Player development is the holy grail of baseball. Velocity, movement, command, injury prevention: the teams that can develop these traits better and faster than others are the ones that will be, theoretically, hoisting the Commissioner’s Trophy more often than any others. This doesn’t just play at t...
There is sometimes disagreement regarding how to change pitching mechanics or if it can be done. Some coaches feel that mechanics are relatively set in stone; others see mechanics as something that can change but with difficulty. Luckily, more research has been done on this topic. Today let’s review...
Let us start by recalling an earlier blog post about efficient front leg mechanics and what they do for the throwing motion, and velocity. In this post, we talk about how the front leg has the job of “slamming on the breaks” [1] and stopping the momentum of the body allowing for maximal momentum tra...
Today, we are going to focus on the communication side of teaching mechanics. More specifically, we’re going to look at why we don’t agree with how most coaches believe in teaching mechanics and explaining how we teach them. We don’t believe the traditional form of teaching mechanics is...
In Part 1 of this series, we talked about the importance of mobility in the pitching delivery. While mobility is crucial, stability is equally as important since it plays a critical role in injury prevention. Mobility is defined as the ability to perform a desired movement; stability is defined as t...
Pitching mechanics are one of the most misunderstood things in baseball. In fact, there’s likely more that we don’t know than what we actually do know. One thing we do know is how stress affects the main parts of our body during the pitching delivery. As strength coaches, our goal is to not only imp...
Continuing with our validation of a Forward Dynamic analysis of the pitching motion from last week (Part One), we had run through the initial stages of the simulation pipeline to have an accurately scaled model that is tracking the recorded kinematic motion and associated force plate kinetics closel...
Previously at Driveline Baseball, we featured an exciting and informative three part series by Dr. James Buffi on his work toward an innovative new training and elbow injury prevention approach that has the potential to better protect a pitcher’s weak link- the UCL (Part One). While traditional meth...
Pitching mechanics are possibly the most hot topic you can talk about in baseball. They are often simplified, for a number of reasons, down to a degree where they can lose meaning. In this series, we’re going to break down some things that affect pitching mechanics and how we approach “teaching” mec...
What We Currently Know About the Lower Half Essentially, nothing. There are studies which have linked lower half force production to ball velocity, and other studies which show very little correlation between the two. One study noted particularly strong correlations between force production and wris...
