I won pitcher of the year for my summer baseball league. The only two things I focused on with my delivery were keeping my eyes on my target and my back foot anchored in the ground for as long as I could.
While I haven’t played baseball competitively in over six years, I still love the feeling of tossing a five ounce baseball. Not just for the satisfaction when you make a throw and know it’s perfect the second it leaves your hand. But because it keeps me connected to how hard this game truly is. Nothing is more humbling than reconnecting with the thing you once dedicated your entire life to. You don’t hold on to these skills for the rest of your life. They’re more fleeting than we’d like to admit.
I tried a lot of things as a player. For the few things I found that worked – as seen above – I found many more that did not. The duality of those failures now is they’ve become teaching points. I can educate kids about how just picking up weighted baseballs and throwing them as hard as you can isn’t a sure way to gain velocity. I’ve watched enough Youtube pitching breakdowns to know that the thing you’re so hyper focused on with your back leg probably isn’t that important. Those things are easier to see with a lot more clarity because I did most of them at one point. Whether they worked or not, I always learned.
And I know how that work can come to life with the right message at the right time.
I still carry those lessons I learned as a player, but my perspective since then has evolved. Things I was once convicted in are things I no longer give attention to. I’ve had the ability to learn from really smart people. I’ve changed my mind on a lot. I’ve gotten tons of hands on experience working with kids and figuring out how to solve different problems. Some got better. Plenty got worse. Every lesson was integral to creating my foundation as a teacher.
But I also know the best lessons I’ve ever learned are the ones I received first hand. Good, bad, and ugly, the best way I know how to learn is by doing. Over the next few posts, I’m going to lay out my first principles on the pitching side of the ball – but through my experiences throwing baseballs again. Some unlocks will be new discoveries, others will be recapturing old sensations. Many more will be the result of connecting dots in ways I never have before.
Even as we learn new things, our old discoveries never become wasted moments. A new experience might be exactly what you needed to see what you learned in the past a little more clearly. I won’t ask you to agree with my conclusions or how I come to them. Just know these conclusions aren’t based purely off theory. There’s skin in the game behind them.
From a framework standpoint, I’m going to use the same buckets I used to evaluate hitting: 1) overcoming inertia (how you get your body going), 2) creating leverage, and 3) rotation of the body and arm. The tasks of throwing and hitting a baseball are very different, but there aren’t a million different ways to rotate. A bad lead leg block is bad whether you’re holding a football, golf club, or a bat. How that block looks might vary based on the task and the person doing it. But it still has to happen. Operating from first principles helps us find substance within those tedious details. When you find the right things to work on, everything else falls into place.
I’m going to try and help you find those things a lot quicker than I did.