Though controversial pulldowns are a staple of our off-season program, we see them as vital pieces to train athletes to handle the stresses of pitching. But, like everything, they can be misunderstood when not done in the proper context.

The What

Pulldowns, otherwise known as Running Throws, Crow Hop throws, or Run ‘n Guns, are max-effort throws with a running start thrown in the off-season.

At Driveline, we have athletes throw pulldowns once a week in a standard progression using 3–7-oz weighted baseballs.

The history of pulldowns comes from long toss. As part of Alan Jaeger’s long-toss routine, athletes would throw extension throws out to a certain distance. Then, depending on the day and schedule, as the two players got closer to one another, they would pulldown, throwing max effort on-a-line.

So, on high-effort days, athletes would long-toss throwing light and high-arcing throws out (extension phase), followed by harder on-a-line throws when coming in.

We adapted this as a part of our program and simply added a radar gun, so we can track velocities. The correlation between velocities of the balls varies but they top out at an R^2 of .7 between a 5-oz running throw and max-effort pitching on a mound.

We know that correlation doesn’t equal causation, but athletes that throw faster pulldowns see higher mound velocities.

The Why

The reason comes down to two things: intent and stress.

We see the intent to throw hard as a key characteristic that athletes should try to develop in the off-season, because it is often overlooked.

We know that intent can mean a variety of things, but in regards to pulldowns, we are looking for the intent to throw hard. Pitchers are often coached in a manner that involves being overwhelmed with cues and trying to think of where their body is in space all while moving at incredibly fast speeds.

This is often not balanced by athletes’ focusing on throwing hard.

Focusing on throwing with intent can work wonders for some athletes, and you can look to Charlie Morton as a recent MLB example of having success after trying to throw harder. But even if throwing at max effort doesn’t yield in the best results, athletes will know they can do it, and it gives them a better filter for the effort they’re are throwing at.

Some athletes very well may sequence better while trying to throw at an 90 or 95 percentage effort, (a percentage that is uniquely individual to each pitcher) but how does a pitcher actually know what his 90-95 percentage effort is if he’s never thrown at 100% effort?

The other reason pulldowns are so important relates to stress levels, mainly the fact that we want to try and push athletes to meet or go slightly past their strength levels seen in games.

The good news is that there is both peer-reviewed (3rd party) and our own (1st party) research that supports the idea that pulldowns are equal to or less stressful than pitching.

ASMI found “statistically insignificant” differences between pitching a 5-oz ball and crow hopping a 5-oz ball. They also found that the heavier balls (6- and 7-oz) resulted in less elbow and shoulder torque when compared to a baseball.

We replicated the ASMI study by looking at 5-oz throws with the motus sleeve and found similar results. We also looked at the stress of throwing 3-7 oz balls during pulldowns and found little no statistical difference between the balls.

So pulldowns do replicate or slightly exceed pitching stress, but why is that good?

Think of the supercompensation effect from the body’s stress-response cycle.

You need a stimulus that will push the body to adapt to higher velocities. Many athletes do not receive this stimulus but still expect to throw harder.

Let’s use an example of an athlete and focus on the assumption that the harder an athlete throws, the more stress he is occuring on his arm. There, of course is nuance to this idea, but let’s still narrow in on that idea. A pitcher, when compared to himself, is going to be experiencing higher elbow stresses when his velocity increases.

So now let’s use an example of a college pitcher, say a junior at a D1 school. Throughout the year, this pitcher is going to throw a number of bullpens and live-simulated games in the fall and winter. Many of these, for a number of reasons, are not going to be tracked for velocity.

Let’s say this is a good starter who can top out at 90 mph on a good day, but usually sits between 86-89 mph.

All throughout fall and in scrimmages, this athlete is able to maintain his velocity in the 86-89 mph range. But come winter school, with unmeasured bullpens and other factors (school, sleep, etc.) contributing, he unknowingly finds himself throwing many of his bullpens (with a focus on command and offspeed pitches) somewhere between 82-86 mph. Remember, these bullpens aren’t tracked for velocity so neither the player nor coach knows this.

Because of this, this pitcher spends the next 2-3 months throwing bullpens between 82-86 mph. On bad days when he’s tired from school and up at 5 a.m. he’s even slower, while on days he’s feeling good, he’s closer to game speed.

All of a sudden spring is upon the team, and this player is ready to throw. He’s been told he is starting the second game of the year, is super amped up for the opportunity, the umpire says play ball, and his first pitch is 90 mph.

Now, understanding what we said earlier, that we’re making the assumption that stress is increasing with velocity, what about throwing offseason bullpens at 82-86 mph prepared this pitcher for his first outside pitch of the year at 90 mph?

Nothing really, which doesn’t do much for an athlete from a preparation view. If this pitcher sits at 86-90 mph for the entirely of the game, there is good chance that the majority of his pitches are being thrown at stress levels that he hasn’t experienced in months.

Alternatively when you see athletes lose velocity and there isn’t an injury, there is a decent chance that it’s because they’ve simply been training at lower intensities for longer periods of time. Though this can be unusual, we would see this as undertraining, which is why we want to schedule pulldowns at specific times to max or push past in-game stress levels.

Now, before you start worrying about training and feel like you need to get your athletes throwing at high intent all the time, understand then when using pulldowns, they should never occur outside of a detailed schedule to meet your goals. Pulldowns work because they are tracked for velocity and only thrown on a schedule.

The When

I’m going to repeat that last part again because of its importance:

Never throw pulldowns outside of a detailed training schedule designed to meet an athlete’s goals.

If you wouldn’t have pitchers throw a bullpen on a random day, then you shouldn’t have them pulldown on a random day. Everything else you do in your training needs to be in-line before doing high-intent work.

This is the big picture that leads to the largest misconceptions about pulldowns: that you can or should do then whenever you want.

Many don’t understand that the only way for pulldowns to be effective is when they are a piece of a detailed training program. One doesn’t (or shouldn’t) exist without the other.

We see pulldowns as a key component to building velocity and intent, but all athletes need to have their mobility, strength, and arm care work as a solid foundation first.

Discussions of scheduling are also linked to workload monitoring. We want to be able to increase an athlete’s workload and throwing tolerance to a level of max-intent throwing. We do not want to assume that since they’re taken time off, they are immediately ready to throw at high intent. This goes for both pulldowns and bullpens.

If a long time off from throwing is unavoidable, we recommend a longer on-ramp, such as our return-to-throwing program.

If you have athletes throwing a baseball regularly for a few weeks, you can slightly shorten the on-ramp phase, while doing plyo-care throws for a few weeks to ramp up to high intensity throwing.

In either case, you need weeks of low-intent throwing to prepare yourself for high-intent work.

The best time for pulldowns is the fall or early winter, But it also depends on what the athlete’s goals are and his timetable.

When planning out a throwing schedule, take into account how much an athlete has thrown (and how much time off they’ve had) along with how much they are expected to throw in the next few months.

Regardless of the time of year, athletes need to take the time to work up to an intense workload.

Below is an example schedule of when athletes can expect to throw pulldowns.

Late Fall: Velocity building (pulldowns)

Winter: Velocity building (pulldowns/mound velos) / transition to mound work

Spring: Competitive season

Early Summer: Competitive season or training

Late Summer / Early Fall: Time off

You can also individualize programming depending on what your players needs are, by having athletes do velocity specific work for different periods of time.

Athletes need time to work up, and even though pulldowns can be fun, you need to take the time to properly on-ramp. Also, take into consideration the amount of throwing players have done in the last year to individualize training accordingly. Schedule backwards, start from game one of the season and work back.

Wrap Up

Pulldowns are a key piece of building intent, developing velocity, and helping pitchers become more athletic. But they are still just a piece, they aren’t the whole picture. It comes down to scheduling and looking at everything your athletes are doing to get better.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post Pulldowns: The What, Why, and When appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Everyone wants to do what they can to prevent baseball injuries. With the increase in different technologies (wearable technology and high-speed cameras) and decreases in prices, there has been a shift in what coaches and players can do to examine their performances.

Of course, as helpful as this technology can be, it doesn’t come without some people taking what they think are conclusions significantly too far: specifically, when coaches are trying to use “biomechanical” analysis.

The truth is that most “biomechanical” analysis is increasingly flawed—not only in the process used to collect it but it the conclusions reached from such analysis. Most conclusions from high-speed video or pictures are taken increasingly further than they should be.

So, let’s try to answer this question: Can you take biomechanical measurements from pictures of slow-motion video?

First a Recap: 2D versus 3D

It may seem too simple, but 2D is essentially looking at something in one plane, thus a two-dimensional space. This means you are looking at something with an X and Y plane, you can look side to side, up and down, but you can’t measure depth or rotation—this is important. Pictures and video all take place in 2D.

On the other hand, 3D adds depth. This means you can look at the X and Y plane and also the Z plane. So, you can look side to side, up and down, and also see depth. In order to have mechanics measured in 3D, you need to have at minimum 2 cameras recording the athlete simultaneously.

Think of the difference between a circle and a sphere.

At Driveline we have used two camera angles to do biomechanical analysis in the past using the Direct Linear Transformation. Using two cameras (and a lot of math) you can then mark parts of the body and get biomechanical measurements.

Source

An upgrade to this system would be a marker-based biomechanics lab, which we now have. Markers are placed on specific body parts so the cameras can calculate the position of the markers and, therefore, how the body moves.

Just understanding these simple differences between 2D and 3D can tell you that 99% of the “biomechanical analysis” that you can find on the internet aren’t actually biomechanical analysis. Why? Because they are pictures of videos taken from one view point, making it a 2D analysis.

Baseball requires movement in all three planes of motion: sagittal, frontal, and transverse, which mean you move side to side, up and down, and rotate respectively. Pitching and hitting are highly rotational; you can’t get a measure of rotation from any view from one camera.

A true biomechanical analysis means you can measuring athletes very specifically in order to get two things: kinematics and kinetics.

Kinematics is the motion of points without considering the forces that cause the motion, like hip or torso rotational velocities.

Kinetics is looking at motion and its causes, its forces and torques, an example would be elbow and shoulder torques. Sometimes, this is more commonly referred too amongst coaches or players as the “stress” on an athlete’s joint.

Understanding a biomechanical analysis means that you are getting kinematics and kinetics, giving us one answer to our question: “biomechanical analysis” using pictures and videos isn’t truly possible. You can’t get kinematic or kinetic measurements in two-dimensions, like pictures or video.

Of course, they are used very often, and we can still take a closer look at how they are used in order to look more specifically at why many of these analyses are answering questions in the wrong way.

This is a broad look at why 2D “biomechanical” analyses don’t hold water. But it is important to realize that video is still very useful for athletes and coaches you just can’t get biomechanical measurements from it.

People should understand the specific limitations of video, what we can do is explain further why many are inaccurate, so you can get a better understanding of what you can and can’t take from any analysis you see online.

Parallax Error: What It Is and Why It Matters

First off, we have to talk about parallax error. This is something many don’t know about, but it is a common flaw ignored by a lot of analysis.

Simply put, parallax error means that if you are trying to measure the same thing from different angles, there will be different measurements simply because of the different camera angles.

The object in the pictures above hasn’t changed at all. But the measurements of the object change drastically.

If you try to get mechanical analysis based off of still pictures of slow-motion video, you will get different measurements simply because of the camera angle. It’s very common to draw lines, circles, arrows, and even angles on pictures and video. But if they are not taken from exactly the same position, more specifically the same angle and same distance, then the measurements are going to have a large margin of error.

Bob Keyes explains this simply when he is talking about comparing 2D to 3D analysis.

This makes these analyses not reliable, you can’t accurately compare two-different videos or pictures that were taken from different angles.

In order for comparisons to be reliable, the video needs to be taken from the same spot and same distance to what it is being compared to. If you are trying to analyze video of your athletes then mark a specific spot on the floor where a camera will be put every time.

This likely won’t stop people from comparing a pro to an amateur hitter using two-different angles, but it is something people should know. There is a large margin of error in measurement that can’t be accounted for (because it’s a 2D picture).

With the growing amount of cameras, it is interesting to look at different pitchers and hitters to see differences, but that’s about all you can confidently say they are: interesting. You can’t get a measurement of torque by looking at a picture; it looks like you can from a video but you can’t. Pictures and video should be used as a filter to check what you see with some sort of actual biomechanical measurement.

This isn’t currently that feasible for many, but things are changing, and there will be growing access to easier biomechanical measurements in the future.

Still Pictures: Sample Size and Confirmation Bias

The way that people use still pictures and slow-motion video to “yay or nay” good mechanics tends to focus around one main idea: a picture or video is representative of what a pitcher’s mechanics will always be.

For a number of reasons, this is false.

First off, it’s understood that pitchers don’t repeat their mechanics exactly the same for each throw. This can be understood by looking at the release points of a pitcher. You can see that pitchers produce a range of mechanics, not an identical carbon copy each time.

Second, keeping in mind what we just said, know that if you take a picture of a starting MLB pitcher from a game he throws 100 pitches in, you are trying to take conclusive evidence from a 1/100 sample. This doesn’t include the warm-ups between games, of course, which if you are using a picture found on the internet, you don’t know always know if the picture was taken from a live pitch or a warm-up. If he threw all 8 pitches to warm up between innings and threw 100 pitches in 6 innings, now you are trying to make very strong conclusions from a 1/148 sample. Multiply that by, say, 28 starts, and now you’re at, well, you get the idea.

Many coaches often forget that still pictures that they can find online are often chosen because they look good and not because of any sort of scientific reason.

This leaves still pictures as the perfect choice to be chosen by confirmation bias. Pictures are chosen because they fit what someone wants to see. There are only a few pictures to choose from, and the one that is picked for analysis is the one that proves the point a coach is trying to make. This isn’t a good way to make decisions.

Every one of these pictures can be use to support some sort of pitching mechanics theory.

Many people want to build a theory on how to build a “perfect pitcher” by funneling information that points to one conclusion. The problem with this is that a good theory gets boxed in by information that supports it and information that doesn’t support it. Good theories get stronger by trying to prove them wrong, not by being proved right.

Also, narrowing down pitching to a number of “checkpoints” is simply too simplistic. It’s more important to see how things relate to one another.

While there are checkpoints that studies have shown to be important, you still can’t get as accurate of a measure from a still picture as you can from true biomechanical analysis.

Let’s take the angle of when an arm is at foot plate. This picture from ASMI’s lab lets you estimate the degree that the arm is at:

But what you can’t see is the angle that the torso is to the camera, because it isn’t perpendicular, or what angle the humerus is to the camera. It comes back to the fact that you can’t get a measure of depth from a 2D picture like you see above.

So can you measure the angle the arm is at from the side angle? Sure, but you have to keep in mind that there are limitations to that measurement (can’t measure depth), so it isn’t going to be accurate.

Every analysis that you have seen that does not have a camera lined up directly 90 degrees to the pitcher is measured inaccurately. Even then, there are only a handful of relevant measures you can get.

The only accurate measurements that you can get from a 2D analysis are going to be ones that are parallel to the camera. This only truly leaves you with the angle of the front leg and angle of the torso. But even those will have slight margins of error depending on how pitcher’s stride.

While we’ve largely talked about pitching to this point, the same rules apply to hitting. The added difficulty in analyzing hitting is that hitting is reactionary. Each swing is completed based on vision information, meaning the pitch a pitcher is throwing and what the hitter is expecting are going to affect hitting mechanics.

High Speed Video Analysis: Looks Better, Same Problems

There is no doubt that high-speed video can be helpful and interesting to both athletes and coaches. But video runs into the same issues as still pictures—you can’t get torque measurements from one camera video.

The biggest issue with video is the lack of ability to measure rotation.

No matter how many lines, circles, or arrows I put on this video, it won’t be able to read the rotation of his arms. A one camera view video can’t tell you how fast your hips, torso, or arms are rotating.

This is the obvious issue in baseball because it is highly rotational and involves all three planes of motion.

This is why the best-case scenario for getting data is the same as for still pictures: body parts that are going to be parallel to the camera.

Take an example from Kinovea’s website, the angle of a cyclist’s leg when he’s training. This works because the camera is set up directly to his side and his leg is parallel to the camera, which minimizes the chance for error.

Analysis from a biomechanics lab and from a camera analysis also differ in how positions are picked. There are specific measurements that labs are able to get in order to ensure accuracy. So if you are reading an article that talks about body positions at front foot stride, there are specific parameters that measurements of the body can be taken at when the front foot hits the ground. While if you want a video analysis, what qualifies at “foot hitting the ground” usually depends.

Lastly, biomechanics analysis need to know specific body markers to get measurements. This can’t be done while an athlete is in uniform and is why markerless labs get different measurements than marker-based labs.

But the same issue can be said for pictures and 2D video. If someone is trying to measure the angle of a joint, is the point they are trying to measure from accurate?

This is the same video stopped at the same point with different measurements based off of different points.

Via pictures or video, coaches and players need to be aware that some things they think players are getting better or worse at, could be different because of measurement error.

These are all things that coaches and players should be aware of.

Conclusion

There are some serious flaws in believing that you can use pictures and slow-motion video for biomechanical analysis. The core of the issue is that you can’t get actual biomechanical measurements from a 2D view point; you need to measure in three dimensions.

This likely won’t stop people from continuing to do these analyses, because they are relatively simple to do. What it should do is make you realize that the conclusions you can take from those analyses must be taken with a large grain of salt. Many of the measurements are riddled with large margins of error that are often ignored.

Video and pictures can still be useful, there is a difference between looking at a players movement and trying to measure biomechanics. If you still use video to look at players mechanics, then you need to make sure the camera is at the same angle and distance every time. Comparing videos over time can give a better grasp of how an athlete’s movement has changed, but you just can’t tell how forces have changed.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post The Pitfalls of 2D “Biomechanical” Analysis appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Individualization is seen as a must have with training programs. While this is good, it doesn’t come without some misunderstandings. We’ve touched on some of those issues before, but it sometimes seems like people get confused by what individualization means in relation to sports.

At times, individualization is treated in the sense that all players have to have a training program that is entirely unique to them, and only them, one that is brand new and never seen before—except that doesn’t always make a lot of sense.

In reality, good individualization shouldn’t be a program that completely starts from scratch, with everything new. Rather, it should be one based on sound principles and then tweaked based on assessment in order to better tailor to the needs of the athlete.

This should happen for lifting, throwing, and hitting programs.

A simple example comes from a lifting program. Each program should be able to cover the basic movement patterns: squat, hinge, push, and pull. But how each athlete does that is subject to change based on the particular characteristics each athlete has.

Maybe one athlete’s body is more conducive to the front squat than the back squat. Maybe he’s had back issues and bilateral squats (front and back) irritate his spine, but single leg work doesn’t. All of these changes fall under individualization and should come from a quality assessment at the beginning of the training process.

Baseball specifically has a significant amount of data in the game—nearly everything is tracked. This gives players and coaches a unique advantage to assess specific skills and then create programs built upon that information.

There are many misconceptions with the data revolution in baseball, many coaches feel as though the technology is intended to replace them, which isn’t true. There will be no winner between a battle of technology or coaching, but it also isn’t a battle that needs to be fought. The best teams will simply be the ones that integrate technology with coaching.

The worst uses of technology are the ones with no action, which is more common than not, and is probably why many dislike it. Spin rate, exit velocity and launch angle metrics with no ability to understand or know how to develop players off it is a waste. But those who disregard the data as a challenge to their current coaching concepts will be passed over by those who use it to their advantage.

Much of the technology now available gives coaches and players the opportunity to answer questions that people have been unable to answer.

Technology and the data it produces isn’t going to replace coaching. It’s going to fill in the gaps and supplement the knowledge a coach already has.

The best teams and coaches will be a blend of technology and coaching making the player development process more precise. The use of data in a formal and continuous fashion means that we can consistently assess our athletes to individualize programs to help them improve.

Below we are going to look at how we can use information from assessments to individualize programming.

Formal Assessments

We see assessment as a multi-part process. At our facility we have formal assessments every four weeks. There is a straight mobility check, a look a strength, and a look at either hitting or pitching movement.

Formal assessments serve the purpose of seeing if the pieces of the training program that are inserted to individualize and help an athlete with a skill are working.

This goes beyond watching a player train or play on a day-to-day basis. It’s a time to take a step back and get a look at how all the pieces of a training program are working together.

Many times there are “issues” that coaches see in a player’s hitting or pitching mechanics, and they try to cue them into better habits. This isn’t going to work if the player isn’t moving a certain way because he isn’t mobile enough or stable enough to hold that position.

Too often pitching and hitting are discussed in a vacuum that neglects strength and conditioning or mobility aspects.

This is why the first part of an assessment, for us, covers these measurables: mobility and strength.

We’re looking at range-of-motion and how an athlete moves under load, which gives us an idea of not only movement quality but also strength and power.

This can then be paired with a performance assessment by getting on the mound and watching a player throw, looking at movement quality with video, which does have his limitations, or reviewing biomechanics with either the motus sleeve or a biomechanics lab—all while collecting velocity, spin rate, and pitch-movement characteristics.

This is where technology and data fit in so well to the assessment process. They are simply more specific measurements of the things that coaches are seeing day in and day out.

Doing all of these things gives us a detailed look at where a player is currently, so we can pinpoint the areas that need to improve. Each player is going to lift, do mobility work, and throw. But collecting this data allow us to take those areas and tweak them specifically to someone’s needs.

This goes beyond watching a pitcher throw and say that they move well enough or they look good. There are now measurables to aim for to keep an athlete healthy and improve their performance on the field.

Throwing Specific Individualization

Throwing programs can take many forms depending on age, skill set, and the season that the pitcher is in. If we focus in on the off-season, we can see the variety of ways programming can go for an athlete. But it’s important to realize that the throwing programs change because of the assessment process, paired with playing, training, and injury history.

What if velocity and strength are low? Probably this means it’s the best time for a lower-volume throwing with more of an emphasis in the weight room in order to build up a strong foundation of strength.

What if velocity is low but strength is high? This is a good time for more velocity-specific throwing work or velocity based training in the weight room.

What if there’s poor movement quality on the mound? Work specifically with plyocare balls to remap your arm action, while working on getting stronger and more mobile in the weight room.

Good velocity but not strong in the weight room? Time to get your strength up to par.

What if they’ve got good velocity and are strong in the weight room? This either means that specific command work is needed or more pitch design work to improve other pitches.

The point is all of these are skills: velocity, command, and strength, which means that they can be improved. That’s why getting accurate measurements to see specifically where pitchers are can be so beneficial.

There is no better example for what technology can do to improve player development than pitch design.

In today’s day and age, there is no reason for a player to enter college or pro ball, be told that what he needs to do to get to the next level is to develop an offspeed pitch and not be able to get immediate feedback while working to improve one.

Every player and coach has spent time working on an offspeed pitch and then waiting days or weeks to see how it does in a game before tweaking a grip or cue again. There is immense value is shortening the time it takes by getting spin rate readings on a device like the Rapsodo and seeing how the ball comes out your hand with an high-speed camera.

Hitting Specific Individualization

Hitting has similar themes to pitching.

If an athlete needs to hit the ball harder, he is going to spend time working on his swing, but he is also going to need to get comfortable in the weight room.

If there are mechanical issues that need to be addressed, look at doing specific mobility work and using weighted bats and other constraint drills.

If an athlete has trouble catching up to high velocities, it’s good to be practicing hitting 92. If there’s trouble with offspeed pitches, practice hitting offspeed pitches.

This is also where measuring exit velocity and launch angle come in. Yes, certain hitters can overhaul their swing to hit the ball harder and at a higher launch angle. But they can also improve both of those metrics by becoming more consistent and getting less mis-hits.

There is a different process when you have a hitter who already hits the ball hard compared to one that needs to hit the ball harder and at a better angle.

It isn’t the technology or data itself that makes that choice, it’s the coach looking at the numbers and communicating with the player what the steps are to get to the next level.

All of these come down to assessment—seeing where an individual is at, then specifically looking at what each needs to improve on in order to get better.

Data and Continual Assessment

The benefit of having a data-centric approach is that assessments can be continuous.

On top of the formal assessments, the data we collect during training, plus the time watching our athletes, train also works as an assessment.

Velocity days track throwing progress just like HitTrax can track exit velocity and launch-angle progress.

Even though these numbers can be incredibly valuable, there is often push back on how they should be used, or if they should be used at all.

One of the most unusual things about coaches and players not seeing the positives for certain metrics is that many of them simply describe what occurred: exit velocity, launch angle, spin rate, pitch movement, and even pitch velocity are all descriptions of what occurs.

They aren’t a new way of coaching. They just describe what happens. It’s up to the coaches and players to decide the best way to make a change or if change is needed at all.

We now have an unbelievable opportunity to measure what previously couldn’t be measured. So not only do we know what the better players do when they are successful, but we can measure where an individual player is and work on getting him to the next level.

All the data that can be taken in during an assessment, or tracked during training, is simply more information to better supplement good coaching.

Good coaching should be able to take the information of where that player is and help him work towards where he wants to be.

Pitch velocity and spin rate are valuable to a pitcher because they tell us more about how he should pitch. It’s no secret that faster pitches are harder to hit—that’s just math. All a radar gun does is give you a concrete idea of where you are. Getting spin-rate data from a Rapsodo can tell a pitcher how to use his fastball, and it can give much more specific information on how to improve other pitches.

Every hitter wants to get hits, so understanding how hard and where he is hitting the ball is going to be valuable information. Then, understanding what the players better than him are doing is going to give him goals to aim for.

Many of the counter-arguments against these metrics come linked to some sort of hitting or pitching philosophy, which is where the problem comes in. People do not understanding that the numbers have value in their own right, or they misunderstand or misinterpret what they mean.

Coaches can take that data and use it as a goal to work the player towards. How do you get there? Good coaching, that’s how. Coaches are going to need to take the data and do whatever they need to do to get the players to reach those numbers.

Doesn’t matter what cues, doesn’t matter the drills, just get the players from where they are now closer to their goals.

We now know more about professional players now than we did years ago, and that knowledge should be used to help develop players. We aren’t aiming for a certain batting average, because we now know: the best hitters hit the ball more often at X MPH and at Y Launch Angle, so those are the goals we need to reach to be better.

If I’m only going to get a hit three or four times every ten at-bats, then I should train to get as many hits at X exit velocity and Y launch angle to maximize the value of them.

The data collected during the training period feeds into the information we can gather from a formal assessment, gathering a more complete picture.

Conclusion

Both pitching and hitting are incredibly difficult, so the more information you can get to learn more about just one piece of the puzzle is incredibly beneficial.

It’s not technology and data vs. coaching. Technology and data can fill in the gaps of what players and coaches have been trying to figure out forever. The average coach intuitively knows more about the game than any number can tell him.

But the best coaches are going to be the best translators. Being able to take the data and communicate it to an athlete so they both understand where they are now, and where they need to be.

The clear advantage goes to the coaches who can build relationships and communicate what players need to do to improve while using data to track progress.

Coaches know the players best and know how they can get the message across, each athlete is different so the best coaches will be able to match the data to the player in a way that they can understand.

Having a good formal-assessment process means that your program will have individualization baked into it. Assessments drive programming, meaning you meet each player where they are and then give them goals to improve on.

Measuring all of these pieces isn’t the end all be all, because of course we all want athletes to perform best in a game situation. What measuring these data points does is gives you a much clearer picture of how a player can develop and that’s the next stage of the game.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post Assessments, Data, and Individualization appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Among talks of collusion, an ineffective player union and a growing discrepancy between contenders and non-contenders, this is as opportune time as any to relive the brow-beaten subject of the slickball theory. In case you missed the 2017 World Series, this has been touched upon here and here and a number of other places Google could tell you about.

However, if you have read one or two or all three hundred of those articles, you may share my feelings of being a little unfulfilled or still unsure of where and what exactly did change with slider-dependent pitchers and pitches. There certainly does seem to be quite a lot of smoke, but is it one main large fire or a series of metaphor-inducing sources of flames?

Here I aim, rather than to just re-open the conversation, to redirect it from a few new angles, both in terms of mechanical changes and binned results. As such, I will briefly glance over the league wide trends and then look in more detail at the tendencies and results of a well-known slider-heavy pitcher who had multiple World Series starts and goes by the name of Clayton Kershaw.

credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/keithallison/8664700662

Here are some specifics we’ll cover below, so this is a last chance for a few of you number-averse readers to bail:

1. The spin rate/direction by seasonal split, with an especial focus on the sliders
2. Binned locational differences of pitches, based on pitch type and seasonal split
3. Horizontal and vertical location differences, further subset for left handed and right handed hitters
4. Discretized outcome differences across pitch type and seasonal splits
5. Discretized exit velocity differences on batted balls across pitch type and seasonal splits
6. Usage differences of pitch types across the time periods
7. Usage differences of pitch types when late in game (5^th inning and on)
8. Pitch selection usage when men are on base, with a bar graph based on the furthest runner being on 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd

Let’s commence with our race to one conclusion that’s worth a thousand graphics. (That’s the idiom, right?)

Analyzing Spin Rate and Direction

Looking at the Statcast data scraped off Gameday directories, we’re pooling the spin rate and spin direction for all pitches thrown in 2017, split up by the regular season, post season (inclusive), and world series (exclusive). For the sake of cogency, we’re going to be using and re-using a lot of abbreviations: I apologize in advance for any confusion about using SD to indicate spin direction when it might pop out as the more naturally at ease abbreviation for standard deviation.

We probably don’t need to spend too much time convincing anyone that the distribution seems markedly different in the postseason and world series vs the regular season.

Now, a slider would often be the pitch most affected by potential “slickness”. So, repeating the seasonal splits, we stayed with the spin rate (a more statistically stable rate to look at rather than spin direction) and split up the graphs between sliders and non-sliders.

Again jarring contrasts, and jarring contrasts in the slider categories where there seems to be a very significant shift in the mean: these R plots even auto-generate different shifting scales for the RPM.

Here’s a numerical sampling of the results.

A very casual overview: the spreads seem to get tighter with the Slider pitches specifically in the postseason; a Fisherian perspective on these numbers seems to paint a very staunchly significant difference. If you’re not a disciple of frequentist statistics, then a complementary Bayesian perspective would also be damning – dependent, of course, on your sensible choice of prior distributions.

Now, a quick look at all the visualizations we’ve seen, but this time for our slider-loving friend, Kershaw.

Let’s take this moment to introduce a new quirk in the mix.

Potential Statcast / Trackman Errors

As has been heavily discussed by sabermetricians and keen observers of baseball statistics everywhere, MLB has introduced the Statcast TrackMan radar over the previous Pitchf/x cameras as the leading provider of measurements in the last few years, and 2017 specifically marked the year Statcast became the official leading face of metrics: MLBAM officially switched to TrackMan. While Pitchf/x’s cameras begin tracking pitches about five feet away and rely on a set of 20 images, TrackMan is in a perpetual journey of thousands of snapshots of the pitch, bringing, in theory, greater precision and ability to the table.

Due to Statcast’s fairly new status and limited public access, there have been known errors among initial Statcast tracking, most notably errors in vertical and horizontal pitch movement although the errors were acknowledged as an improving work-in-progress due to Statcast’s learning potential and the continued commitment of the Statcast developers. In fact, a (very) recent study by Gerald Schifman commits just this fact to light: errors for Trakman readings have certainly decreased on metrics like horizontal/vertical location and movement, although they are not quite unilaterally better across the board than the older Pitchf/x data.

In addition, a huge difference is especially notable when it comes to Pitchf/x vs Statcast in the premise of this article: The already-much-bandied-about Pitchf/x spin rate.

The TrackMan system has the ability to measure the “observed” [0] spin rate, which can be seen as a summation of the pitch’s “useful” spin (where the spin axis is perpendicular to the direction of the pitch) and its gyro spin (or where the spin axis is aligned with the direction), where Pitchf/x only notes down the former number, which it calculates based on the trajectory of the pitch. This will result in Statcast’s spin rate potentially being a much different number.

Differences in Statcast Data?

However, the spin rates we presented above from the MLB Gameday’s raw TrackMan data are different not just from Pitchf/x data but also from one of the leading faces of Statcast data, Baseball Savant.

Baseball Savant, the most prominent result following a search for “statcast data”, is self-marketed as  “a site dedicated to…Statcast metrics.” Yet, after using their Search function to output Kershaw’s 2017 data, we find a few stark differences. In fact, here are the same seasonal splits of the breakdowns for spin rate by Savant for Kershaw.

Does this invalidate the TrackMan conclusions we’d previously drawn? Not necessarily; looking at the raw, unaltered data places everything on the same scale after all. But this raises a bigger question: why are two different interfaces, both based on Statcast’s TrackMan as a data source, spitting out different numbers? And just how different are they across the board?

It’s been covered before how Statcast is undergoing constant changes to better its data output and measurements. It’s, predictably, a little more closeted about what exactly these changes are. Requests from Driveline Baseball’s R&D Director on this subject went unanswered.

(Historical requests for where this data lives have also been ignored by MLBAM’s representatives.)

Reviewing Kershaw’s “Statcast” Data

That being said, given that the greater wealth of data we have comes from the raw MLB Gameday interface, it seems highly pertinent to suppress newly festering qualms about which data source to play with in exploring how the nature of Kershaw’s pitches changed across the season. Especially relevant is seeing where and how the two different tracking systems differ, when it comes to movement and location.

Looking at the roughly 3000 pitches Kershaw threw in the regular season and postseason combined, a simple match performed on the unique date/time-indexed stamp of when the tracking system first detected the pitch in the air, managed to match over half of Kershaw’s unique pitches across both sources. This is no mean accomplishment, as MLB Gameday and Baseball Savant defer even in the exact number of total pitches Kershaw threw over said season (3025 from Gameday versus 2931 from Savant).

(Although looking at easily verifiable examples, it seems Savant does a much better job of tracking these pitches, with its convenient ability to backtrack and correct.)

Given the 1500+ individual pitches that we can match, I decided to take this opportunity as a chance to measure the similarity of the descriptive matching data fields in both Gameday and Savant, something that I have had trouble finding verifiable results for online.

We looked at the following metrics that are present in both tracking systems and help describe individual pitches: start speed, x0 and z0 (the horizontal and vertical location of the pitch at the initial release point, respectively), pfx_x and pfx_z (the horizontal and vertical movement of the pitch between the release point and home plate), px and pz (the horizontal and vertical location of the pitch when it crosses home plate), vx0 and vy0 and vz0 (the velocity of the pitch in three dimensions at the release points, ax0, ay0 and az0 (the acceleration), sz_top and sz_bottom (the top and bottom of the strike zone), and the spin rate.

We also looked at two differences of similarity measure: the commonly used Euclidean distance and normalized Euclidean distance, the latter to account for the different magnitude of certain metrics (i.e. speed vs a pitch movement metric).

Here are the results.

As expected, spin rate is colossally different. Most of the other metrics don’t seem too incredibly different (keeping in mind that we have an 1500+ sample size that boosts up the non-normalized metric). The velocity and acceleration metrics we don’t touch upon in this piece, and the horizontal and vertical movement we’ll also stay away from as those seem to speak to some potential measuring differences.

In addition, among these 1500+ pitches, 78 pitches were classified differently between Gameday Statcast and Savant Statcast. Further breaking it down below, we see that 59 of these pitches were classified as Sliders in Gameday (column labels) while falling into either four seam fastballs (48) or change ups (10) for Savant (row labels).

Is there anything unique about these pitches that the two systems seem to be disagreeing on? Looking at the 58 pitches we mentioned before (all sliders in Gameday and FF’s or CH’s in Savant), we surveyed the descriptive statistics of a few aforementioned metrics.

It appears that, at least in these cases Gameday is deploying a more sensible pitch type selection based on location and movement. We will pursue Gameday’s metrics for those pertinent analyses, although again the differences across the whole sample size are not large.

Slider Location Analysis

First then, we look at where the pitches actually ended up. The level of hitting in the postseason is better by any sort of common sense or statistical rationale, but was it a result of the hitters hitting the same pitch in the same spot? Or did the pitches, specifically the slider, look different?

The above tables are segmented by the Gameday value of px and py, which indicate the horizontal and vertical location of the pitches respectively. We tossed out any obviously wild pitches or pitches well outside the strike zone: we filtered out pitches more than 2 feet inside/outside from the center of the plate, below 0 feet (i.e. bouncing), or above 5 feet. The first set of plots compare the locational difference for all pitches between the regular season and postseason; then sliders specifically, then a set of the differences (regular season minus postseason) for both all pitches, and sliders.

It appears at a glance that pitches might have shifted over from between 0 and 2 to 0 and -2 px, or from outside to inside. Let’s hold on a moment though and break it down for the type of batter Kershaw is facing.

More particularly, looking at Kershaw’s splits against LHB vs RHB we see a few stunning differences in px indices, particularly against RHB where he appears to start throwing to the other side of the plate. Here are the means for these px indices for all pitches, and then controlled for sliders specifically:

So it appears that pitches, and sliders in particular, are ending up in different locations, yes. Now let’s see if this has any impact on the actual result of the pitch.

Swinging at Kershaw’s Stuff

We looked at changes in pitch event outcomes based on pitch type across our by-now-familiar three-way seasonal split. We looked at differences through four different lens: the frequency of batter swings across all events, the frequency of recorded strikes across all no-swing events, the frequency of contact among all swing events, and the wOBA generated by the opposing batter across all swing events. The number of changeups and two seam fastballs that Kershaw threw was quite small (as you’ll see depicted lower down in another graphic) so we focused on his three main offering of curveballs, four-seam fastballs and sliders.

Keeping in mind that the World Series sample size is smaller than the Postseason and much smaller than the regular season, a few observations:

It looks like Kershaw had the biggest discrepancy in batter performance with his curveball and slider.

For both sliders and curveballs, he got fewer batters to swing at his offerings in the postseason and these batters generated a much higher frequency of contact when they did swing (for the exclusive postseason splits on curveballs, CU actually generated less contact). While Kershaw was more efficient at getting called strikes for his regular season curveball, he actually was more successful getting called strikes in the postseason with his slider. However the typical slider, and especially Kershaw’s, isn’t intended as a pitch to freeze hitters—hence the low rates of called strikes across all splits. In fact, the increasing ratio of called strikes might speak even more to the changing location of the slider.

Interestingly, the wOBA on slider-generated swings decreased in the postseason, while it increased for his curveballs and four-seamers. However, when accounting for all swings, Kershaw still recorded a lower wOBA in the regular season.

His fastball seemed to induce a similar amount of swings across the season splits (slightly more in the regular season) and a similar amount of contact, with the lowest wOBA against in the postseason.

Now, bringing in some Statcast batted ball data from Savant, we can look at just how hard his main three offerings were hit after the calendar flipped to October.

So, a few mixed signals in there but it does seem like there are differences, with perhaps the most dichotomous split existing with fewer induced swings on sliders and much more contact and harder contact when the slider is swung at, in the postseason. (It’s also important to note that a true rigorous analysis of the wOBA figure would require hitting park factor adjustments, correction for the superior level of hitting faced in the postseason, etc.)

Now if we do believe the nature of Kershaw’s pitches (specifically his slider) is changing, let’s look to see if Kershaw himself changed his pitch type based on certain situations, perhaps out of a conscious (or subconscious!) desire to adjust for these differences.

In the next plots we see first a comparison changes in pitch usage across the regular season vs postseason (for both of our Statcast-based data sources), and then, consequent changes in said pitch usage based on in-game situational circumstances.

The pitch usage change here comes as a percentage of times it was used in the regular season minus the percentage of times it was used in the postseason. The two systems seem stumped when it comes to how often exactly slider usage changed for, although as we covered above, perhaps Savant’s slider classification isn’t always the most accurate and we should trust the raw TrackMan data’s proposition that slider usage declined in the postseason. Everyone, however, seems to agree that curve usage has gone down, with Kershaw relying more and more on his fourseamer.

Now, diving a little deeper, we look to see if these changes have led to Kershaw being more or less likely to use certain pitches in different dynamics. We looked at these pitches under two different lens: a) early versus late in the game (where we encoded “late” as the 6^th inning and later on) and b) the bases being empty versus the lead runner being on first, second, or third base. The pitch type classification used here was, as previously unless otherwise noted, pulled from MLB’s Gameday.

The early/late split seems to have been non-impactful in pitch usage but the second split speaks to a more unfortunate combination: Kershaw seems to have used more (or less! If you believe Savant) sliders in the postseason, but definitely had to resort to them more than ever with men on third base, just as his slider’s spin rate (maybe) and effectiveness (definitely) plummeted.

Hmmm.

A lot has been said about the slickball theory and a lot has been said about the changes ushered in by Statcast, but that is because there is a lot to say about both. Here’s to hoping we’ve confused the few that had a resolute, firm grasp of what was going on. Cheers, l’m excited for the new season as well.

Alex Caravan is the Quantitative Analyst for Driveline Baseball in the R&D department.

The post Kershaw, Sliders, Statcast: An Analysis of the Slickball Theory appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

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 the major-league level either. In fact, it’s almost more important at the college and high school levels where you can’t just shovel out huge salaries or make a trade to get the pieces you need. At the high school level, you can’t even recruit; you get whoever lands in your school district. This is why player development is so crucial to the success of an organization or team. This is why teams should invest big sums to further their players’ development.

However, that’s not what’s happening for the majority of baseball teams, especially at the affiliated level. This is a problem, because players have particular expectations. Like many others, I believed that if I was good enough to make it to the next level, to play college ball, to just get on an affiliate roster, there would be a coach there who would help me become a better baseball pitcher—because I knew I had more in the tank. Does this sound familiar?

The higher level you get to, the better coaching you believe you must receive. But that’s unfortunately not always the case, which brings us to this quote from a current minor leaguer:

“There is no player development. Teams aren’t adding velocity or any of that, the teams that appear the best at player development are the teams that are the best at not screwing their talent up.”

So, is that what good player development is? Is it just, not getting in the way? Or should it be something more?

First, we need to acknowledge that player development in-season is very difficult. While improvements can be made, development isn’t a primary focus when trying to compete and win baseball games.

Second, it comes down to the offseason—when high school and college players may be playing other sports or working around rules of contact hours, and minor leaguers are looking for another job to make ends meet.

Finally, you get into what players are doing in the off-season. You wonder if everyone is on the same page, especially when when almost thirty percent of all injuries needing surgery occur during spring training (Lindbergh, 2015).

So, if the current model isn’t ideally servicing our athletes, how do we change it? Now, I am by no means privy to all the details of player development in affiliated baseball nor am I aware of what every college and high school is doing around the country. I also realize that every player has their own unique situation and circumstances. However, since I have spent time around major and minor league clubs and coached college baseball for five years, I want to share what I see as some of the biggest issues currently facing true player development.

Communication

Any sort of self-help or leadership book almost always talks about communication. Communication as a whole is incredibly important—just ask your significant other; relationships don’t work without communication. However, often and at almost every level, we see a dearth of communication among the skill coaches, strength coaches, and the ATCs. (We won’t even begin to bring the R&D folks into this to keep it simple.) While this is not always the case, more often than not each group is siloed into their own realms and relegated to certain tasks: get them healthy, get them strong, make them throw strikes, etc. These shouldn’t be individual tasks; each group can have a positive impact in a cohesive manner.

This is where, when you really get rolling, true player development begins.

For example, consider a pitcher who’s struggling to throw strikes. The pitching coach works with him, maybe tries some mechanical changes, some drills, but however he chooses to correct it, the player either gets better or he doesn’t. The important part here is that the athlete’s skill development often begins and ends with only the pitching coach. Now, imagine instead the pitching coach takes a look at the struggling pitcher, realizes he has some mechanical inefficiencies with his lead leg, sees there’s a lot of lateral shifting, and knows that it doesn’t seem to brace well. The pitching coach then programs certain drills to improve lead-leg brace and then informs the strength coach and ATC about it as well.

The ATC does an assessment, learns the athlete is lacking internal hip rotation, so no matter how much the pitching coach does, he would have never helped that athlete to block his lead leg and improve his command. However, knowing this, now the ATC begins working to manually increase hip IR, and the strength coach programs mobility and strength work to help strengthen the hip through its newly opened range of motion. The skill coach can continue to help the athlete pattern that movement, while being cognizant of the athlete’s limitations and how he’s progressing his development.

The idea behind this process started when Kyle Boddy and Jack Scheideman took a trip to Altis, where they watched Stuart McMillin, Dan Pfaff, and others provide manual therapy while observing their sprinters’ warm-ups. They used manual therapy to adjust and correct for any movement restrictions they noticed in their athletes. The athletes, knowing their bodies and their “feel” better than anyone else also provided feedback so that the trainers could correctly treat and fine tune the athletes for that day’s workout. Through this simple communication loop, they began to not only bridge the athletes’ development gaps, but also improve their performance, allowing them to be more prepared for that day’s training or competition.

I should also point out that we know this scenario isn’t available for everyone, but it’s important for school coaches to reach out to their ATC and for facility owners to start networking local PTs, ATC, and chiropractors to refer athletes to. The goal is not to have athletes become dependent on treatment, but to provide a means of identifying limitations, treating them, and then putting athletes on a sustainable path that will allow them to be self sufficient through warm-ups and training.

My question then, is, Why are we not doing this with at least bullpen pitchers in baseball? If sabermetrics is telling us that the highest-leverage innings come later in the game, why do we not want these athletes as finely tuned for performance as possible? They often warm up for four hours before the start of the game. Four hours!

Now, that’s not four hours before they pitch; that’s four hours before first pitch. So, tack on another one and a half to two or more hours from there, and you can’t tell me that after getting hot six hours ago things haven’t stiffened back up. Just think about how you feel after sitting behind a desk for a few hours—great right? I doubt it.

So why would you not have a manual therapist working on helping pitchers feel better and become more finely tuned an inning or two ahead of their potential appearances?

Terminology

While this falls under communication, making an effort to learn terminology and gain knowledge in departments outside of your own not only helps make you a better coach or trainer, but also facilitates ease of communication among groups. For example, if you understand the strength and conditioning concepts of energy systems and training economy, as a pitching coach it can help you better structure practices and coordinate with the strength coach on lifting, recovery, overreaching, and other important training factors required for player development. The same goes for the strength coach, who likely has a good understanding of the movements required for success in the sport but can benefit from understanding the movement and mechanical principles the skill coach is looking to have his athletes perform.

There are other examples of how important it is to know your training staff’s philosophies, what they’re doing to train athletes, and the terminology they use when speaking to athletes in order to make you and your athletes better, so we won’t wear this out. Just remember, the more you know about every aspect of your athletes’ training, the better you will communicate and the better you will be at training them yourself.

Knowledge

This is something I’ve been guilty of and that I’ve seen many smart coaches struggle with as well: it’s ok to share knowledge. It’s ok to let people into your world and to tear down that silo. All too often we feel the need to protect our knowledge. We live and work in a competitive industry and sometimes knowing more than everyone else seems like job security. You’re valued more if you know more, right? As wrong as this is, I’m sure we’ve all worked with others who have had this kind of attitude. Some of them even try to brow beat you over the head with their knowledge.

One major league strength coach I spoke with said he worked with a pitching coach early in his career who used his knowledge of biomechanics to throw other members of his staff under the bus when things went south for his pitchers. That kind of thought process doesn’t contribute to athletic development and success no matter how much you know. Not sharing information and not learning more of what your coworkers’ departments are doing limits you and your team’s ability to impact athletes positively. It also sets up a poisonous work environment. Regardless of how much that coach knew about biomechanics, you can’t tell me he was going to have long-term success. It’s just not possible with that mindset.

Technology and Feel

This is the last piece of player development we’ll touch on, so let’s set the record straight right away: Feel is not real, and technology is not the answer. You can hate sabermetrics; you can hate Rapsodo and edgertronic cameras. You can believe launch angles are the devil and deny batted-ball exit velocity.

However, the truth is you need these if you want to give your athletes the best opportunities to develop, but remember that these tools are not the answers in and of themselves. They’re simply a means of measuring improvement and providing feedback for quality control. You won’t believe how many athletes think they’re throwing a curveball only to discover on the Rapsodo that they’re actually throwing a 30% spin efficiency crappy cutter. While it may even look moderately ok to the eye, for some reason it keeps getting tattooed for doubles in the gap. Like it or not, the technology is there to help understand the why of what is happening.

But as I said, technology alone is not the answer, it needs a good coach to be able to interpret the data and communicate it to his athletes. You can’t just use the Rapsodo and edgertronic cameras to develop a new pitch if you don’t understand seam orientation, spin axis, spin rate, etc. A good coach provides feedback and suggestions based on an athlete’s feedback (i.e. feel) and data from the technology, and the same goes with hitting and using a Rapsodo or anything else you do. Regardless of the task or environment, there’s a necessity of having a coach there to discuss feel and direction; we just want to use whatever technology it is to help aid that process. It’s not meant to take over the process and it certainly isn’t there to replace a coaching staff. Instead, it should empower them to better own their athletes’ development.

Don’t be afraid of data and technology—baseball is going to the nerds and for good reason. They’re finding ways to analyze the game like never before, and this means more opportunities to understand the game and make your players better. Don’t run from it; embrace it, because players will always need coaches to show them the way and if you’re willing to look, the way forward is starting to have much better signs to guide us.

The Wrap

In closing, I just want to reiterate that for organizations and teams to experience peak player development, there needs to be communication. You can buy all of the technology you want, you can throw weighted balls, you can have the best, most educated coaching staff in the country, but if you’re not fully integrated with every department, if you don’t utilize your strength coaches, skill coaches, and ATCs to best of their abilities, you’re missing huge opportunities to develop your athletes.

We need everyone discussing what they’re seeing and sitting down together to formulate development plans with their athletes. It doesn’t matter if an athlete struggles with exit velocity, command, health, etc, everyone can have an impact on improving each athlete’s development. This is one of the reasons we’ve been so successful at Driveline. The more we’ve integrated all aspects of our floor into one, the better results we’ve seen, and the lower our injury rates have been.

So, let’s breakdown the silos. It’s time for a better age of player development where we don’t just avoid screwing talent up, we take talent and make it great.

This article was written by Director of High Performance Sam Briend

Ben Lindbergh. March Sadness: Understanding the True Cost of the Spring Training Tommy John Surge. http://grantland.com/the-triangle/mlb-preview-tommy-john-spring-training-surge-zack-wheeler-yu-darvish/ 2015.

The post Player Development: Integration and Communication for Better Results appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

During the draft of every major sporting event, the topic of “sports specialization” is guaranteed to come up. You’ll probably end up seeing plenty of graphics like this:

Undoubtedly, there will be people who point out that many top-draft picks were multi-sport athletes, and because of that, you should be one too!

But should you? The actual answer, as usual, is it depends. There are a number of factors involved in becoming a high-level athlete in any sport, with whether or not to specialize being one of them.

Here we’ll break down some of the nuance around what athletes should do about specializing in baseball.

For the context of this discussion, “youth” athletes refers to athletes under the age of fourteen, or pre high-school. We’ll discuss and refer to other levels later because athletes’ ages and levels matter in the discussing whether or not to specialize. We can think of specialization as narrowing the focus of an athlete to focus on one sport.

First things first: Correlation ≠ Causation

We’ve touched on this topic before, but it helps to restate that many statements in favor of multi-sport athletes suggest that a multi-sport athlete is the main criterion for becoming a high draft pick. However, just because these two may seem to correlate, it does not mean that they are related in the way commonly assumed.

“Most pro athletes played multiple sports, therefore specialization is bad.” Reverses cause and effect

In fact, we should be able to acknowledge that better athletes are going to be in highest demand of every sport. At every age group, the athletes who are faster, stronger, throw harder, and rotate well are desired by coaches of all sports. This is especially true of youth athletes because the differences in skill levels among them, and those in early high school, can be drastic.

This means that the better athletes are going to get significantly more opportunities to play multiple sports than others—not to mention the fact that school size plays a role in the opportunities presented to athletes. Just by math alone, it is easier to play multiple sports with a school body of 500 kids compared to a school with 2,500 kids.

The effect of being a good athlete means you get pulled into more sports, it is not the cause

So most of these stats claiming that playing multiple sports leads to high draft picks multi-sport are not being used properly. We should realize that the amount of general athleticism needed to be drafted in any sport is usually incredibly high.

We should also note that certain sports pair much better with each other than others. We can draw many more similarities of ball movement and player position between soccer, basketball and even football than we can between one of them and baseball—not to mention how typical fall sports like soccer, football, and cross country pair very well with a sport like track in the winter and spring.

Now, this doesn’t mean that youth athletes should not play multiple sports, they should. It’s just not great way of getting to that point.

One reason youth athletes should take time off from one specific sport to play another is to give them a mental break from the game. Another reason is to keep amateur sports away from increasing professionalization. For example, we can see that youth sports are now an incredible $15-billion dollar industry.

“Sports Specialization” Is Often Used With Different Definitions

When specialization is talked about negatively, it is almost always framed in the a way that suggests these athletes are playing their sports competitively year-round. This often blurs the line between specialization and overspecialization.

Playing one sport year-round is often linked to injuries—mainly overuse injuries—which has been an issue for a long time as seen by the date of the New York Times article below:

When specialization is talked about positively, it often acknowledges that these athletes should take time off and train before competing again.

Now, there are some big differences between these two even though you rarely see them distinguished in an argument.

When trying to figure out where an athlete is on the spectrum, we should also ask, Who is driving the specialization? The athlete or parent? There can be a big difference between a parent who pushes for a youth athlete to play one sport and an athlete who decides he doesn’t like playing other sports.

Pressure to be great at a sport, and specialization in that sport, is often tied to the desire to play in college or play professionally.

Playing baseball specifically year-round is not going to be beneficial to an athlete’s development. Yes, athletes will improve by practicing the skills they need to perform in a game, but practice and training are different than playing.

Playing year-round is also closely tied to the politics and pressures of baseball, along with travel teams and the increase in year-round showcases. The perception is that every team and showcase presents one more opportunity to be “seen” by some scout to get that next chance at a scholarship or draft opportunity.

This is half true. Yes, athletes need to be seen to get a chance, but being seen isn’t going to help without skill and talent. Athletes get better by becoming stronger and training better, not playing. At Driveline, we’ve also had multiple athletes get college scholarships or pro contracts based on youtube videos alone, which supports the point that opportunities will present themselves—athletes just have to be really good first.

So Does Specialization Work? What Are the Risks?

It can work, but it’s no guarantee. The research suggests the injury risks are certainly higher, which is an important factor to consider.

While there are flaws in the specialization model, we cannot ignore the fact that many Caribbean and Latin American countries greatly prefer specialization and have developed some great baseball players. However, information on burnout rate and injuries is lacking, and we should also point out that the incentives are quite different as well.

We have to acknowledge that practicing or training more will get you better at a specific sport.

That being said, there is still a belief that being better at a younger age will give an athlete an advantage down the road in that same sport. The survey results from a recent study (Brooks et al., 2018) on sports specialization are eye opening:

• Only 45.8% believed specialization increased their chances of getting injured either “quite a bit” or “a great deal.”
• 91% believed that specialization increased their chances of getting better at their sport either “quite a bit” or “a great deal”
• 15.7% believed they were either “very” or “extremely” likely to receive a college scholarship based on athletic performance.

Contrast those numbers to a different survey study (Wilhelm, Choi & Deitch, 2017) of 102 current professional baseball players that found 48% specialized early, with the mean age of specialization being 8.91 years old. The study also found that those who specialized earlier reported more serious injuries while they were professionals—while 63.4% of the players surveyed believed that early sports specialization was not required to play professionally.

Another factor to consider is that it doesn’t matter how good an athlete is at a sport at the age of 10. It just doesn’t—playing on an fall all-star team, cool travel team, or having a “select invite” to a winter showcase at 10 may be fun, but there is no direct relationship between skill at that age and success in that sport later in life.

Another study (Erickson et al., 2017) found that between 2001 and 2009, 10% of the players in the Little League World Series ended up playing professional baseball—with 6 of the 638 players making the majors. And yet another study (Kearney & Hayes, 2018), looking at track athletes, found similar results: excelling as a youth athlete does not guarantee success later.

So do youths absolutely need to specialize before high school to become professional athletes? No.

What’s more, the downsides to early specialization are mental burnout and injury.

In a 10-year study, ASMI (Fleisig et al., 2011) found that pitchers who pitched more than 100 innings in a year were 3.5 times more likely to be injured. Playing year-round, on multiple teams, with increasingly smaller rosters are all variables that may lead youth pitchers to throwing more innings. This makes it all the more important how coaches run their travel teams.

Those same researchers also found that playing catcher appears to increase a pitcher’s risk of injury. This would suggest that because the gap in talent level in youth baseball is so large, better athletes are more likely to play more demanding positions and thus be at a higher injury risk.

One study (Yang et al., 2014) found no relationship between playing baseball exclusively and injury, but did find that pitching with arm pain and tiredness were associated with an increased pitching risk. There are two things we can take from this.

First, we can assume that playing year-round results in more chances for pitchers to throw with pain or tiredness. Second, like we mentioned above, not all specialization is the same; there are differences between competing year-round and just playing one sport.

So while there can be exceptions to the rule, it doesn’t seem that early specialization is the best way for athletes to reach their goals.

Of course this is still a simple look at the issue. There are underlying issue of teams and players having incredibly varied warm-ups and recovery protocols as well as having drastically different opinions on workload management and lifting. All of this factors into the risk of injuries.

Older Players of Certain Skill Sets Need to Consider Specializing to Meet Their Goals

At this point, we’d like to clarify that youth athletes should play multiple sports, because it makes them well-rounded. Different sports require different skills and types of communication to be successful, and it’s good for youths to have this variety. This should never be in question.

It should also be said that whether or not an athlete specializes in high school requires a different perspective from youth athletes. Once athletes hit high school, they should start to re-evaluate a few things to see if specializing in one sport makes sense to meet their goals:

An athlete’s decision to specialize in high school should be determined by his current skill level and what his goals are.

Age and skill are the important points in determining goals, these discussions should continue until a player enters high school and and then be more seriously considered as a player enters sophomore and junior years of high school.

Now, an incoming high-school junior who is an all-state baseball player and has been offered multiple college scholarships is probably fine continuing to play multiple sports.

However, the baseball player starting his junior year who has never been a full time starter but wants to play in college probably needs to make a different decision.

There are only so many top-level talents that we can hold up as examples until we realize that the majority of athletes have average skill sets but similar goals to the best players. Therefore, they need to make different decisions on how to reach those goals.

Pushing high-school athletes to be multi-sports athletes when they want to specialize ignores the fact that the more time athletes can spend training for their sports often means the better they can become. (Notice we said “training,” not “playing.”)

This shouldn’t be too controversial and is similar to the long-term athlete development plan that USA baseball recommends.

If you haven’t seen USA baseball’s long-term athlete development notes, they are worth reading, and this is a good start.

Decisions around specialization need to be considered in high school, but before high school athletes should try playing a variety of sports.

One More Note on High Schoolers

While participating in multiple sports is beneficial for youth athletes, we offer a quick word of caution for those playing multiple sports in high school.

One study looking at sport specialization (Jayanthi et al., 2015) found a strong relationship between specialization and spending more hours in organized sports and injury. Specifically, a high ratio of organized practice in relation to free play was a risk factor. Let’s use a baseball scenario to see how playing multiple sports can restrict free play or rest time.

With the increase of competitiveness in travel baseball, many teams try to lock in their rosters at the end of summer or fall while expecting to compete again the following summer. For teams, this does help them make sure that they have players, but it often comes with fall and winter practices.

This means a three-sport athlete could be playing football in the fall, with “optional” baseball practices on Sundays. This then leads to basketball in the winter and “optional” baseball practices on Sundays, followed by a competitive season in the spring.

Summer doesn’t get any easier. You could technically be in-season for baseball while going to football or basketball camps in the morning. These are potentially huge global workloads for high-school athletes, with very little rest.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer to these questions. Coaches are competitive as well and want certain players on their teams. This can lead to some awkward but necessary conversations with coaches who tell athletes that they have to go to certain practices or they won’t play.

So, parents and athletes may need to put their foot down and make certain decisions on which sports they are playing, or which practices they can make, earlier than they wish.

Help! My Son Only Wants to Play Baseball

How do you keep the specialized baseball player safe? Limit throwing and rotational load.

Being specialized doesn’t mean doing baseball-specific activities 6 days a week. The specialized baseball player needs to be lifting, taking care of mobility work, and everything else that makes a strong foundation. Ideally, these pieces are able to be implemented after a solid assessment.

What is not needed is to play more or try to get better by throwing more bullpens and taking more short flips. 

Part of the reason that not specializing in baseball is good for youth athletes is that there is time away from rotating and throwing, which prevents overuse of patterns. It’s not that soccer, basketball, or football have skills that directly relate to being better at baseball; rather they improve general movement skills in youth athletes but they also give rest from throwing and rotating.

But if youth athletes do just want to play baseball, then they need to take adequate time away from throwing and rotating. They should still take significant time off—aim for at least four months off in a calendar year. Parents should also attempt to have two to three of those months off continuously. Remember, athletes need time away from both throwing and from rotating.

The way one-sport athletes can get better at moving, without throwing or rotating, is take the weight room seriously.

• While hitting, hitters experience 60-120% of their body weight in horizontal force and a peak vertical force of two to two-and-a-half times their body weight on their front leg (Fortenbaugh).
• Pitchers produce up to 150-175% of their body weight on their front leg when pitching (MacWilliams et al., 1998).

After you realize all these forces are already occurring when athletes are practicing, you can see why progressively training to get the body stronger and better at accepting and creating force is a huge benefit.

Lifting for youth athletes doesn’t need to be complicated; it needs to be consistent.

To create and maintain consistency, covering the basic movement patterns and focusing in on technique are the key.

Squat, hinge, push, pull, move laterally, do some fun work. It’s going to involve education and practice.

If an athlete insists on doing baseball work, it should be unstructured. Taking grounders or fly balls can be fine; just don’t have them throwing.

Lastly, these extra baseball activities need to be driven by the athlete, not by the parent or coach.

Planning Is the Key

Here is the biggest piece of actionable advice we can give: parents and athletes need to take time to plan and evaluate what they are doing and when.

Youth and high school athletes and their parents should ask themselves:

1. What are your goals?
2. When was the last time you took time off? 
3. When do you plan to?

Points two and three can be asked for both one sport and multiple.

It best to think of an athlete’s schedule by looking six months back and planning six to twelve months ahead.

This gives you the best chance to get a wide look at things and start planning when athletes are competing, what sports they want to play, when they can take time off to train, and when they have time to rest.

The most important question is not about whether or not to be a multi-sport athlete. It’s what athletes want their careers to be and how far they are willing to go to meet their goals.

There is nothing wrong with playing sports for fun, and there is nothing wrong with setting a high goal in one sport and working towards it. But everyone needs to have a plan.

Athletes should come up with goals and get help from their parents to schedule how they can reach them. Then re-evaluate where they are and then decide on the best path moving forward.

This can be every year for a youth athlete or before a season to see if what sports they are interested in playing. In high school, decisions can be re-evaluated every season because factors in their control, such as skill level, and outside their control, school size and coaches, are going to impact their planning.

Then can then re-evaluate every season and see how, and if, their goals have changed and what they can do to train for them.

Wrap Up: Key Points

There is a lot of nuance in the discussion of sports specialization. We covered a lot of topics, so let’s recap the main points:

• Correlation ≠ causation: Better athletes get more opportunities to play more sports; playing more sports doesn’t always make them better at one.
• Overuse injuries in youth sports have been around for a long time; there isn’t a good reason for youth athletes to play one sport competitively year-round.
• Specialization can work, but it comes with a higher injury risk, especially if specializing as a youth athlete (pre high school).
• Athletes in high school need to evaluate their current skill sets and goals to see if they should specialize.
• Multi-sports athletes need to manage their workloads and make sure they are getting time off and not overlapping schedules.
• If youth athletes only want to play baseball, they need adequate time off from rotating and throwing.
• Getting stronger and learning how to lift is vital for all athletes.
• Athletes and parents need to sit down and plan their time, what sports they want to play, and when they are going to take time off.

Works Cited:

The post A Closer Look at Sport Specialization appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

According to the Paul Haggen at MLB.com, baseball and softball are the most participated in team sports for youth athletes, with over a combined 25 million participants in 2016 (Haggen 2017). Not only that, but baseball participation has increased 7.7% in 2016 (Haggen 2017). It’s great to see so many young athletes taking part in the game we all love and the sport beginning to offer more opportunities for youths to play. However, an aspect of the youth game often unaccounted for in an athlete’s treatment and development, is the two-way player.

Now, we are primarily talking about youth two-way athletes, but this has credence for the high school and collegiate player as well. Two-way players, are an integral part of the youth game. Often, rosters are limited and games and tournaments abound, which can make developing youth players a unique challenge. Everyone needs to be able to pitch and play the field so the team can compete, and playing multiple positions also helps aid skill development by granting opportunities for athletes to develop at multiple positions.

However, the downside to this is that training economy for youth athletes is often overlooked. Pitch counts and inning limits (on the mound) are instituted in many leagues to help curtail the rise in arm injuries, but there’s very little control over innings played in the field or other measures of workload. There are even horror stories of youth athletes playing as many as 120 games in a calendar year—which is only 20-games less than what a AAA team plays in the regular season and twice as many as most D1 baseball teams.

Admittedly, a 120 games is not the norm for most youth athletes; regardless, there are many things we need to consider when playing and training them.

Practice and Game Scheduling

Since we’ve already mentioned the absurdity of some youth schedules, we’ll begin with scheduling and how it affects the two-way athlete. From a macro look at the schedule, playing year-round has its benefits and drawbacks.

• From a benefits standpoint, if an athlete wants to get better at something, he needs to do it. So, playing can help improve skill level and competency within the sport. Though, it’s not that straightforward, as you’re more likely to see improvements by good training & practice than more games.
• However, one study found that up to 74% of youth baseball players, listed as ages 8-18, play with some degree of arm pain and 23% reported injuries that are typically seen with overuse (Melugin et al. 2018).

Now, we do not want to open the debate of early sport specialization (youth players should try to play multiple sports), but we do want to illustrate concerns about youth athletes’ health based around playing time and training economy. This is an even greater concern for two-way athletes because of the increased workload placed upon them.

It’s easy to lose sight of the volume of work placed upon these athletes throughout the course of a season. They play just as many games as their peers, but two-way athletes have a higher workload: high-intent throws when pitching and when playing the field, as well as higher volumes of rotation since they’re throwing more and swinging on top of that. At practice, they throw bullpens, shag, run bases, do fielding drills and take bp. There’s just far more work being placed upon two-way athletes that is not always being accounted for. This increase in workload can lead to an increased risk of injury.

Rotational Injuries

Of the injuries youth athletes face, elbow and shoulder complications are fairly well documented, but rotational ones are less talked about. For more on that, our in-house physical therapist, Terry Phillips, has written about the prevalence of stress injuries to the lower back in rotational sports.

The key points to highlight though are that repeated rotation is linked to lumbar-stress injuries and any injury to that area can cause inhibition to the muscular system, resulting in a drop in performance. Drops in performance are clearly bad, but what’s worse is working an athlete to the point of having a stress reaction or stress fracture to the lumbar spine, which is something that potentially can be career ending.

So, if too much rotation can lead to lumbar issues, then that is important to consider with our focus here on two-way athletes. They’re often the ones rotating more than anyone else on the field with the amount of throwing and hitting they do. As coaches, we need to be cognizant of this fact and adjust their schedules appropriately. They may need more time off or they may need to have specific days dedicated to each task in order to limit the amount of rotation we’re placing on their developing bodies.

Fatigue

Not only is the amount of rotation an issue for two-way players, but also the increased levels of fatigue they experience compared to other players can be problematic. Again, in most scenarios two-way athletes put in a significantly larger amount of work when compared to a position-specific athlete. We touched on training economy earlier, but this is a reminder that this work adds up, and those elevated levels of fatigue have been shown to affect pitching mechanics and increase an athlete’s risk of arm injury (Erickson et al. 2016).

The key here is to be proactive. Yes, often the best athletes are two-way players and they’re key to a team’s success, and while winning that 12u championship is a great memory for your athletes to have, this should not come at at the potential cost of their playing careers.

As coaches, we have to be smart about scheduling. If they’re two-way guys, give them a bit more downtime than a specialized-position player. They need it, and it’s the right move to reduce the risk of injury.

Strength Training

The last point to touch on is the importance of strength training for any youth athlete, regardless of whether they’re two way or not. There’s a persistent belief that youth strength training is bad for developing bodies, and many youth athletes don’t train for this reason.

Now, it’s ok to not do strength training at this age, but there are complicating factors. We’ve all seen the parents who think their kid is a D1 superstar or the next Bryce Harper at age 10. They’re living vicariously through their kids and forcing them to play a ton already, and training economy is stretched thin as is.

Remember how we talked about fatigue? Piling more on a greater workload only makes things worse. From an even simpler standpoint, there’s merit to just allowing your kid to play a sport and enjoy it rather than dedicating himself to training at a young age.

However, there’s also merit to a well-structured strength program for youth athletes—especially since the negative effects have been shown to be more myth than fact. The research on the topic has shown that the majority of injuries come from improper use of equipment, lack of supervision, inappropriate weight, or poor technique (Dahab 2009).

With proper structure, there are a lot of positive benefits to such training. Athletes already have to accelerate and absorb forces near to or over their body weight when they run, jump, sprint, swing, and throw. That’s a lot to be able to handle, and it’s a part of why we see some of the injuries that we previously talked about. Getting in the weight room can help young bodies be more prepared to handle those forces. It also helps balance their body out.

For the most part, baseball is a unilateral sport. We’re always rotating one way; we’re always striding one way when we throw a baseball. Over time, these repetitive movements bias certain functional adaptations. While this makes athletes better at performing them, we need to account for this over time, and strength training is a great way to get some of that balance back.

We should not be over exerting youth athletes in the weight room—we’re not going for maximal squats or deadlifts. We just want to begin practicing good movement patterns and working on laying a foundation that will keep them healthy and setup the rest of their career if they choose to pursue baseball past adolescence.

Closing Considerations

The main takeaway from this is that if you’re coaching two-way athletes, they absolutely must have more rest time. This is non-negotiable. If they’re out on the field everyday throwing, hitting, pitching, playing every inning of every game, and never taking more rest then any of the other athletes, you are putting them at increased risk of injury, regardless of how good or how developed you think they are. They’re still developing, and it’s honestly not worth risking a kid’s career to win a few more games as a middle schooler. Let’s face it, while it is fun at the time, those stats aren’t going to define him getting a college scholarship or drafted as a senior in high school.

This article was written by Director of High Performance Sam Briend

Works Cited

Paul Haggen. Baseball/softball most participated team sport. 2017. https://www.mlb.com/news/baseball-softball-most-participated-team-sport/c-230956600

Heath P. Melugin, Nels Leafblad, Christopher Camp, and Stan Conte. 2018 Injury Prevention in Baseball: from Youth to the Pros. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5825337/

Katherine Stabenow Dahab, Teri Metcalf McCambridge. 2009. Training in Children and Adolescents Raising the Bar for Young Athletes? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3445252/

BJ Erickson, R Sgori, PN Chambers, B Vignona, M Lesniak, CA Bush-Joseph, NN Verma, AA Romeo 2016 The Impact of Fatigue on Baseball Pitching Mechanics in Adolescent Male Pitchers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26952088

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It has been reported that around 25-million boys and girls participate yearly in baseball and softball combined, with that number on the rise. As the number of participants increases, so too does the rise in injuries for athletes participating in these sports. With increases in travel and select teams, along with more tournaments throughout the year, youth sports injuries have become more prominent. In particular, injuries from overuse have seen an increase in prevalence. In the upcoming series, we examine several of the most common overuse injuries seen in youth baseball and softball players. First, let’s look at brief overview of each type of injury.

Growth-Plate Injuries

Growth plates are areas of bones where the most growth occurs. In the humerus, the bone of the upper arm, there are two growth plates: one by the elbow and one by the shoulder. In youth athletes, due to the attachment of ligaments and tendons, these areas can take a lot of stress during the throwing motion and eventually lead to small fractures. This injury is more commonly referred to as Little League Elbow or Little League Shoulder. In severe cases, surgery is warranted; in most cases, time off from sport in necessary. Signs of this type of injury can include pain and tenderness to the inner elbow above the joint line or tenderness around the front and lateral aspect of the shoulder, depending on which structure is most irritated.

Osgood-Schlatter’s and Sever’s Disease

These two conditions are injuries that happen at the knee and heel and are similar to Little League Elbow and Shoulder. At these locations, the difference is that they occur at areas not responsible for how the bone grows in length. Rather, they happen at areas where the bone grows in width. These conditions arise when the quadriceps tendon at the bottom of the knee or the achilles tendon at the heel exert too much force on the bones they are attached to. These areas can actually demonstrate an enlargement of the bone along with a great deal of soreness. Treatment of these conditions can include several months of rest from the athlete’s sport.

Spondylolysis

Spondylolysis is an injury to the lumbar spine most commonly referred to as a stress fracture or a stress reactions. The vertebral arch, an area that spans the articulating surfaces of each vertebrae, becomes overstressed due to continuous, repetitive compressive movements—such as rotation and extension of the spine. Over time, this stress can lead to the weakening and potentially fracturing of bones. Even prior to fracture, signs and symptoms can become present. These include pain in the lower back, apparent hamstring tightness, weakness in the lower extremities, loss of hip mobility, and decreased overhead flexibility. In severe cases, an athlete can be out o sport for upwards of 9 months, and bracing would be necessary. In less severe cases, it may still be recommended that the athlete rest for 1 to 3 months.

We discuss each of these injuries in more detail in upcoming blog posts. The goal for these posts is to be able to give parents and coaches a better understanding of these types of injuries so they can not only better identify any issue at hand, but also to have an idea of what steps to take in case they become worried an athlete is starting to develop an injury. The more knowledge a parent or coach possesses, the better of a job they can do in protecting their young athletes from having to miss playing the sports they love.

This article was written by our in-house physical therapist Terry Phillips

References:

“Baseball and Softball Combine to Become Most Participated Team Sports in United States, According to SFIA Report.” Team USA, www.teamusa.org/USA-Softball/News/2017/May/18/Baseball-and-Softball-Combine-to-Become-Most-Participated-Team-Sports-in-United-States.

The post Youth Injury Series: Introduction appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Growth-plate injuries are among the most commonly reported injuries for youth and teenage athletes—becoming an issue for even 16 and 17 year olds.. Also referred to as Little League Elbow or Little League Shoulder, these injuries occur to an area of the body responsible for roughly 80% of growth to the humerus, the bone running between the elbow and shoulder. As with any injury, the severity of the problem varies with each individual. However, being able to recognize the risk factors associated with growth-plate injuries, as well as the signs and symptoms, plays an important role in reducing the likelihood that these types of injuries will have a major effect on an athlete’s playing career.

First, we must understand what the growth plate is and how it can become injured. The growth plate, also known as the epiphyseal plate or the physis, is an area of cartilage at the end of a bone and is where new bone is made. There are two growth plates in the humerus: one near the shoulder, and one by the elbow. In adults, these areas close and bone no longer grows. In children and teenagers, this area remains open. Because these areas are open zones of soft cartilage, they are actually one of the weakest spots in the upper arm—weaker even than the attaching ligaments and muscles, including the UCL (the ligament needing repair in Tommy John surgeries).

Because throwing puts high amounts of distraction, or pulling, forces on the shoulder and elbow, the growth plates are susceptible to small, microtrauma with each throw. Over time, this trauma can lead to inflammation, adaptive bony changes, such as widening of the growth plate, or in more extreme cases, fragmentation or avulsion fractures, in which the attaching soft tissues can rip off a small piece of the bone.

Early detection is very important to help reduce the risk of a mild injury becoming more severe, which could remove an athlete from several months of competition. Elbow or shoulder pain is the most obvious indicator that something may be happening at the level of an athlete’s growth plate.

In the shoulder, pain is most commonly present in the front and lateral portion. There may be swelling, tenderness to touch, loss of range of motion that may include pain, as well as weakness, pain, or both with resistance to external rotation of the shoulder.

In the elbow, pain will most likely be present around the medial epicondyle, the bony prominence of the inner elbow. There may also be swelling, tenderness to touch around the medial epicondyle, pain with bending or straightening the elbow, and decreased grip strength with or without pain.

From a performance perspective, an athlete could demonstrate a decrease in throwing velocity, and in some instances may also have decreased accuracy due to a loss of grip strength.

Knowing the risk factors associated with growth-plate injuries is also beneficial for parents and coaches so they can help reduce the risk of occurrence. Among the biggest risk factors is the amount of throwing an athlete does throughout the calendar year. USA Baseball has developed the Pitch Smart program that governs how many pitches a pitcher is allowed to throw and the number of days rest following a pitching outing. Pitch Smart also makes recommendations to reduce the amount of throws a pitcher does in a 12-month period, depending on the athlete’s age.

This includes such recommendations as not throwing a baseball for 2-3 months. While Little League and most youth leagues enforce the pitch-count guidelines, there is no enforcement of the amount of throwing an athlete can do throughout the year. With travel teams and tournaments taking advantage of year-round practice, it becomes very easy for these recommendations to be neglected and for young arms to amass a lot of throws throughout the year. In addition to excessive throwing, other risk factors include muscle tightness that can occur with growth spurts, muscle weakness and/or poor body control, poor throwing mechanics, and joint hypermobility—which is another way of saying an athlete is too flexible.

Diagnosing a growth-plate injury can only be done by a medical professional. To fully understand the severity of an injury, imaging will have to be done to see whether there is only inflammation or some other type of widening or fracture of the actual growth plate. Even if there is no fracture or widening present, rest for 4-6 weeks may still be recommended to allow the inflammation to decrease. During this time, the athlete should work with a rehab professional to improve the strength and range of motion in the area, along with other areas of the body, including the scapula, spine, and hips. If left untreated, the injury can progress to a fracture, which in many instances can result in surgery to repair the area. In these cases, the athlete will be splinted for several weeks, will need physical therapy for 4-6 months, and will be unable to throw a baseball for upwards of 6 months.

Injuries to the growth plate are not completely preventable. However, the likelihood of an injury happening can certainly be reduced. The most important guideline to follow is to limit the amount of throwing an athlete does throughout the year. While this does mean adhering to the Pitch Smart guidelines, it also includes avoiding playing other positions that require a high amount of throwing—such as catcher, outfield, or shortstop—if that athlete is pitching regularly. Additionally, athletes should not be throwing year-round. It is widely recommended that youth athletes take at least 4 months off from competitive pitching as well as 2-3 months off from throwing a baseball at all. When athletes are throwing, it is very important they participate in proper warm-up and recovery protocols to ensure the tissues around the shoulder and elbow are ready to take on the stress of throwing. Finally, if athletes are doing a considerable amount of throwing throughout the year, they should work with a rehab or strength and conditioning professional to address any weaknesses or mobility restrictions that may be present, which could lead to increased stresses on the elbow or shoulder during the throwing motion.

Growth-plate injuries continue to be one of the leading injuries that youth baseball players endure at some point in their playing career. Identifying possible risks, knowing the signs, and making the appropriate modifications are extremely important when it comes to limiting the risk of significant injury. As coaches and parents, a lot of this task relies on us. Following the appropriate recommendations can help keep your young ball player on the field throughout the course of a long, hard season.

This article was written by our in-house physical therapist Terry Phillips

References:

Binder, Harald, et al. “Physeal Injuries of the Proximal Humerus: Long-Term Results in Seventy Two Patients.” International Orthopaedics, vol. 35, no. 10, 2011, pp. 1497–1502., doi:10.1007/s00264-011-1277-8.

“Elbow Injuries in Young Throwers.” Nationwide Children’s Hospital, www.nationwidechildrens.org/specialties/sports-medicine/sports-medicine-articles/elbow-injuries-in-young-throwers.

Fleisig, Glenn S., and James R. Andrews. “Prevention of Elbow Injuries in Youth Baseball Pitchers.” Sports Health, SAGE Publications, 4 Sept. 2012, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3435945/.

Klingele, Kevin E., and Mininder S. Kocher. “Little League Elbow.” Sports Medicine, vol. 32, no. 15, 2002, pp. 1005–1015., doi:10.2165/00007256-200232150-00004.

Murachovsky, J, et al. “Does the Presence of Proximal Humerus Growth Plate Changes in Young Baseball Pitchers Happen Only in Symptomatic Athletes? An x Ray Evaluation of 21 Young Baseball Pitchers.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 44, no. 2, 2008, pp. 90–94., doi:10.1136/bjsm.2007.044503.

Pytiak, Andrew V., et al. “Are the Current Little League Pitching Guidelines Adequate? A Single-Season Prospective MRI Study.” Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 5, no. 5, 2017, p. 232596711770485., doi:10.1177/2325967117704851.

Thigpen, Chuck, and Ellen Shanley. “Throwing Injuries in the Adolescent Athlete.” International of Sports Physical Therapy, vol. 8, no. 5, Oct. 2013, pp. 630–640.

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In previous posts, we have examined growth-plate injuries and their effects on the shoulder and elbow. Similarly, in the lower extremity, overuse injuries also happen at the knee and heel. In the arm, these injuries occur at areas with the majority of bony growth. In the leg, they occur at the apophysis, a secondary area of bony growth where the bone grows outwards and has minimal effect on the length of the bone. The apophysis is also an area of tendon or ligament attachment. As a result, this area experiences shearing forces from the pull of these tissues which, over time, can become irritated. This inflammatory response is known as apophysitis. Apophysitis at the knee is called Osgood-Schlatter’s Disease; at the heel, Sever’s Disease. With both, early detection and proper management is essential to limiting the effects it can have on athletes’ playing time.

Osgood-Schlatter’s Disease is the more common of the two in the lower extremities. and has been reported to occur in 13-17% of youth athletes. In females, symptoms most often appear between the ages of 8 and 13. In males, they can appear generally between the ages of 10 and 15. At the knee, the patellar tendon, or the end of the quadriceps muscle, attaches beneath the patella onto the bony prominence of the front of the tibia, known as the tibial tuberosity. When the quadriceps contracts, traction forces are placed on the tuberosity. At certain times in the maturation process, the tibial tuberosity is weaker and unable to withstand these forces as efficiently as with older athletes. As a result, small fractures can occur and be deposited further down the tuberosity—where they solidify. Eventually, this area enlarges and can become very painful and sensitive.

Sever’s Disease, which takes place at the achilles attachment of the heel, has been reported to occur in 2% to 16% of athletes. Generally, Sever’s most often occurs between the ages of 9 and 12. The mechanism is similar to Osgood-Schlatter’s, in which the traction forces of the achilles become too stressful for the calcaneus, the bone where the achilles attaches. As a result, small fractures occur that lead to a bony enlargement of the back of the heel. This area can also become painful and sensitive.

Both conditions share similar causes and predisposing factors. Weakness and poor stability in the lower extremities are major contributing factors: not just around the knee or ankle, but also the hips, glutes, and trunk musculature. In addition, poor flexibility in the ankle, hamstring, and quadriceps, may also add to the amount of stress placed on the knee and heel. It has also been reported that athletes with a higher body-mass index (BMI) may also be at risk for developing this type of injury due to the increased stresses placed on tendons and ligaments. Finally, correlations have been drawn to poor foot positioning—namely a pronated, or flat arch shape—predisposing youth athletes to injuries to the lower extremities. Generally, this foot position puts more stresses on the ankles, knee, and hips, increasing the demands of the muscles that attach to these areas.

If left unchecked for a long enough period of time, these conditions can become so painful that rest from sport may be necessary. Many studies recommend athletes taking anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks—or in severe cases, 3 to 5 months—off from their sport to allow symptoms to subside. During this time, doctors will likely recommend physical therapy to improve flexibility, lower body strength, balance, and overall motor control. Orthotics may also be recommended for athletes with flat foot structure to help improve body mechanics when returning to their sport. Eventually, as symptoms diminish, the doctor or physical therapist will guide a gradual return-to-play schedule for athletes to ensure they do not get start their sport again too quickly.

While not completely preventable, the likelihood of developing Osgood-Schlatter’s or Sever’s disease can be significantly decreased with proper management of youth athletes. Limiting overexposure to training or sport participation is one of the most important things to do. While there is no set limit as to how much youth athletes should play, various studies have recommended that an individual’s workload, whether time spent playing or intensity of training, should not be increased by more than 10% each week. Furthermore, often preceding an injury, an athlete will demonstrate signs of fatigue or decreased playing performance. Coaches or parents should be responsible for recognizing when athletes may be demonstrating these signs and modify their workload accordingly. For coaches, it is also important to recognize that youth athletes mature at different rates. As a result, the same amount of training or activity may be no problem for some, but may be beyond what other players can tolerate. Again, constant monitoring of each athlete is key to limiting the likelihood of injury.

Apophyseal injuries in the lower extremities remain one of the most prevalent injuries in the youth athletes across all sports. Overtraining, poor strength, and decreased flexibility remain among the biggest contributors. Proper workload management, along with a supervised strength and conditioning program, can play a vital role in significantly reducing the risk of youth athletes having to miss significant time from the sports they love.

This article was written by our in-house physical therapist Terry Phillips

References:

Arnold, Amanda, et al. “Overuse Physeal Injuries in Youth Athletes.” Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach, vol. 9, no. 2, 6 Feb. 2017, pp. 139–147., doi:10.1177/1941738117690847.

Launay, F. “Sports-Related Overuse Injuries in Children.” Orthopaedics & Traumatology: Surgery & Research, vol. 101, no. 1, 2015, doi:10.1016/j.otsr.2014.06.030.

Longo, Umile Giuseppe, et al. “Apophyseal Injuries in Children’s and Youth Sports.” British Medical Bulletin, vol. 120, no. 1, 2016, pp. 139–159., doi:10.1093/bmb/ldw041.

Nakase, Junsuke, et al. “Precise Risk Factors for Osgood–Schlatter Disease.” SpringerLink, Springer, Dordrecht, 2 July 2015, link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00402-015-2270-2.

Smith, James M. “Sever Disease.” Advances in Pediatrics., U.S. National Library of Medicine, 17 June 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441928/.

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In previous posts, we have discussed chronic overuse injuries to the upper and lower limbs. The last area of discussion in regard to common youth injuries is stress injuries to the lumbar spine. The main injury of focus is spondylolysis, more commonly known as a stress fracture or stress reaction, and is defined as “a weakness or stress fracture in the bony arch of the vertebral body.”

Back pain is a common occurrence in youth athletes. It has been reported that 2-4% of athletes between the ages of 11 and 13 and 12-20% of athletes between the ages of 14 and 17 report some form of back pain throughout their playing careers. Among those athletes with pain, 40-50% will have spondylolysis. However, it should be noted that spondylolysis does not always manifest with back pain, so a reported incidence rate based on back pain may actually under report the true prevalence of this type of injury.

Several risk factors may lead into a youth athlete developing spondylolysis at some point in their playing career. First, it is important to note the anatomy of the lumbar spine. The articulating surfaces in the lumbar spine orient in a way that makes the lumbar spine more built for bending forward and backwards, and not for rotation. When participating in a sport that requires high amounts of rotation—such as baseball, golf, or hockey—the vertebral arch endures more stress. Other risk factors for spondylolysis include high-training volume, which can include too much time spent training or training at too high an intensity. In addition, an athlete who demonstrates poor strength and body control, especially in the trunk and lower body, is also at an elevated risk for developing this injury. With these known risk factors, baseball has a higher incidence rate of spondylolysis than other sports. Given the high amount of rotations made in a practice or game, the number of games or practices in the course of a year, and the fact that much of this high workload happens during developmental times when youths do not have the physical capacity to handle such a workload, these factors can create a “perfect storm” for athletes to develop an injury.

Several signs and symptoms can occur with spondylolysis. The most telling sign is pain in the lumbar spine—in particular, pain with spinal motions. Restrictions may be present in one or multiple directions of motion. The most common directions with restrictions or pain are bending backwards and bending backwards with a side bend in either direction. Because pain is not always present, athletes should be observed for other symptoms including nerve tightness, specifically in the sciatic nerve going down the back of the leg, which can appear as hamstring tightness. Other symptoms include hip tightness, decreased latissimus dorsi length (which can present as loss of overhead motion), and a loss of muscle recruitment in the muscles of the lower body. Now, the presence of one of these signs does not confirm an injury to the spine, nor does the absence of one of these signs confirm that there is no injury. Rather, these signs should be looked at in clusters where the more signs present, the higher chance there may be an injury to the spine.

Spondylolysis can only be officially diagnosed after proper imaging has been performed. In some instances, x-rays or MRIs may be used. However, especially when dealing with smaller stress reactions, these tools may not provide the most accurate answer to the severity of a spinal injury. The two most accurate tests a doctor can perform are a CT scan or a bone scan. It is important when discussing with your doctor to get an understanding of what type of imaging is preferred and why.

Depending on the severity of the injury, there is a wide range of time needed to take off from sport. In instances of stress reactions, where the bone has begun to weaken but has not yet fractured, it is recommended an athlete take off 1 to 3 months to allow the bone to heal. If an athlete’s spine gets to the point of being fractured, the recovery time may be upwards of 6 to 9 months. Recovery time depends on the severity of the fracture, the athlete’s doctor’s preferences, and the health of the athlete. In many instances, especially when a fracture is present, a brace may be recommended to help with the healing process. For both stress fractures and stress reactions, in addition to rest from sports participation, physical therapy will likely be recommended to address core and overall weaknesses, limitations in spine and hip mobility, poor posture, and body awareness. Generally, physical therapy will take place throughout the entire recovery period, and the therapist will guide the athlete through a gradual return to sport protocol.

Improper treatment of spondylolysis can have severe, lasting effects. The biggest of which is the potential of developing chronic back pain, not only throughout a youth’s playing career but also well into adulthood—even if the bone does fully heal. Other potential implications can include chronic or ongoing injuries to the lower body or, in more drastic cases, can indirectly lead to injuries of the throwing arm. With all the possible long-term consequences, it is important an athlete gets properly diagnosed in a timely manner and works with a physical therapist to address any deficits that may have lead to the injury in the first place.

While spondylolysis is not completely preventable, steps can be taken to reduce the risk of incurring an injury. Similar to the injuries we’ve discussed in previous posts, monitoring the intensity and frequency of sports’ participation year-round is of highest importance. Parents and coaches should take note of fatigue in an athlete. This not only includes subjective complaints of fatigue but also noting decreased performance, complaints of back tightness, or even loss of flexibility in the lower extremities. If athletes are competing at a high level of intensity, they should also participate in some type of strength and conditioning program to address any strength, flexibility, or motor control deficits that may be present.

As the intensity of youth sports continues to grow, so does the prevalence of spondylolysis in this population. The potential of this injury to have career-altering and long-lasting effects makes early detection and treatment extremely important. With proper preventative measures, screening, and treatment, the effects of this injury can be drastically minimized and athletes can continue on with long, healthy playing careers.

References:

Bono, Christopher M. “Current Concept Review: Low-Back Pain in Athletes.” Journal of Bone      And Joint Surgery, Incorporated, 2004, pp. 382–393.

DiFori, John P, et al. “Overuse Injuries and Burnout in Youth Sports: A Position Statement From the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.” British Journal of Sports Medicine, vol. 48, 2014, pp. 287–288.

Lawrence, Kevin J., et al. “Lumbar Spondylolysis in the Adolescent Athlete.” Physical Therapy in Sport, vol. 20, 2016, pp. 56–60., doi:10.1016/j.ptsp.2016.04.003.

Looper, Mark, and Ken Cole. “CORE-Tical Control: Linking The Extremities H Through Neuro-Muscular Control.” Kirkland, WA.

Muller, J, et al. “Back Pain Prevalence in Adolescent Athletes.” Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, vol. 27, no. 4, 2017, pp. 448–454.

“Spondylolysis in Young Athletes.” Physiopedia, www.physio-pedia.com/Spondylolysis_in_Young_Athletes

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Swing plane is a commonly used, and certainly not a new, idea. Ted Williams famously discusses it in his book The Science of Hitting in 1971 and includes this awesome graphic. Swing plane is incredibly important, but the swing plane problem is much more complex than how it’s being discussed.

Vertical Swing Plane

The term used often, and the one I prefer, is “attack angle.” This is the vertical angle that the barrel of the bat travels through impact with the baseball. This can be measured with a bat sensor, and it’s a part of our swing assessment at Driveline.

Why Is This Important?

Being on plane with the pitch, or having an attack angle that matches the incoming pitch angle, has multiple benefits:

1. Distance in the zone: a wider margin of error allows the hitter to make more consistent contact with the ball.
2. Better transfer of energy from bat to ball: when the bat strikes the ball, any offset in the attack angle and incoming pitch angle results in potential energy lost.

So, being on plane can help a hitter with both batting average and power. Note that today, I’m just talking about energy transfer from bat to ball and optimizing exit velocity. When talking about ideal offset, launch angle, hit probability, and expected batted ball outcomes, it’s a different story. We’ll get to that at a later time.

What Is Ideal?

When a hitting coach says “get on plane,” what is the coach telling the hitter to get on plane with? Virtually all pitches enter the hitting zone between -4 and -21 degrees. By no coincidence, the attack angles of pro hitters typically fall within this +4 to +21, so we train all of our hitters to do the same.

Does the Ideal Attack Angle Change for Individual Hitters?

The ideal attack angle changes, certainly, but probably not as much as one would think. When assessing hitters, we learn their attack angle and then build a program to fix it—if need be. Over 90% of hitters that fall outside of the +4 to +21 range err on the negative side. I don’t prescribe exact attack angles for athletes; rather, I prescribe ranges based on their exit velocity. While there are exceptions,  this is my basic formula for players in college or pro ball: If the hitter’s peak exit velocity is under 105 mph, their attack angle should be between 5 and 15 degrees. If their peak exit velocity is above 105 mph, it should be between 10 and 20 degrees.

Why? Being a successful hitter is in large part determined by how well athletes can optimize their mishits. Note that per statcast, only 5% of batted balls are “barrels.” The key is then in optimizing one’s distribution of batted balls.

Batted Ball Distribution of a Professional Hitter During Training

For instance, if a hitter has a peak exit velocity of 95 mph and an attack angle of 19, a slightly undercut ball would result in a batted ball hit softer than 95 mph and above a 19-degree launch angle (a lot of outs). Now if that same 19-attack-angle hitter has a peak exit velocity of 108 mph, the slightly undercut balls would be hit softer than 108 mph and above a 19-degree launch angle. There are a lot of productive batted balls within those parameters.

Looking at it another way, if you have a peak exit velocity of 108 mph and an attack angle of 5, balls hit above a 25 launch angle have high spin and lose a lot of potential exit velocity—this is an inefficient use of above-average bat speed.

Let’s look at an example of a hitter’s batted balls during his first 10 days at Driveline compared to his final 10 days. He trained here for 8 weeks. He was going into his junior year of college and had 0 career home runs. This year he hit 5. Although his peak exit velocity improved just over 6 mph (about the college athlete’s average improvement in-gym), what was really important was that his exit velocities in the 25-35 degree launch-angle window dramatically increased. He was able to maintain exit velocity as his launch angle increased. This was accomplished by a change in attack angle.

First Ten Days

Final 10 Days

This hitter already possessed professional-caliber bat speed, however he was striking the baseball in a way that not optimal for him. The balls he hit at a 25-35 degree launch angle had too much spin and not enough exit velocity due to his attack angle. He was put on a Swing Plane phase of training, and it was a very successful summer for him.

And taking a deeper look, an analysis of the average launch angle of his “hard hits” tells us that he made the swing adjustment we wanted. (“Hard hits” are balls hit within 10% of his peak exit velocity).

Is There a Diminishing Return?

Another consideration is the potential correlation between an increase in attack angle and swing and miss rate. 

SEEMS as though as Attack Angle is increased you do get a slight uptick in strikeouts. But…. pic.twitter.com/a6YONnPLYX

— Josh Rodrigues (@CoachRodrigues2) January 22, 2018

In my opinion, the risk is worth the reward for someone who can slug but surely not for someone who is unlikely to hit a lot of balls above 95 mph.

Speaking of spin, many think that swinging down can create backspin to help balls carry. Yes, this is true. It is also true that swinging down produces more backspin, with all other variables being the same. However, any carry gained from the extra backspin is minuscule in comparison to the carry the hitter loses by cutting down through the baseball and losing exit velocity. Swinging down through the ball is not ideal; this is why the best in the game don’t do it.

Worth Noting

-Attack angle is a 2D view to a 3D problem. It’s very important to consider that the swing is an arc, and that as the swing becomes more vertical, the attack angle becomes increasingly dependent on point of contact. A (horizontal) flat swing at a high pitch keeps the same attack angle for a long time (e.g., the Ted William picture). However, that is not the case with most swings.

Notice the change in attack angle throughout the swing.

Often when a hitter’s assessment data shows us a negative attack angle, he is just consistently late and catching balls too deep in the zone before his bat has begun the upswing. When hitters are perfectly on time and still swinging down, that’s when they need help. This is unfortunately more common than it should be. The opposite is true as well, as high attack angles will be registered on balls hit out in front. In these cases, we put them through our Swing Plane program, targeted at fixing such issues.

-Another important concept to understand is the “Low Point” of the swing. At what point is the barrel at its lowest point, and where is impact happening in relation to it. 

Hitters with a positive attack angle have their low point behind impact. Many hitters have a neutral or downward attack angle, and have swung their whole life with their low point at or beyond impact. If a hitter has synced up his timing mechanism with his low point synced with impact, it can be a tricky process to recalibrate a positive attack angle to a new swing. We must understand that for athletes, every time they tie a perception to an action, it is essentially a data point stored in the athlete’s motor system.

When hitters make an attack angle change, it is common to see timing and barrel precision issues when they face game speed pitches.

They will:

1. swing underneath their target

2. be late, because they are not used to making impact after reaching their low point

Too many hitters try to make this adjustment and just hit off a tee, front toss or batting practice. It is extremely important that hitters who make this adjustment are constantly challenged and facing game speed pitches, so that this new pattern will be stable in-game. At the end of the day, thats all that matters.

How Can You Measure Vertical Swing Plane?

A bat sensor is the easiest and most affordable way to reliably measure vertical swing plane. We use Blast Motion, but other options are Zepp and Diamond Kinetics. All are good products.

It’s not necessarily practical, but with a large enough sample size of batted-ball data collected with HitTrax, FlightScope, or Hitting Rapsodo, vertical swing can be deduced by looking at the launch angle of the hitter’s hardest hit balls or by looking at the average launch angle of balls hit with low spin—That is, the average launch angle of all batted balls with a spin rate of less than 500 RPMs in both directions.

How to Train a Positive Attack Angle

Every hitter is unique, and the best way we can help you to train a positive attack angle is to join our online training program. I work with hitters personally build their drill progressions. Otherwise, here are some pointers.

Hitting Plyos are the best way to train attack angle. If the attack angle is too low or high, athletes will mishit the ball and it won’t go anywhere. Attack angle problems can be exposed and corrected by hitting these, and all the hitter has to do is try to hit them hard and far. Getting instant feedback via a bat sensor is very helpful as well.

Swing 1: swinging down. Swing 2: on plane. Hitting Driveline weighted plyo balls can provide instant feedback. pic.twitter.com/QJBrbuWrOF

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) March 13, 2017

As Joey Votto said, “Let the ball be your feedback.” Take note of the launch angle when batted balls knuckle or have low spin. This can tell us what the hitter’s attack angle is. Generally speaking, hitters topspin balls that are hit at a launch angle below their attack angle. A hitter should not be back-spinning ground balls. If a hitter is hitting balls at a 0 launch angle with backspin, that’s a problem. MLB batted balls at a 7-degree launch angle have topspin.

Horizontal Swing Plane

We’ve discussed vertical swing plane, but I think the horizontal plane in which the bat rotates through and direction of that plane are extremely important—and not discussed enough. Many talk about the swing plane as either up or down, but whether the swing is going left or right(in or out) is important as well. The swing is 3 dimensional, and should be analyzed as such. 

Swing Direction is another term I have used to describe it.

When the bat is colliding with the baseball, the horizontal bat path is either in-to-out, out-to-in, or somewhere in between. 

In response to an earlier tweet, I got a question about what I meant by “entering from the inside” (in regard to bath path). Swing 1 is entering from inside, swing 2 is entering from outside. pic.twitter.com/RRfyg2nDbS

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) March 20, 2018

Every hitter I’ve ever worked with can swing out-to-in. What the best in the world can do is enter and work through the zone in-to-out, out-to-in, or anything in between.

Working in to out. Courtesy of @dustinlind's google drive, the best resource online for hitting information and video pic.twitter.com/xw3lsTnvGO

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) April 28, 2018

HR #14. 3-1, 95.6 mph down-middle. Oppo. Stayed in the frame. pic.twitter.com/coU2ca6wbi

— Craig Hyatt (@HyattCraig) May 22, 2018

This is necessary in order to adjust to the surprisingly wide range of horizontal pitch planes that a hitter will see.

Pitches from Max Scherzer and Chris Sale

The horizontal bat path will dictate how purely a hitter will hit the ball to different fields(at various horizontal launch angles). Hitting a ball to the opposite field with an out-to-in path will slice or cut the ball, and it will be hit with a lot of spin, relatively speaking. The opposite is true as well.

I suspect an analysis of a hitter’s batted ball spin rate (or Batted Ball Bauer units) at various horizontal launch angles could dictate how well a hitter can adjust their swing direction. A hitter with an adjustable swing direction could hit balls with low spin through a wider range of horizontal launch angles.

Another important concept is the idea of squaring up the barrel with the swing direction. This is hard to grasp, and perhaps I can dive it at a later time but this is the gist of it: In ideal conditions, the bat will be near perpendicular to the swing direction at impact.

The barrel begins open relative to the swing direction, and eventually gets to square. The best hitters in the world can control this release of the barrel, and do it early or late depending on swing direction and point of contact.

Notice the thin blue lines in relation to the thick blue line. Barrel goes from open, to perpendicular, to closed throughout the swing. This is caused by the release of the barrel, or more technically: the deceleration of the hands and unhinging of the wrists.

How Can Athletes Figure Out Their Horizontal Swing Plane?

The 3D viewer on the Blast Motion app allows the option to rotated the vantage point in order to see the direction of the swing.

Swing 1: out to in. Swing 2: in to out.

This can also be seen by looking at a hitter’s batted ball spin and exit velocity at various horizontal launch angles. To the eye, this can especially be observed when swinging to hit low pitches.

How to Train It?

Our hitting program has a variety of drills targeted at training this, but my favorite is the “around the world rotation” drill.

One of my favorite drills: Offset Rotation Drill.

Rotate the body 30 degrees after each swing. External goal: drive the plyoball through the center of the cage. Done with and without a stride.

Purpose: Train & feel difference as you work through an in-to-out & out-to-in path pic.twitter.com/VX8aqx9PPy

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) May 19, 2018

Conclusion

These are my thoughts on swing plane, some fact and some theory. The goal of this post is to get coaches and players to look at swing plane as more than just “up” or “down.” The topic is much more complex and deserves to be looked at in more depth.

Like always, we continue to study and learn so we can help our hitters and yours. We’re persistently collecting 3D kinematics of our hitters with our biomechanics lab and with K-Vest, swing plane data with Blast Motion, and batted ball metrics with HitTrax and Rapsodo. We’re excited about what we can discover and as always, I’ll continue to share everything with you guys. I really appreciate you reading.

Jason Ochart

Director of Hitting

The post Using Swing Plane to Coach Hitters: a Deeper Look appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

The secret to all biomechanics and motion capture boils down to a few fairly simple equations, first proposed by Abdel-Aziz and Dr. Karara. These form the basis of what is called Direct Linear Transformation (DLT).

Once you read it, you’ll know the secret to solving all the injuries that happen in baseball athletes at the elbow, basketball players at the knee, and use the power of joint torque prediction and analysis to revolutionize the game!

Ah, well, I guess we need to factor in calibration of the cameras, accounting for optical errors as well, so use this formula too:

And of course, DLT reconstruction is just a few steps away:

Got it? Off you go – set up some cameras, record some markers on the human body, and you too will start solving for kinematics (mechanics) and kinetics (forces/torques) soon enough! A biomechanics expert is born!

(Equation sources: kwon3d)

Alright, so it’s not that easy

Believe it or not, the above equations are how I got started in analyzing biomechanics. Off-the-shelf systems were too expensive to purchase at the time, running in the low six figures to even get started, but high-speed cameras like the Casio Exilim EX-FH2 were hitting the market at ~$500. Rather than just use the cameras for qualitative purposes and coaching cues, I wanted to know if I could create a markerless biomechanics lab using the cameras, mathematics, and some hard work. I figured if I could do this and build a biomechanics lab for baseball, that I would be on my way to solving pitching injuries and that I’d command a ton of contract work from Major League Baseball!

So, two things happened: Yes, it’s just math, and Matthew Wagshol (current biomechanist at Driveline Baseball) and I proved that we could do it, by building the control objects in the aisles of Home Depot and spending countless hours using terrible software meant for graduate students that we twisted in so many directions to just spit out answers.

The other thing is that no one cared. No one cared that we could calculate angular velocities and joint torques using the methods pioneered by Dr. Jesus Dapena and Michael Feltner in their breakthrough paper Dynamics of the Shoulder and Elbow Joints of the Throwing Arm during a Baseball Pitch (1986) that leaned on the amazing description of DLT’s methods in Direct Linear Transformation from Comparator Coordinates into Object Space Coordinates in Close-Range Photogrammetry (1971).

I also slowly realized… that I didn’t care, either. Sure, the achievement was really cool, and as far as I could tell, no one had done it before me… but biomechanics data alone wasn’t getting my athletes major results.

Why?

Biomechanical Data is Useless…. By Itself

It turned out that all this kinematic and kinetic data we were generating after months and months of hard work were just that – piles of data. Biomechanical data does not predict or project injuries, it does not tell you who will get hurt and who will not, and it cannot tell you who has a future in the game and who should learn to develop software instead.

What I slowly began to realize – and how we use biomechanical data at Driveline Baseball now – is that this data is part of a larger thumbprint, an increasingly vital part of an athlete’s assessment. Today, we use this data for amazing purposes, and every day that goes by that we put assessments into our machine learning-enabled backend software, we learn more and more about injuries, performance, and the human body simply by doing our jobs.

Now that’s a story. But before we delve too deep into the actionable part of the data – which we talk about all the time on our blog and on social media – let’s talk about pitfalls of biomechanical analyses and the misuse of science that I see on a regular basis.

Markerless vs. Marker-Based Biomechanics Data

The methods I described above illustrate markerless biomechanics data – this means using multiple cameras to take synchronized footage of an athletic movement and to reconstruct it using DLT to get angular velocities of limbs/body parts and forces at the various joints. However, there are serious limitations with markerless data, and areas where markerless capture cannot adequately address. Here are just a few:

• Rotation about an axis – markerless capture cannot track pronation/supination
• Valgus carrying angle and other deformations can cause faulty readings due to assumptions in markerless methods
• Global vs. rolling shutter – if the cameras are rolling shutter (which most are), then the image is exposed top-down, meaning the top of the image is not at the same time as the bottom of the image

Rotation about an axis is an easy one to understand. First, a graph – this is a comparison of pronation/supination at the elbow using a marker-based system vs. a markerless one.

Second, a statement from a biomechanist who works in an academic lab:

You got me thinking again about the issues/problems with accuracy in measuring internal shoulder rotation… with markerless/digitizing, it comes down to carrying angle of the elbow screwing up the cross-product of upper and forearm (which is how shoulder IR/ER has to be tracked if going markerless).

Even if you simply project the forearm’s long axis onto a plane perpendicular to upper arm’s long axis, the carrying angle screws that up too. The issues begin somewhere near 25-30 degrees flexion and continue up to full extension – basically the period in which the IR is maxing out. Problem is, many simply report a number without trying to ascribe some of it to mathematical artifact.

Gordon/Dapena (2012) proved this at length in A method to determine the orientation of the upper arm about its longitudinal axis during dynamic motions.

As you can see from the image above and what the biomechanist said, markerless motion capture cannot capture pronation/supination. And from all we know about how important forearm rotation is in the pitching delivery, if we cannot capture this, that raises huge concerns.

Yet this doesn’t stop organizations and coaches using cameras and non-validated markerless methods to compute biomechanics, or worse, nonsense like drawing lines and angles on still images and calling it biometrics, biomechanics, or other buzzwords they lift from research papers they do not understand.

Science is something to be respected – and as usual, if it sounds too good to be true, it almost always is.

Using Biomechanics Data Properly to Improve Performance

So, how can we use biomechanics data to improve performance and maybe reduce the chance of injury? By taking frequent snapshots and examining how training impacts the athlete.

By taking thumbprints of our athletes using EMG sensors, biomechanical data, velocity data, and other metrics in our performance software database, we can expose it to machine learning methods to constantly analyze the markers that contribute most to performance gains and what seems to cause backslides in ability or worse, injury.

For example, a common issue that we have found that is a marker for injury is high angular velocity at the elbow and shoulder combined with low ball velocity. This is an efficiency problem; why does the athlete have such high arm speed, but comparatively low fastball velocity? Three things are true about this athlete:

• They are at higher risk for injury due to some breakdown in the kinetic chain
• Ball velocity would be a poor way to monitor this athlete’s throwing load
• This athlete has high potential to gain fastball velocity due to arm speed

A minor league pitcher fit these definitions a few years ago after coming to us during rehab from bone chips in his elbow. After exposing him to a minimal PlyoCare throwing program to smooth out some mechanical deficiencies and to just give him a lower-volume throwing program to replace some days of his long toss program, his velocity went from 87-90 MPH to 92-95 MPH touching 96-97 MPH! He carved up AAA and was in the big leagues shortly thereafter, where he remains as his velocity has settled more into the low-90s as a starting pitcher.

Comparatively, there are athletes with low arm speed that we see in our biomechanical reports. These athletes can probably tolerate higher workloads to develop velocity, due to lower stresses at the elbow and shoulder. A good example of this is Trevor Bauer, and combined with our biomechanical reports and screenings he gets done elsewhere besides Driveline Baseball, we can tailor his program to be high-volume responsibly. He needs high-intensity training like throwing 3 ounce underload baseballs 116+ MPH, because if he doesn’t keep the intensity up, he loses fastball velocity very quickly, something he found out in 2013 when he was tinkering with his programming.

In other news, here's @baueroutage pulling down a new facility record of 116.9mph with a 3oz pic.twitter.com/a21va55HyN

— Driveline Baseball (@DrivelineBB) January 10, 2018

However, the golden goose still remains being able to capture validated biomechanical data without invasive procedures like applying markers to a shirtless athlete. So, how do we get there?

Markerless Systems Moving Forward

Using marker-based systems, we can get sub-millimeter accuracy of movement. Yes, that’s right – our typical mean error in reconstruction is about 0.8mm. Marker-based biomechanics systems are incredibly precise AND accurate, while markerless systems typically lack the validation required to even make firm conclusions about precision.

At Driveline Baseball, we are pushing markerless technology forward by planning hundreds of test cases of marker-based situations vs. markerless ones and running cross-validation tests to see just how useful markerless data can be. It’s possible that a rigid body approach using markerless data in-game could work, but no one has done the research on it or released anything that would indicate the science behind it is sound. While many organizations sell it, no one has proven it in a peer-reviewed journal or a wide release open access paper – and without that, there can be no sound conclusions made on the topic.

Remember, anyone can calculate biomechanics from markerless data – I managed to do it as a college dropout with an intern in the aisles of Home Depot and in a facility located inside of a trailer park. But as many biomechanists and scientists reminded me, it’s not about spitting out data – it’s about going the extra mile and validating your work; proving that you know what you’re talking about. As a physicist at Cal Berkeley once said:

For decades, organizations that have been funded by MLB have churned out thousands of biomechanics reports, and their abilities to predict injury or performance gain have been minimal at best. What the decades of research do show us, however, are how to refine analyses and data collection. Science is a collaborative and iterative process, and we truly stand on the shoulders of giants like Dr. Jesus Dapena, Michael Feltner, Abdel-Aziz, Dr. James Andrews, Dr. Glenn Fleisig, and Dr. Karara.

Driveline Research looks forward to moving the ball down the field of biomechanics, and doing so openly.

(This post was written by Kyle Boddy, Founder of Driveline Baseball and Director of Research and Development)

The post The Limitations and Usefulness of Biomechanics and Motion Capture for Athletes appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Recently we released our first peer-reviewed study at Driveline Baseball, titled “Surface Electromyographic Analysis of Differential Effects in Kettlebell Carries for the Serratus Anterior Muscles.” Now, the title is a little long and perhaps challenging to understand specifically what we studied. So with that in mind, let’s take a little time to explain the thought process behind the study and the impact it has had on how we train our athletes.

The Kettlebell Carry (KBC) is an exercise that has been programmed in gym as part of our recovery routine. It’s also one that has typically been performed in myriad ways depending on where you train. Historically, at Driveline we’ve performed them at 90 degrees of horizontal abduction. We wanted to compare the 90 degree position to a new position, approximately 45 degrees. An EMG sensor was placed on the serratus anterior to measure the difference between the two positions.

The serratus anterior serves as a prime mover for scapular upward rotation and a key muscle in scapular stabilization, two components for reducing injury risk and improving rotator-cuff function. It’s also a finicky piece of musculature that tends to lose function in both athletes with pain and those who are symptom free, but don’t move well. For these reasons, we take time after throwing to take care of this muscle in order to keep it functioning properly.

Prior to our study, we could not find literature on what arm position elicits the greatest amount of serratus activation during the KBC. Therefore, the goal of the study was to determine with minimal coaching which KBC position provided the highest amount of serratus anterior activity.

We used two positions: approximately 45 and 90 degrees of horizontal abduction. Our subjects split into two groups and had surface EMG sensors attached to their serratus anterior muscles. Once ready, we had one group perform a 90-degree KBC, take a short break, and then perform a 45-degree KBC. The other group followed the same procedure but in reverse order.

Our results found that the 45-degree KBC produced a significant increase in EMG activity for the serratus anterior in this position compared to the 90-degree KBC. This suggests there’s a better chance of the 45-degree carry impacting serratus function and strength. As a result, during our recovery work at Driveline, we have shifted from using the 90-degree KBC in favor of 45-degree KBC instead.

Also of note from this study is that technique was not heavily coached. This allowed us to see the levels of activation prior to any major technique intervention from a trainer. However, when we coach our athletes, we look for several things:

• First, we look for posture. We want our athletes to maintain a neutral spine and not compensate by sliding into lateral flexion or lumbar extension to support the weight.
• Second, we look for the lat, bicep, and upper traps to stay quiet during the activity, as this allows for proper scapular upward rotation to occur. If it does, the athlete should feel a muscle turning on under the armpit—that’s the serratus!
• Lastly, we ensure general positioning is in 45-degrees horizontal abduction while the elbow sits at roughly shoulder height throughout the duration of the exercise.

If you are interested in learning more, read the full in-depth look at the KBC study and the science behind it.

This article was written by Director of High Performance Sam Briend

The post A Closer Look at the Kettlebell Carry appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

I get a lot of messages from players and coaches asking various questions, so I figured I’d answer some of the more frequent ones in the form of a short blog. Thanks for reading! 

-Jason Ochart

I want to start implementing Bat Speed Training/overload and underload training. Where should I start?

-A great place to start is to read these two blogs:

Training Hitters with Overload and Underload Bats

Implementing Driveline Hitting into Team Practice

Both blogs outline some theory and application of weighted bat training.

-If you purchase the Axe Bat Speed System, you get a hitting program written by me. You get a hard copy and a PDF, and I talk about the why and the how of weighted bat training.

-If you’re an athlete, you can sign up for Online Training, and you get daily programming so you can do our bat speed program. You’ll also get our strength and position player throwing program.

-A great way to start is to see it in action. You can visit our facility and observe/ask questions on any day we’re open. (Mon-Sat) This is free to all coaches and players and we’d love to have you in.

Should we do overload/underload training in-season?

I think weighted bat training in-season is extremely valuable. Other than gaining bat speed, the weighted bats have training benefits that are extremely useful to an in-season hitter.

-Mechanical patterning: movement deficiencies can be cleaned up by swinging overload bats. Hitters, for a variety of reasons, can make bad swing changes throughout the year. Continued weighted bat training helps make sure you’re moving efficiently.

-Bat Speed Maintenance: Bat speed is one of the biggest contributors to a hitter’s success. Many lose bat speed throughout the season because they abandon all the training they did all off-season, have poor sleep/diet habits(especially on the road), and/or deal with general fatigue associated with being in-season. Using weighted bats, in particular the underload, can keep the hitter from losing bat speed, and even help them gain bat speed throughout the year with a diligent management of workload. Our in-season program has less swings and is more focused on quickness and adjustability than the off-season program, but it still includes a few high intent underload swings/day to keep the body moving fast.

I’m looking to hire a new hitting coach. What would you look for in a candidate?

Communication Skills

Being a coach requires the ability to communicate and connect with athletes. The best coaches I know are extremely effective communicators, and have the ability to express their ideas clearly and concisely. Furthermore, they are able to pick up when the recipient of their communication doesn’t understand something. Typically, the best can say a lot in few words, and the worse say nothing with many. I’d look to hire someone who was particular about what they say and what they don’t say. Sometimes, nothing at all is the right thing to say. Whether the intentions are good or not, far too many coaches drown their athletes in noise, and it waters down everything they say.

An often under-looked aspect of being a good communicator is being a good listener. Bad coaches say their 2 cents, then wait for their hitters to stop talking until they can talk some more. Hitting is very difficult, and it can really mess with the confidence and psychological state of an athlete. Being a hitting coach is part movement coach, part mental skills coach. The hitters need to know that they have a coach who will intently listen to what they have to say. Nothing is worse than talking to someone who blankly stares at you, waiting for you finish talking, while mindless saying “uh-huh,” “yeah,” “or my personal pet peeve,. “I know.” Communication is a 2-way street. If you’re only good at one, then you really aren’t good at all.

I’d look to hire someone who knows how to efficiently express their ideas, and can listen and process incoming communication.

High Care Level

It seems cliche, but the best hitting coaches I know care a lot about the people they work with. Many players feel like their relationship with their coach is a “what can you do for me?” type relationship. This is due to athletic performance dictating how the athlete is treated (or perceived to be treated). A player-coach relationship in which the perception of one another is dependent on in-game performance is a) unhealthy and b) likely to hinder performance as the arousal level increases. You can tell when a team is playing because they are scared of their coach and afraid of losing, or because they are excited to win because they love their coach and their teammates. The latter is less likely to turn into anxiety as the pressure rises.

In my opinion, a toxic trend in baseball coaching is sitting around and complaining/talking crap about your players. I was fortunate enough to work for an incredible leader, Jake Mckinley while coaching at Menlo College, and he had a policy that we were not allowed to make fun of our players. If we had an issue with their performance in the classroom, on the field, or elsewhere, we were to confront the athlete and talk to them about it, like adults. Few things tear a team apart like slander and gossip, and it should never start from the top.

I’d look to hire a coach who cares about people, and is passionate about the development of life skills that will long outlast their playing careers. By no coincidence, the bestskill coaches I know are also exceptional in this regard. Athletes, especially young ones, have keen instincts and they know if you care.

Humility

I’m impressed by what someone knows, and I’m more impressed by what they know they don’t know. I would never hire someone who thinks they have it figured out. When I interviewed Max Gordon, he didn’t have the technical knowledge required when it came to swing mechanics. But when I asked him, he was very honest about what he knew, and about what he didn’t know, and he expressed excitement to learn. It takes confidence to tell someone “I don’t know,” and I’m sure most people would have tried to BS their way through that interview.

The worst coaches I know think they have found the Holy Grail of coaching hitters. You didn’t. The first Olympics were in 776 BC. Its 2,794 years later, and experts in Olympic sports training are still learning how to be better coaches, and athletes are breaking records every year. Baseball has been around for less than 150 years, and the idea that one has it all figured out is laughable and rich.

I’d look to hire someone hungry to learn, and aware of what they don’t know. I’d be sure to find someone confident enough in themselves to be wrong occasionally, and whose desire to be accurate was stronger than their desire to be right.

Awareness/Feel

Social awareness and feel is arguably one of the most important parts of being a leader. Being able to assess the situation and act accordingly is a rare trait, yet one required to be an excellent coach. I know a lot of incredible coaches who have poor technical knowledge of their skill, but are exceptional in this area and their teams always do well. It’s key to being a leader.

Positivity

Hitting is hard, and there will be a lot of failure. I think a hitting coach should be a positive person, generally speaking. There’s nothing worse than having a bad at bat and going back to the Grinch in the dugout. The hitter knows that he shouldn’t have popped up. He doesn’t need a reminder from a coach, or bad body language from his leader. I tweeted my thoughts on an ideal coach dynamic earlier this year.

My opinion:

Head coach should be calm and collected, never rattled. Leaders never panic.

Hitting guy should be a players coach, and generally a positive person since hitting is demoralizing enough.

Pitching guy should be a hard ass because pitchers are slap dicks. https://t.co/oc0269bfbH

— Jason Ochart (@JasonOchart) April 16, 2018

I’m a young coach, and I want to get better. What do you recommend?

I could write a whole blog about this, and most of it would be about things I’ve learned thus far in my short coaching career, often through failure.

-Seek the wisdom and mentor-ship of an older coach

There is nothing quite like experience. When I meet coaches who have been doing it longer than I have, I always ask the same question: “what do you know now that you wish you knew when you were my age?” The answers vary, but they are typically either:

“I didn’t yet know what I didn’t know”

“I cared too much about winning games and not enough about creating winners” or

“I cared so much about where I wanted to go that I forgot to enjoy who I was going with”

-Coach, a lot

The coach-player dynamic is something that took me time to learn. I began coaching college baseball at 22, and what was really helpful for me was that I was also working at a facility, coaching group classes, doing 10-12 private lessons a week and working as a personal trainer. Furthermore, I had a great group of hitters and Menlo and I’d be in the cages working with hitters all morning, 7 days a week.

The point is, I coached for countless hours, day-in and day-out, and there was continuous trial and error. I can assure you I was not very good when I first started, and I certainly still have room to keep getting better. But there are few things in the world that you can become excellent at without time and effort. And the best hitting coaches I know basically live in the cages. You can read all the blogs and listen to all the podcasts in the world, but there is nothing quite like getting your hands dirty and being where the rubber meets the road and getting true hands-on coaching experience.

So, my advice to a young/first year coach is to go coach, and coach as much as possible. Give lessons, teach group classes, find hitters that want to work with you and coach them. You’ll eventually learn and establish your individual coaching style.

-Be Yourself

I had a tough time as a young coach establishing my coaching personality. I am typically introverted and pretty quiet and reserved, but I had this idea that I needed to be a loud hoo-raw type guy because that is how I was coached. It was not genuine, and having to put on a mask every day at the field did not make it fun. Eventually I confronted Jake, my mentor, about it and I’ll never forget what he said, “just be yourself. I hired you, not who you think you should be, and you’re good at being you. Just be that guy.” So my advice to a young coach is to be real and genuine, and don’t worry about trying to fit the typical coaching mold. Your players will probably like you more and so will you.

Those are my answers to some of the most common questions I get. Some were technical/training questions and other more philosophical or theoretical, if you will. None the less, I certainly don’t have all the answers but I figured I’d share my thoughts anyway. As always, I really appreciate you reading.

-Jason

The post Questions from Hitting Coaches appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Our methods for teaching hitting and pitching differ from most. While there are many different styles of coaching, even those who have seen or worked with such variety find that our methods stand out in a number of ways.

We’ve previously discussed various reasons for why we use weighted balls and wrist weights, as well as why we use weighted bats and constraints in hitting.

However, we have not spent much time discussing the underlying philosophical reasons for our methods.

To best, and briefly, show how our coaching is different, let’s break down a comparison by looking at a more common method of coaching compared to some of the philosophies and theories that drove us to think of training in a different way.

Current Coaching Model

Broadly speaking, let’s consider a developmental model of how many coaches in baseball think about teaching hitting and pitching. Although many of them probably don’t mention a specific philosophy, we can see some themes.

Often, coaches select a hitter or pitcher that they personally believe to be an ideal hitter or pitcher. This is usually a very popular and successful professional baseball player.

After this, they first attempt to figure out what pieces of that player’s mechanics are the keys to his or her success. This usually comes from picking up what players say in interviews about their thought processes on training. Second, coaches often analyze mechanics using pictures or videos, which has become increasingly popular. From this, coaches will choose the “big idea” pieces or movements of what they wish to focus training on.

Lastly, coaches make up drills to funnel their players towards what they believe the “correct” movements to be. This usually comes to form by matching specific positions in the swing or when pitching—for example, “every pitcher has a good balance point” or “points the ball to second base” or “each hitter gets their foot down early.”

Those drills are then repeated until a sort of mechanical perfection is reached. Players’ performance in a game is looped back to practice, where the mechanical pieces that players need to improve are practiced.

This approach is supported by a belief that players have good mechanics when they do well and bad mechanics when they don’t. So, this means that because performance is a mechanical problem, it can be fixed by rote repetition.

Coaches who implement this approach mainly work around the idea of an athletic or a baseball-skill funnel. They see what the best players do, and they take their players from where they are to what the coaches believe is best to do.

On the occasion that they don’t have one idea athlete to model, there is the belief that “all great pitchers/hitters do X or Y.” This can continue to have as many steps as the funnel, as the coaches believes there are absolutes in hitting or pitching.

The last piece of this “mystery baseball coach philosophy” is that they try to get their players to replicate the ideal model by drills and verbal cues, generally with a heavy emphasis on internal cues and feel.

Now, we understand that feel is very important to many athletes. Many successful athletes keep routines not only because they prepare them, but also because they have a more consistent feel each time they perform.

But that can also result in an issue: feel can change day by day. Take a second to imagine what a great batting practice session or a great bullpen felt like. Now, compare that feeling to a day you practice after little sleep or when you were sore from lifting.

While the task did not change between those events, the feel did.

Taking a Step Back

This coaching model is probably the most common. Unfortunately, there are a few flaws with how it scales with a large number of athletes. Mainly, it can dismiss certain strengths that athletes have in an attempt to box them into certain movements.

Good theories are not improved by piling up more evidence in support. However, seeing what evidence does and does not support the theory boxes it in and gives better perspective. This makes it so that the theories either become more accurate or needs to be dismissed.

The problem with the coaching model we mentioned above is that coaches almost always solely focus on narrowing down support, rather than looking for exceptions or evidence to the contrary. This leaves holes in any analysis.

All coaching philosophies that are based on the replication of one athlete’s movements have series flaws.

While this doesn’t dismiss the fact that high-level players likely share similar principles, they are most likely much more broad than what’s currently discussed. Plus, trying to narrow down movements to very specific checklists leaves little room for variability.

Taking a Piece From Dynamic Systems Theory

Now that we’ve discussed one of those common approaches, this is where we can take something from dynamic systems theory (DST).

If we quickly take a big picture look, dynamical systems perspective says that human movement consists of a highly intricate network of co-dependent sub-systems (e.g. respiratory, circulatory, nervous, skeletomuscular, perceptual) composed of many interactive parts (e.g. blood cells, oxygen molecules, muscle).

Whew, that’s a lot to take in. Let’s try another way to think of this definition: everything matters, and everything is a piece of the puzzle of athlete performance.

 Performance isn’t a top down mechanical only ‘problem’ but something that have multiple variables to attend too.

To us, this can be first reframed in simpler terms as a comparison to the older school coaching model. We should acknowledgement that both problems keeping athletes from improving and solutions helping athletes to improve can come from many different areas.

DST isn’t cut and dry, but it offers a framework where multiple variables can affect a player.

There isn’t one mechanical model to box athletes into. There are multiple ways that coaches can go about improving an athlete’s movement besides directly coaching it.

The human body is a complex system with different aspects interwoven with one another.

This means that when trying to improve an athlete’s performance, the discussion shouldn’t focus only on mechanics; it should also focus on how mechanics play a role intertwined with mobility, strength, and other factors.

This differs from the older coaching model mentioned above, where athletic improvement comes from mechanical fixes and poor performance also comes from mechanical issues.

Now, for the sake of comparison, we can simplify things a little. Let’s consider three scenarios where we can take a multivariable approach to improving an athlete’s performance. For this, let’s simplify the variables to mechanics, strength, mobility and psych.

• Player one: A college athlete who hasn’t lifted much before, throws 82 mph as a freshman, and is underweight.
• Player two: An athlete coming off an injury and has just finished his return to a throwing program.
• Player three: A hitter who has some good swing metrics, like swing path, but low measurables, and a below-average exit velocity.

Note: The changes in the graphic do not represent changing importance or intent in each variable but the focus of each may change to meet a goal. These adjustments in programming are also made with workload management in mind.

This is where we can see how we are moving beyond a mechanics solution by looking at many factors and trying to address them accordingly.

We should also say that there is significantly more to cover on dynamical systems theory in many areas, but for an introduction of how it may relate to baseball, this should remain simple. We need to start looking at multiple causes and solutions rather than seeing everything through a mechanical lens.

Putting it Together

We admit that trying to move to a system that considers more variables for improving player performance can be daunting.

It can take a lot of time to learn a lot about one domain, so it’s natural to feel overwhelmed by the need to know a lot about multiple domains. However, it mostly takes time, effort, and desire to learn.

This is also where we can do better at breaking down silos among different groups in order to better work together: coaches, strength coaches, physical therapists, etc. We’ve mentioned before that good team communication is vital to success. We see our throwing trainers, strength trainers, and physical therapists discussing issues on players every day.

So, while it would certainly help to be knowledgeable about all these topics, in the meantime we can encourage more collaboration between people of different backgrounds to work with players.

This is why we closely integrate hitting and pitching movement, strength, and mobility, among others. They all have a stake in a player’s success and should be on the same page of what an athlete’s strengths and needs are to see where he needs to grow.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post Comparing Coaching Philosophies appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Weighted balls continue to be a hot topic of discussion in baseball. We’ve written about weighted-ball research before, and with new research coming out recently, we felt it was time for another update.

How We’ve Gotten Here

Many years ago, a number of studies looked at weighted balls and how using them affects velocity. The results were positive.

In 2016, there was finally a biomechanics study on weighted balls that looked at the differences between throwing 4- to 7-ounce balls off a mound and while pulling down.

The publication of Glenn Fleisig’s study on 4- to 7-ounce weighted balls was well received. We were able to learn something new about them rather than just training results.

The natural next step is to look at longer-term studies using heavier weighted balls with a wider range of programming. However, this is far more difficult because there are so many different combinations of ball weight, intensity, and frequency—not to mention work outside of throwing; mobility and strength work matter too.

The good news is there are a couple of studies looking at using heavier weighted balls in training programs.

Today, we examine one paper, one thesis, and one presentation on using weighted balls in training and conclude with some take-away lessons from reading them.

Effect of a 6-Week Weighted Baseball Throwing Program on Pitch Velocity, Pitching Arm Biomechanics, Passive Range of Motion, and Injury Rates

M Reinold, L Macrina, G Flesig, K Aune, J Andrews

First Published June 8, 2018

What the Researchers Did

This paper took 38 athletes, between ages 13 and 18, and randomly assigned them to either a control group, which did a throwing program with only regular 5-oz baseballs or a weighted-ball group, which had pitchers complete the same throwing program as the control group with additional weighted-ball training.

The weighted-ball program followed is shown below using balls weighing 2, 4, 6, 16, and 32 ounces. Three drills were performed with each ball weight: Half Kneeling Throws, Rocker Throws, and Run and Gun.

The weighted-ball group performed the outlined repetitions with a 10-second rest between sets. The control group was instructed not to throw any under- or overload balls during this time.

Before and after the 6-week training period, pitch velocity, shoulder and elbow passive range of motion, and shoulder strength were measured. In each groups’ pre and post bullpens, the motus sleeve was used to measure elbow torque (or stress, as motus calls it) and arm speed.

What Were the Results?

These are the big ideas from the results section:

• Pitch velocity showed a statistically significant increase (3.3%, P < 0.001) in the experimental group (WB group) .
• There was a statistically significant increase of 4.3% of shoulder external rotation in the experimental group (WB group).
• The overall injury rate was 24% in the experimental group (4/17, 2 athletes were removed for other injuries). Of those 4 injuries, two occurred during the training program and two in the season after training. No pitchers from the control group were injured.

Both groups showed an increase in pitching velocity, but the weighted-ball group showed the larger increase.

Both groups showed an increase in elbow torque (as measured by the motus sleeve). Interestingly, the control group had a larger increase in elbow torque than the weighted-ball group, but the difference was not significant.

We have used the motus sleeve to measure bullpens, and our numbers have been higher than those published in this study. This is most likely because our velocities were significantly higher.

In theory, an increase in elbow torque puts a player at a higher risk for injury. However, the control group did not experience any injuries.

Arm speed increased for the control group and decreased for the weighted-ball group. As we have mentioned earlier, the motus unit sits on the forearm, meaning it cannot directly measure internal rotation. At times, arm-speed measurements can change per pitch, as we’ve seen before. Because the sensor sits on the forearm, it can change based on the velocity of forearm rotation.

The athletes also performed a baseball-specific strength and conditioning program, specifically focusing on strengthening the external rotators. The external-rotation strength of the control group increased, whereas the training group showed no change.

The Effects of a Baseball Throwing Velocity Improvement Program on Shoulder Range of Motion (Thesis)

C Rodrigo (Under the direction of Joseph B. Myers, Elizabeth E. Hibberd, and William Burniston)

First Published: 2014

What the Researchers Did

The researchers wanted to specifically examine the effects on range of motion of a weighted-ball throwing program. This study included a control group and a group participating in the weighted-ball throwing program. The researchers were blinded to the group assignments of the participants.

Post-testing data was collected on 32 individuals: 20 in the control group and 12 in the intervention group. These 32 were from an original group of 57 baseball players between the ages of 8 and 17. Of the participants, 47% indicated that their primary or secondary position was pitcher. The study started off with a higher number of participants but a number dropped out. Reasons for leaving either group were not tracked.

The program lasted 10 weeks. The players in the weighted-ball group threw four days a week: two days under staff supervision at a training complex and two days on their own. The throwing programs were individualized for each athlete.

Although the throwing programs were individualized, the researchers did include general guidelines that the throwing program followed.

What Were the Results?

After the 10-week period, the only significant difference between the weighted-ball group and the control group was that the weighted-ball group showed a significant decrease in Dominant Arm Total Arc of Motion of 16.4 +/- 11 degrees. The control group showed a mean decrease of 6.2 +/- 13 degrees.

No significant differences between groups were present in the change scores for velocity, TAMD, GIRD, ERD, Dominant IR, or Dominant ER. This program did not include a specialized stretching routine; players may have stretched on their own, but they were not given targeted exercises.

The researchers mentioned several limitations, including the wide age ranges: 10-17 years old for the control and 8-17 for the intervention/weighted ball. There were also unbalanced groups, with 12 athletes in the intervention group and 20 in the control group.

They also said that alternative workouts, either lifting or other baseball work, may have been conducted during this time and affected the results. Finally, the researchers noted that the findings had low statistical power, in part because of the small sample size and the large number of participants unable to complete the study, for a variety of reasons.

Effects of Velocity, Distance and Shoulder Range of Motion in Two Throwing Programs

D Peters, H Maliska, E DeLeon, S Coste

Presented: 2018

*Note: The summary below is from a conference presentation, not a paper, so the analysis is shorter.

The study involved 20 college baseball players aged 18 to 22. The players had their maximum throwing distance measured, as well as their throwing velocity, shoulder range of motion abduction, flexion and external rotation. After the initial screening, players were randomly divided into two groups: a weighted-ball group and a long-toss group.

The weighted-ball group performed the following program three times a week:

The long-toss group performed the following program three times a week:

What Were the Results?

Throwing distance improved in both groups, as did range of motion; however, there was no significant difference in velocity. The long-toss group also showed the greatest increase in distance and range of motion.

The researchers also noted several limitations to the study in addition to the relatively small sample of each group: The post testing had drastically varied weather when compared to the pre-test, especially wind. The range of motion was measured by different researchers pre and post test that could have increased the error of the measurements. Internal rotation ROM was not measured, so we can not tell if there was a change in total range-of-motion. Lastly, because this is a presentation, the exact distances and measurements are not listed.

Lessons Learned: What We Can Take From the Research

Each of these has its own strengths and weakness. But after reading each of them, there are still some lessons we can take, along with better questions we can look to answer in the future.

Too Many High-Intent Days

The first and second study supports what we have mentioned previously: doing more than two high-intensity days is too many.

High-intent weighted-ball training should at minimum be considered as much, if not slightly more, work than a bullpen.

This means that high-intensity days should be planned appropriately and without excess. High-intent weighted-ball training is a good example of something where more does not mean better.

Don’t Overlap Throwing Programs

One thing we wish the first study mentioned above had had was more information on the non-weighted ball throwing program. Whether or not we look to high-intent training with weighted balls or just for warm-ups, there needs to be a balance in throwing loads appropriately. This is especially true for high-intent throwing.

You wouldn’t find two 5-oz throwing programs and do them simultaneously, so you shouldn’t take a 5-oz throwing program and overlap that with a high-intent weighted ball program.

Weighted balls as a warm-up can be introduced along with a throwing program that includes bullpens and long-toss. However, that requires athletes to treat warm-up throws as a warm-up, so they don’t blow it out because they feel good. Second, it requires some reduction in throwing of regular baseballs before bullpens, simulated games, or long-toss.

The first 6-week study had a control-group throwing program and a weighted-ball group that did the control group’s throwing program and the weighted-ball throwing program. There isn’t any information on what the control group program was, so all we can tell is that the weighted-ball group had more volume because they did both.

Overall Training Economy Needs to Be Managed as Well: Multiple Variables to Consider

When we talk about training economy, we are saying that everything an athlete does needs be accounted for; otherwise, you run the risk of fatigue or, worse, injury.

The first study mentioned found that ER strength stayed the same in the weighted-ball group but increased in the control group. Both did a baseball-specific strength program that focused on strengthening the rotator cuff, particularly the external rotators.

The no-change in the weighted-ball group, while showing an increase in the control group, may be attributed to the weighted balls requiring too much shoulder work on top of the shoulder program. It’s possible that ER strength of the weighted-ball group might have increased if the throwing volume of the weighted-ball group was decreased or the volume in the weight room and shoulder program was decreased.

We can make the example a bit simpler. Let’s say you have a high school athlete who needs to improve his squat. He’s never really squatted before, and since this is some simple mobility work, he’ll be doing front squats twice a week. Monday is a heavy day, with Friday as a lower volume and weight day to help groove the pattern. This, at the very least, should help him improve, but there can also be the risk of too much work.

Doing back squats on Monday, Zercher squats on Wednesday, and front squats on Friday with superseded goblet squats in between sets and a finisher of 100 bodyweight squats after each day is probably too much.

This means that the programming of what you are trying to improve matters a lot, whether throwing or weight room specific.

The programming of how every piece fits together is the key. This is especially true of the arm.

The second and third studies focus largely on the sets and reps on the weighted balls, but they provide little information on other throwing or weight-lifting work.

Lifting and mobility training all play a part in an athlete’s range of motion and velocity work. They should be accounted for whenever possible.

Range of Motion Questions

Counterintuitively, the first and second study had range of motion findings that were opposite of one another. (We’ll leave out the third study for now because the full numbers are not available, internal rotation was not measured, and two different researchers measured the pre/post tests.)

Both gaining and losing too much range of motion can be negative. Research shown that range of motion changes after one outing, after a season, while doing a warm-up, and while doing specific stretching.

Ideally, the full individual numbers would be available so we could see how high the outliers were compared to the average (the first study mentioned that two athletes who got hurt gained 10, 11 degrees of ER) in order to see if there were any commonalities, so those athletes with similar attributes could be, at minimum, screened away from that programming.

Screen Your Athletes: Researcher and Coach Differences

Finally, two of these studies (the first and third) had groups randomized into throwing groups. While this makes good sense from a research perspective, it makes little sense from the realities that coaches and players face.

From a coach’s perspective, he wants to take in information about a player and set him up with the best set of tools or variables available to succeed.

Not discussing these differences in approach is one of the reasons why we usually end up with researchers and coaches talking past one another—both with legitimate gripes:

• Researchers complain, “Ah, but how do you know of X is actually what made them better when you have all these variables.” This is true.
• Coaches might look at a group of athletes and say, “Based on X, Y, and Z that athlete should be focusing on X in practice not Y. Otherwise he’s not being set up for success.” This is also true.

Training decisions should be made based on screening. The more impactful research is going to be through communicating certain characteristics and showing coaches what to look for and what interventions can help them.

This means researchers need to realize that randomizing participants may not be the best approach, and they should loop in coaches on other ways to screen athletes. Coaches also need to get more specific in screening and tracking so they can help researchers see what real-life interventions are occuring.

Training decisions should be made based on screening. The more impactful research is going to be through communicating certain characteristics and showing coaches what to look for and what interventions can help them.

This means researchers need to realize that randomizing participants may not always be the best approach, and they should loop in coaches on other ways to screen athletes. Coaches also need to get more specific in screening and tracking so they can help researchers see what real-life interventions are occurring.

Conclusion

We’ve taken something away from each study mentioned today. However, it’s important to note that we still have a lot of work to do in the future. Much of this work will not be on individual items, such as weighted balls, but how multiple items interact with one another.

This idea stems from dynamic systems theory and the idea that we are looking at the interaction of systems with one another, not trying to change something from the top down.

The truth is that while we want to highlight this one mechanical position or a certain training tool as important or not, there are serious limits to eliminating other variables. Real life is all about the interaction of a large number of variables. Knowing that athletes may have 10 important variables, focusing on 4 of them, and claiming 1 of them is bad leads to serious limitations regardless of what that one thing is.

Acknowledging and attempting to measure the effects of how different variables interact is incredibly difficult, but if we don’t start trending in that direction, then we run the risk of claiming findings that make sense in a vacuum but fail in the real world.

This is why we push for open and as much data as possible so we can not only study the averages but also the outliers—along with getting better ideas of what pieces work or don’t work well together.

A Pitching Mechanics Example:

Single variable take: Position X results in elbow torque 1 standard deviation higher than the mean.

Multivariable take: Position X, along with positions Y & Z, results in elbow torque 2 standard deviations higher than the mean.

Or

Position X, along with A & B, results in elbow torque at the mean.

A Training Example:

Single variable take: Introducing X into a training program resulted in no change in velocity and no change in injury rate; therefore, it is not useful.

Multivariable take: Throwing program X along with weight-lifting program Y and mobility program Z resulted in no change in velocity and no change in injury rate.

Or

Multivariable take: Throwing program X along with weight-lifting program A and mobility program B resulted in increased velocity and no change in injury rate.

Acquiring a better knowledge of how different pieces layer with each other is the key to the future of understanding how to increase velocity, get better performance, manage fatigue, and reduce injury risk. It’s much harder to do, but it is vital to helping get more research applicable to coaches.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post A Look at Long Term Weighted Ball Research appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

Previously, we’ve discussed various updates on weighted-ball research: both on biomechanical findings from ASMI and from a variety of long-term training programs.

More research is a good thing, and as we look back on what we think we know, there are some interesting points that are not often discussed but important to consider.

Pulldowns and Bullpens: A Different Look

We’ve discussed the findings from ASMI’s biomechanical look a 4- to 7-ounce balls numerous times. One of the big takeaways from the paper was that 5-ounce throws off the mound had a statistically insignificant difference in torque when compared to pulldowns.

Pulldowns were slightly higher on average, and while there could have been bigger individual differences, this was still an important finding.

The goal of pulldowns is to match or slightly exceed torques seen in a bullpen as a training stimulus. Seeing that the difference between the mound and pulldowns was statistically insignificant means that that training stimulus meets our intention.

But there is a way to frame this finding differently.

Let’s say there is a coach who sees someone pulling down and believes the following:

“Pulldowns must be twice as stressful as pitching!”

This is not an uncommon position.

Looking from this viewpoint at ASMI’s findings you can see that pulldowns are less stressful than previously believed. But you can also come to the belief that throwing bullpens is more stressful than previously thought.

“I thought pulldowns were twice as stressful at pitching but when I found out that they were almost the same I realized I need to do a better job scheduling and warming up my pitchers to pitch.”

This difference seems to be largely based on perception. Most baseball players are used to throwing a high number of bullpens; less are used to pulling down.

Pulling down once a week may be called aggressive, whereas doing one bullpen a week may be called not enough work. Even though our current understanding of the torques of bullpens and pulldowns states that they are statistically insignificant.

Some may realize there is little difference and think they can pulldown as much as they throw in bullpens. But, doing 50 pulldowns is excessively unnecessary, and throwing 50 pitches in a bullpen needs more planning than often thought—and might be equally unnecessary.

In reality, bullpens likely need to be considered more “stressful” or intense than they currently are, both from a health perspective and from a performance perspective.

This may be a case where we are focusing too much on the specific effects of weighted balls and missing the improvements that still need to be made with workload management.

Whether using weighted balls or not, there is still much to be gained in both preparing to throw a bullpen and managing of frequency and intensity of bullpens.

External Rotation and Stress: Does Theory Match Up With What We Know Now?

Range of motion concerns have been a critique to throwing weighted balls, with research showing there can be a gain in external rotation and a loss of external and internal rotation, depending on the programming.

While the theory for those concerns is simple—that the heavier weight causes more external rotation— research has suggested that more external rotation can be more stressful on the elbow.

So, that part should be clear. We don’t have data on the biomechanical effects of balls 8-ounces or heavier, but we have a place to start with 4- to 7-ounce balls.

Now, considering this theory and looking at the biomechanical data that we’ve seen can be confusing. In this theory, ASMI’s study should show that 6- and 7-ounce balls cause more torque on the elbow and shoulder because of increased external rotation. But ASMI showed the 6-ounce ball as causing less elbow and shoulder stress than the regular baseball and the 7-ounce baseball even less than the 6-ounce.

This leads to some interesting questions:

• If weighted balls (each ball heavier than 5 ounces) lead to more external rotation but less torque, what is the cause?
• If these balls do increase external rotation, is gaining more external rotation still a negative if it can be achieved with less shoulder and elbow torque?
• Do 6- and 7-ounce baseballs cause less torque than a 5-ounce in part because external rotation may be statistically insignificant? If so, is there a specific ball weight where external rotation starts to statistically significantly increase or decrease?

We’ve tried answer some of these questions before, and the answers were still mixed. We didn’t use our motion capture lab, but we used the motus sleeve to measure plyo care velocities and regular plyo throws. The amount of external rotation changes with each drill, and we saw the highest external rotation with the lighter balls.

Although there isn’t current research on the biomechanical differences of heavier weighted balls, we do have some data comparing pitching to football passing, which was first published in 1996.

While football passing and pitching are obviously different, it’s the closest data we have right now so it’s worth taking a look.

Remember a football (14- to 16-oz) weighs approximately three times the weight of baseball (5 oz).

Here’s what they found in relation to external rotation and elbow and shoulder torques.

Note: This study compared 26 pitchers to 26 quarterbacks. Results might differ slightly if the same players performed both the football throw and pitching.

So, when looking at comparing different objects at different weights, we see that pitching has significantly higher external rotation, whereas the elbow torques were not significantly different.

In the conclusion, the researchers wrote, “Football passing did not produce greater forces or torques.”

Clearly there are difference between football passing and pitching. The motions are often taught differently and they have different volumes and intensities in regards to programming which may play a role in the measurements.

Another look at external rotation and weighted balls can be found in a thesis titled “The Effect of Throwing Under- and Over-Weight Baseballs on the Pitching Motion.”

The methods were different than the most common way of measuring torque. They were measured using markers that were put on using straps, meaning there may be more error than a regular lab with markers stuck on individually.

That being said, the only ball that was significantly different in regards to external rotation was the lightest ball thrown, the 3 ounce.

More work should be conducted on the biomechanics of weighted balls since the belief that “more weight equals more external rotation which equals more stress” is not a clear conclusion from the biomechanical data available.

There are also concerns on how weighted balls affect passive range of motion. This is undoubtedly related to what happens biomechanically when throwing, both with and without weighted balls. As we stated earlier, we’ve seen that passive external and internal rotation can change, both an increase or decrease. Ideally we stay away from significant increases and decreases of range of motion with athletes who are already in a normal range.

So, there appears to be different effects depending on the programming and what athletes do mobility and strength wise. Which is why it’s important in the future to also consider what athletes do outside of throwing.

Ideally we can learn more biomechanically about heavy weighted balls, while learning from the results of other papers. This can help with programming ideas, which may work and which may be too much, and help use use assessments to drive athletes towards the right program for them.

Weighted Balls Don’t Just Train the Arm

This was discussed in an earlier article on weighted-ball training, but it bears repeating and expanding upon.

The ASMI study looking at 4- to 7-ounce balls found significant differences (p<0.05) among ball weights between both pelvis angular velocity and upper trunk angular velocity. While the researchers also suggest that “these differences were small and probably of little clinical relevance,” they still occur even though the ball weight changed by, at most, 2 ounces.

This leads to the question, What differences would be seen then with ball weights that are heavier than 7 ounces? Knowing there can be differences by just changing an ounce means there are likely bigger differences at heavier weights.

Although they are obviously coached very differently, there were also differences seen between pitching a baseball and throwing a football. Many of these differences were quite large.

This brings up the more relevant question of how many of these differences in movement are because of the weight change (and size) and how much of the difference is due to the coaching.

Because if there were changes that could be seen just from changes in weight, that would open up the possibility that certain weights could be aimed at specific movement changes, arm action while or body wise. Of course, there would still be difficulty in figuring out how much change is coming from changing the environment (ball weight) and which is coached.

Conclusion

• If you think that pulldowns are far more stressful than pitching, know that the difference is statistically insignificant and bullpen/pitching warm-ups and scheduling should be treated more seriously.
• The current biomechanical research does not draw a straight line between a heavier ball weight and more external rotation. More biomechanical data should be conducted on heavier weighted balls to examine what the acute biomechanical effects are. More long-term studies of varying programming should be conducted to examine the changes of passive range of motion.
• Biomechanical data supports the idea that changing ball weight causes small changes in movement outside of just the arm. It’s unknown if this pattern continues, or to what degree, with heavier ball weights. Long-term biomechanical changes are not known and should be researched under a variety of training programs.

This article was written by Research Associate Michael O’Connell

The post Uncommon Points from Weighted Ball Research appeared first on Driveline Baseball.

I’m obsessed with sample sizes. And I think anyone looking to draw any sort of conclusions off data should be.

The world of analytics has come far in recent years, but the critical area of research that deals with reliability in drawing conclusions off certain sample sizes has still left a lot to be desired. Specifically, anyone interested in the projectable nature of sample statistics should be deeply interested in what the benchmark for the appropriate n, or number of data points in the sample, to reliably project the number as a stable indicator.

That’s not say there hasn’t been some research: Pemstein and Dolinar have helped raise the bar high and set out an intuitive approach to sample size, in their (in my eyes) instrumental piece here and they reference even earlier work done in much the same vein by others like Russell Carleton, while Adam Dorhauer provided a few applicable situations for putting the gory math to work.

Warning: There are a few technical, math details below, which aren’t instrumental to the broad understanding of this piece but are included for replicability purposes and the the mathematically curious.

However, almost all past research has stayed at largely plate-appearance level (or the even more infrequent event of a BIP, or Ball-In-Play) and used only Cronbach’s alpha as a measuring device, which is the average of all split-half reliability coefficients, stemming from splitting each sample size in half and measuring correlations. Below, you also find the equations for the raw Cronbach’s alpha on the left and the standardized Cronbach’s alpha on the right.

A delineation of the variables included:

• K denotes the number of individual samples, 
•  denotes the variance between the samples,
•  denotes the variance of pitches among all samples,
• and  denotes the mean of the [K * (K-1)] / 2 number of non-redundant correlation matrix values.

As mentioned above, many of the findings have revolved around finding the appropriate sample size for plate-appearance metrics, like walks, strikeouts, home runs, etc. In this piece, however, we examined the following pitch-level metrics (taken from separate player seasons between 2008 and 2017):

1. Zone Swing %
2. O-Zone Swing %
3. Contact %
4. SwStrk%

We also employed an assortment of different methodologies to validate our findings below.

Although not totally clear, it seems from the explanation given in previous research that the “raw” covariance-based Cronbach’s alpha was used as a measure of score, which is often sensitive to differences in row variances, where the rows are going to be player-specific sequences of pitch-specific column values. We instead decided to go with the standardized alpha, which is based on the correlations between samples. The rationale being that pitch samples with additional variance will be given extra weight if the individual items (or rows of data) are not standardized. Given that we have a congeneric model where each line of the matrix (Xi = bi*T + Ei) and each item doesn’t measure the “true talent level” of individuals (as these numbers are to an extent dependent on opposing pitcher, ballpark, umpire strike zone, etc) but some items are more highly correlated with the “true talent level,” the raw and standardized alpha are not equal. (They would be if a parallel tests model held, where each item is measuring the same underlying talent level and the error items are equal.) If desired, a more in-depth discussion on the use of raw vs standardized alpha is available.

An example of what the first 5 rows of a covariance matrix would look like for a 10-pitch sized sample follows:.

Caption: 1 denotes the presence of a “swinging strike” within each pitch; 0 denotes the lack thereof. The smallest matrix actually constructed had 40 columns and over 100,000 rows of N-sized pitch samples.

In addition, we relied not only on Cronbach’s alpha but also looked at composite reliability, which combines the true-score variances and covariances with factor loadings in a confirmatory factor analysis and does away with many of the assumptions that Cronbach’s alpha adheres to. Although composite reliability is seen as a universally superior form of loading when it comes to specific construct-factor loading, this advantage is not specifically important when evaluating the outcomes of separate baseball pitches. We still included it alongside Cronbach’s alpha in order to account for potential inequalities in error variances or measurements of correlated error amongst our player-specific list of pitches, a reported-drawback of Cronbach’s alpha. Additionally, for those interested, there is a list of more circumstance-dependent reasons to use composite reliability over Cronbach’s. Composite reliability can be mathematically described as (A)2 / [(A)2 + B ],where A represents the standardized loading for each item variable and B represents the variance from random measurement error.

To summarize, we don’t necessarily advocate composite reliability as a superior form of reliability in this situation, as factor-loading is not recommended, but we wanted to provide a possible additional benchmark in case the two measures signal different sample sizes—that in of itself would be interesting and might raise up relevant questions.

Looking at the pitch-level data from seasons 2008 through 2017 (and splitting each player season by year to account for differences in player skill or tendencies), we looked at reliability figures for a sequence of pitch numbers (from 40 to 75 pitches, which was enough in all of our main four cases to reach the general cutoff of 0.5 Cronbach’s alpha or composite reliability that was employed in previous cases).* The sequential list of pitches was first ordered by batter after each full-sized sample (which changed based on the the eight-different incremented cutoffs we ran through the data) was arranged as the rows of a covariance matrix, which was then run through a series of reliability measures. Here are the totals for the four metrics:

Now these calculations suggest that Cronbach’s standardized alpha and the composite reliability residual-variable calculations found themselves largely in agreement. To be clear, the suggestion here is that the sample size is large enough to expect the next similarly sized sample to replicate the same level of incidence in said metric.

• 55 pitches for a reliable O-Zone Swing %
• 70 pitches for Zone Swing %
• 40 pitches for Contact %
• 70 pitches for SwStrk %

These calculations were again calculated from over 7-million pitches thrown at the major league level over the last decade and can help us in pinpointing emerging trends of plate discipline or classifying players in buckets as soon as possible.

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, a general look into any number of different permutations and combinations that arise from a sequence of pitches at the game level. (A more concentrated delve into the recent couple years where the shift to the three true outcomes could indicate different sizes of n). We just wanted to get begin looking at the reliability of progressively more discrete units. Catch us next month when we look at what happens during millisecond-intervals of pitches.

(Joking)

(Maybe)

*The 0.50 cutoff comes from the idea of accounting for the “majority” of the variance in the same setting.

References

525,600 Minutes: How Do You Measure a Player in a Year? | FanGraphs Baseball. Available at https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/525600-minutes-how-do-you-measure-a-player-in-a-year/ (accessed July 27, 2018).

A New Way to Look at Sample Size | FanGraphs Baseball. Available at https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-new-way-to-look-at-sample-size/ (accessed July 27, 2018).

Regression with Changing Talent Levels: The Effects of Variance | The Hardball Times. Available at https://www.fangraphs.com/tht/regression-with-changing-talent-levels-the-effects-of-variance/ (accessed July 27, 2018).

Falk C., Savalei V. 2011. The Relationship Between Unstandardized and Standardized Alpha, True Reliability, and the Underlying Measurement Model. Journal of personality assessment 93:445–53. DOI: 10.1080/00223891.2011.594129.

Cortina JM. 1993. What is coefficient alpha? An examination of theory and applications. Journal of Applied Psychology 78:98–104. DOI: 10.1037/0021-9010.78.1.98.

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In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed spin rate extensively, including what it is, how it affects pitch characteristics, and how it is useful for pitch development, among other topics. For this validation study, we looked at the performance of the Diamond Kinetics PitchTracker ball in measuring spin rate, velocity, and other metrics, as compared to Rapsodo. We previously validated Rapsodo to Trackman, which you can read about here.

What Is PitchTracker?

PitchTracker uses a “Smart” Ball paired via Bluetooth with the PitchTracker iOS app. Using an internal IMU that detects the motion of the ball, PitchTracker outputs velocity, spin rate, timing, and extension data. Pitch metrics can be viewed live on the iOS app and then stored in individual bullpen sessions, with options to tag pitch type and location.

Earlier this year, we did some preliminary investigation into the accuracy of the PitchTracker spin-rate metric as compared to Rapsodo using our Spinball Sports pitching machine. Our results were very encouraging, showing an R^2 value of .975 between PitchTracker spin rate and Rapsodo total spin, ignoring a few obvious outliers.

DRIVELINE R&D: Validating the @DiamondKinetics Pitchtracker vs. @rapsodo. r^2 value of Total Spin vs. Spin Rate of 0.975 shows great validation for spin metrics out of our @SpinballSports machine.

Blog post to follow w/ human pitchers to test other metrics by DK! #proservices pic.twitter.com/KdMsN9sjKV

— Kyle Boddy (@drivelinebases) April 12, 2018

Given our initial findings, we decided to investigate further. We had 6 athletes throw a 10-15 pitch bullpen with the PitchTracker ball, with a mix of fastballs and breaking balls. We compared the PitchTracker readings with the Rapsodo.

Spin Rate

First, let’s look at how spin rate data from PitchTracker compares to Rapsodo. Using linear regression (and filtering out a few clear outliers), there is a very strong correlation (R^2 = 0.9856) between the two data sets, with a trend line slope of 1.0175, indicating a near linear, near 1:1 relationship between PitchTracker and Rapsodo spin rate.

By separating pitches by pitch type, we also see similarly encouraging trends. R^2 values are 0.9737 and 0.9923 for fastballs and breaking balls, respectively, along with trend-line slopes of 1.0171 and 1.0181. This indicates that PitchTracker performs similarly against Rapsodo, regardless of spin direction or pitch type.

While linear regression is useful for showing that two variables are correlated, it doesn’t fully demonstrate the differences between the readings. In this instance, since we are looking at how two instruments measure the same variable, a Bland-Altman plot (differences vs means) is useful to illustrate systematic difference, or bias, between the two measurements.

Here, the mean difference in spin rate (PitchTracker spin minus Rapsodo spin) is 32.3 ± 22.6 RPM, meaning PitchTracker has a bias of about 32 RPM, and we can expect readings to be anywhere from 12 RPM below to 78 RPM above Rapsodo, with 95% confidence. Given that the average MLB spin rate is roughly 2200 RPM, this constitutes a relatively small bias and shows good agreement between PitchTracker and Rapsodo when measuring spin rate.

Velocity

After spin rate, we also compared PitchTracker velocity against Stalker Pro 2 Radar velocity. In comparison to spin rate, velocity readings have a weaker correlation with the testing standard (R^2 of 0.8812 vs 0.9856).

By looking at the same graph but with Rapsodo velocity data, Rapsodo appears to have a slightly better correlation with Stalker (R^2 of 0.9141)

Similar to spin rate, a plot of the reading differences against the mean readings gives more insight into the validity of velocity readings. The mean difference for PitchTracker from Stalker is 0.59 ± 2.65 mph, while Rapsodo does slightly better at 0.33 ± 2.15 mph.

It appears that PitchTracker performs almost as well as Rapsodo at measuring velocity, with a slight edge to Rapsodo. Both have rather small biases and are decently accurate, but both are prone to occasionally misread velocity by 5 mph or more.

Additional Metrics

Besides spin rate and velocity, PitchTracker tracks four additional metrics: timing to plate, extension, delivery timing, and reach back to release timing. In theory, these metrics should be consistent for each athlete repeating his delivery, so we looked at the intra-subject coefficient of variation (CV), a measure of how well PitchTracker can replicate the same measurement.

The full data set can be found here.

Based on this data, the timing metrics from PitchTracker look decently reliable, with coefficients of variation under 10 percent for each athlete. The extension metric had notably higher coefficients of variation, indicating a relatively broad distribution where we would expect to see a narrow distribution.

Misreads/Missed Pitches

As noted before, we had a few obvious outliers with spin-rate readings that were neglected in data analysis. Generally, almost every pitch that did register produced reasonable data. However, roughly one-third of the pitches thrown during data collection did not register on PitchTracker. Though Rapsodo also occasionally fails to pick up pitches, it misses less often and mostly on pitches well outside of the strike zone, while it was harder to predict why and when PitchTracker would miss pitches.

Conclusion

The Diamond Kinetics PitchTracker appears to be a viable, robust measurement tool, taking the convenient form of a leather baseball. In terms of spin rate, the consistency of readings and relatively small error surpassed our initial expectations. Though susceptible to missing pitches and occasional misreads, the PitchTracker performs very closely to Rapsodo for both spin rate and velocity, with timing metrics that appear to be reasonably accurate.

One drawback to PitchTracker is that it only measures spin magnitude, whereas Rapsodo measures both magnitude and direction. As we have have discussed before, both components of the spin vector are important in understanding pitch characteristics. However, given the low price of PitchTracker compared to Rapsodo, its capabilities are impressive and can be a useful, low-cost tool for players and coaches.

This article was written by Research Intern John Scheffey

The post Diamond Kinetics PitchTracker, Rapsodo, and Pitch Tracking Technologies appeared first on Driveline Baseball.