After looking further into fastballs, now is a good time to look deeper at offspeed pitches—particularly curveballs and sliders. We’ve talked before that one of the key parts of an offspeed pitch is how the spin of the pitch aligns with the axis. If using a device like a Rapsodo, this shows up as us...
Driveline Baseball Podcast Episode 17: On this episode of the Driveline Baseball Podcast Mike and Kyle recap the recent trip our staff took to Utah State to work with Barton Smith (@NotRealCertain on Twitter) to do some research on fastball movement. To learn more about the experiment click here to...
This off-season and spring training have seen a major upheaval in the number and type of coach that is being hired into the professional ranks, while the use of technology throughout all levels of professional baseball has increased drastically. This new level of investment demonstrates clearly that...
As access to ball-flight data becomes more readily available and intricate theories of pitch/swing design continue to increase in popularity within the player-development community, we can easily overlook one of the most arguably fundamental concepts of the game: how batters see the ball as it heads...
Jeff Passan– (@JeffPassan on Twitter) is a baseball columnist with ESPN after a 13 year stint with Yahoo Sports, and author of New York Times Bestseller The Arm: Inside the Billion-Dollar Mystery of the Most Valuable Commodity in Sports. Jeff joins Mike and Kyle to discuss the process o...
This past summer at Driveline, we had more than 200 athletes pass through our gym, and each of them went through a full biomechanics assessment. That’s a lot of data, a lot of arm paths, a lot of lower-half mechanics, a lot of kinematic sequences, and a lot of arm stress. From the information gather...
While the beginning of the technology revolution in baseball analytics may have started on the pitching side, hitting is catching up fast. More people and teams than ever have been using objective, precision-measuring technology to evaluate swing outcomes (batted ball technology like Rapsodo Hitting...
In a previous article, we discussed the difference between cues and measurements as well as how technology is changing baseball. We now know that instead of simply repeating cues verbatim to players, learning more background knowledge of certain topics is needed. One of those topics is spin rate. As...
This post from our Coaches Series was written by Justin James, Head Coach at Point Loma Nazarene University. He previously served as Assistant Coach at University of California, San Diego. In prior blog posts, I covered implementing the Driveline Pitching Program for first-time coaches: 30 days Befo...
With increasing accessibility to tools such as Rapsodo, Trackman, and Flightscope at all levels of the game, spin rate and spin axis have largely dominated much of the recent conversation revolving around pitch design and repertoire development. This greater emphasis should come as no surprise given...
