By Hank Campbell

Unless you are a true baseball fan, you have probably never heard of Bob Feller. Maybe you have heard of Nolan Ryan. They were classic power pitchers. They threw hard and they threw for strikes.

Even if you are a baseball fan, unless you live and breathe the Detroit Tigers, you have probably never heard of Joel Zumaya.

Right. Who? While playing in the American League Championship in 2006, he threw a fastball clocked at 104.8 MPH, the fastest in history. How can a guy who threw that fast not be on the cover of every Wheaties box in the civilized world? Because the following year he was 1-4 with a 4.28 ERA; hardly the stuff of legends.

In two months, a 20-year old from San Diego State named Stephen Strasburg could shatter the draft pick signing bonus record by securing as much as $15 million guaranteed, handily beating the $10.5 million those zany Chicago Cubs gave pitcher Mark Prior from USC in 2001. Why? Because Strasburg has been clocked at 103 MPH and hits 101 quite often. 103 is something only officially done by two other players in history, both of them in the major leagues.(1) That’s not supposed to be done by college kids and it’s part of what makes baseball superior to football or basketball, where you can quit college and be an All-Star your first year in the pro leagues. Baseball success is an elusive mistress – but she returns your phone call promptly if you throw 103 MPH.

Why is it so difficult? Is there a cap on how fast a ball can be thrown?(2) The awesome power of physics is going to answer that, just like we discussed the physics of a moving baseball and the farthest home run ever hit.

First, let’s be practical about how blazing fast 104 MPH is. A 90 MPH fastball, the go-to pitch and speed for the top echelon of pitchers, is travelling at 132 feet per second. Since the ball is closer to the batter when it is released and because the batter is in the middle of the plate depth, we are really only talking about 55 feet to see a pitch rather than just over 60. That means the batter has .4167 seconds to react. Boosting that speed to 104 is bordering on unthinkable to hit (3) but it explains why a lot of pitchers can be so successful without triple-digit speed.

So if we know exceptional humans can pitch 95 MPH and up, we at least have some ranges to work with, just like we know a human will likely never run a 30 second mile – there are physical limits to the possible. Basically, it takes energy to throw a ball.

We discussed drag forces on a ball before and we know that at the moment of release a ball has about 1/6th horsepower of energy. A horsepower-second is the energy of a 1 HP motor running for 1 second, which would lift 550 lbs. one foot.

If a throw takes .11 seconds that means an average force on the ball of 12 lbs. – a mean acceleration equivalent to 40 G’s. Yep, 40 times gravity. So a pitcher is transmitting power of 1.5 horsepower to the ball but his body is also in motion, the total power is more like 3 HP. It takes 20 lbs. of muscle to generate 1 HP so 3 HP is obviously impossible using just a human upper body. This is why pitchers talk about the importance of leg strength(4) – 60 lbs. of muscle has to come from somewhere.

Is there a demon in the air at 105 MPH?

So back to how fast a pitcher can throw. In my favorite movie, The Right Stuff, some engineers and pilots in the late 1940s felt like the sound barrier was a hard limit to airplane speed – the plane would come apart if you tried to go beyond. Yet Chuck Yeager broke that sound ‘barrier’ in late 1947 (5) and from then on records got broken time and again.

So is there a sound barrier, a demon in the sky, for baseball, or do we just need a Chuck Yeager?

Maybe there is a demon. Or at least a body barrier. Like I mentioned in Note 4, there is a lot of energy in stored tendons at the mid-point of throwing a baseball. Glenn Fleisig, a biomechanical engineer who studies pitching at the American Sports Medicine Institute in Birmingham, Ala., subjected cadaver elbows to increasing amounts of rotational force. His experiments showed that an average person’s ulnar collateral ligament (UCL – the part that connects the the humerus and ulna in the elbow) breaks at about 80 Newton-meters. The torque on an elite pitcher’s elbow when he throws a fastball? About 80 Newton-meters. So pitchers are already doing things that would destroy a normal person’s arm.

So unlike running or swimming, there hasn’t been a huge leap in pitching speed because pitchers were already pretty good decades ago but, like we have discussed in previous articles, conditions that impact the ball help.

We established that a fastball is faster in Denver. If Stephen Strasburg, the fireballer from San Diego State, makes the majors and continues to grow in strength the way previous major league pitchers have done, playing in Denver with a 30 MPH wind at his back could have him throw a pitch at 110 MPH. One of those records, like Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, that would be very tough to beat until we start putting tennis rackets on the shoulders of baseball players.

Here, just for fun, are four types of pitches you can throw to get you out of most pick-up games you come across on your way home – with your dignity intact. Fastball, a 2-seam fastball, a curveball and a (circle) changeup. Just don’t generate too much torque.

NOTES:

(1) In fairness to Bob Feller, radar guns did not exist when he pitched. In fairness to common sense, being clocked at ‘104 MPH’ because they used a motorcycle going that fast is not really going to be considered scientifically valid.

Ted Williams, arguably one of the best batting eyes in the history of the game, who faced Bob Feller and numerous others, instead said Steve Dalkowski was the fastest pitcher ever. If you’ve never heard of him, it’s because he had a career record of 46-80 and a 5.59 ERA – in the minor leagues. So speed is not everything. However, should you happen to like great baseball anecdotes, here are some Dalkowski gems:

* He was once pulled in the second inning of a game because he had already thrown 120 pitches.
* He once hit a batter in the head so hard the ball rebounded to second base (that’s over 127 feet).
* In one game, three of his wild pitches penetrated the backstop screen which is supposed to protect fans.
* He once threw a ball through the outfield fence to win a bet.

They tried to measure his speed at the Army Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Md. but he had to throw the ball through a metal box about the size of home plate, through which a laser was being beamed, and couldn’t hit the target. There was also no mound there but the consensus among people who watched him play in games said he threw 115 MPH in actual pitching conditions. Unfortunately, he hurt his elbow fielding a bunt in an exhibition game in 1963 and was never the same – he also never got to play in the major leagues.

(2) Let’s hope it’s not 160 MPH, as in George Plimpton’s The Curious Case of Sidd Finch. His catcher had to practice by snaring balls dropped out of the Goodyear blimp, so they could reach terminal velocity. Plimpton’s Sports Illustrated article on the matter came out April 1, 1985, the kind of April Fool’s prank most of us only dream about.

(3) Unthinkable to some. Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams had ridiculously great batting eyes. As much as modern fans want to hiss at Barry Bonds because of steroids allegations, there is no doubt his batting eye is in the top 10 in history. But Stan Musial, who would be as famous as Joe DiMaggio if he hadn’t played in a small market like St. Louis, once told a rookie the secret to batting was hitting the top third of the ball if he wanted a grounder, the middle third if he wanted a line drive and the bottom third if he wanted to pop it up. Clearly Stan Musial was not using eyeballs the way ordinary players, much less regular people, do.

(4) It also tells you why pitchers blow their arms out or they just wear down. At the mid-point of the throw, the tendons of the arm are storing all that energy and then it is released as spring-energy from those stretched tendons. Imagine the strain!

(5) Classified, of course, so the commies didn’t send spies from Hollywood to steal the secret of really fast planes. But, in the days when journalists did journalism and not primarily liberal good works, word still got out. Here is my Time magazine from 1949 when the world learned of it:

REFERENCES:

The Physics of Baseball, Robert K. Adair, Harper Perennial, New York, 1994
Men At Work, George F. Will, Macmillan Publishing Group, New York, 1990

by Bruce Reed

Everyone seems to agree that youth sports should be fun, social, safe, and instructional.  Even while competition increases as kids mature, no one wants to see the core objectives of youth sports diminished.  Most youth leagues do a good job of providing a fun, social, and safe experience for their participants.  And there are many knowledgeable volunteer coaches who offer top notch instruction to their individual players, however, most leagues could provide even more educational value by choosing to make teaching their sport the top systemic priority.

Change rarely comes easy in any organization.  Even small leadership mindset shifts, however, can make a profound impact.  While it’s more realistic to start with small ideas, a healthy thought exercise is to brainstorm bold ideas.  To start that process, here are my bold ideas to improve youth sports:

1. Share. Youth coaches should share their best ideas.  Create a Document Library on your league’s website where coaches can upload their best coaching ideas, success stories, drills, and practice plans so newer volunteer coaches have resources to help them succeed.
2. Collaborate. Youth coaches should help everyone in the league improve, not just the players on their team.  Create a tutoring program in your league so a coach can help an individual player on an opposing team, 1-on-1, each season in fundamentals.  The coaches who have the most to offer should seek opportunities to coach the players in the league who can benefit most from them.  Youth coaches in a given league should see themselves as a selfless collective unit — similar to a staff of counselors at a sports camp — not competitive adversaries.
3. Report. Instead of participation certificates, I give each of my players personalized “scouting reports” at season’s end.  They include confidence-building highlights from the season and constructive suggestions on areas to improve.  Create a communication system for your league that allows all coaches to provide helpful feedback to developing athletes.  These players’ future coaches could also benefit from the collection of these insights from previous seasons.
4. Survey.  At the start of the season, ask parents and players to indicate what they hope to get, educationally, out of their participation.  At the end of the season, solicit specific feedback and share it with coaches.  Did the coach help the player reach his or her educational and developmental objectives?  Players and parents could also be offered a chance to self-evaluate their own contributions to the team and their individual development at season’s end.
5. Mentor. Create a mentor program to form bonds between older and younger players and teams.  Assign older teams to younger teams and encourage them to attend each other’s games for support.  Older players could attend an occasional practice of a younger team and assist with drills.
6. Teach Back. Create a set of player-led skills clinics, pre-season, for younger players.  Give your veteran players an opportunity to teach back what they’ve learned through their participation in your developmental league.  Every age level in your league could teach back one level down the chain.
7. Standardize. Develop a set of best practices that are taught all the way up.  Introduce players to proper technique and vernacular, taught in a consistent manner, to build educational continuity from year to year.  Tap into the most experienced coaches in your area to help establish these best practices.
8. Shuffle. Mix kids up year-to-year.  While many young players find comfort in knowing a friend or two on the team, youth sports should be an avenue toward new friendships.  Kids should learn from youth sports how to navigate a range of teammate personalities to form a cohesive, productive unit.  Phase out the practice of handpicking entire rosters based on existing cliques and social circles.  And if a team wins a championship one year, its coach should have the chance to lead the last place team the next.
9. Go Blind.  If your league has a draft, encourage a blind draft where every coach works together to form balanced rosters, and then draw teams out of a hat after rosters are set.  The current system probably won’t change, but suggest it anyway just to see who reacts, and how.  Adults should realize, in most youth league drafts, highly-rated players are over-rated and lower-rated players are under-rated.  Youth coaches should worry less about getting the best players at the outset and worry more about developing the best players over the course of a long season.

10.  Brainstorm.  I’ve saved the last bold idea for you!  I encourage you to brainstorm ideas that would improve youth sports and then share them with the Team Snap community. And if you have a different take on any of my ideas, I’d love to hear your perspective.

Leave your comments below or post on the TeamSnap Facebook wall with your bold idea for the chance to win a $50 gift certificate to Dick’s Sporting Goods!  So go on, have at it and hit us with your best idea for improving youth sports.  Don’t forget… be bold!

By Jake Chapman, Showcase U Co-founder

Very Important People are watching you every game you play, whether you realize it or not.  If you want to be taken seriously as collegiate prospect, you need to be aware that your performance, behavior, body language, effort and sportsmanship are always under review.  Letting your guard down and having a “moment” may cause an observer to form an opinion of you that doesn’t necessary reflect who you are as a person or athlete.

We are all human.   We make mistakes, have bad games and get frustrated in the heat of competition, but the best athletes have a SHORT TERM memory and are able to shake off a bad play and respond with greatness.  I’ve talked with several scouts and college coaches who have told me that their first impressions carry a lot of weight when recruiting.  If they are there to watch you play, THEY ALREADY KNOW YOU ARE A GOOD PLAYER.  They want to see what separates you from the rest of their prospects.  Make sure your “separators” are positive attributes…and remember, they show up on game film and video too.

So, besides colleges coaches, who are the other VIPs that have their eyes on you?  Let’s discuss:

Your Family

Parents and siblings are your biggest fans and at times, your biggest critics.  You are a reflection of your parents and there is no better way to make them glow with pride than to hustle, play fair and positively encourage your teammates.   Stay focused, disciplined and resilient in the heat of the battle and steer clear of behavior that could bring shame and embarrassment to you and your loved ones.

Your Coaches

In the world of college recruiting, your most important advocates are your high school coaches.  They play a crucial role in your success and can positively and/or negatively impact your chances to play athletically at the college level.  During your career, they spend as much time with you as your family and friends.  They see you how you handle adversity and can vouch for your character.  Make it easy for them to confidently look a college coach in the eye and give an enthusiastic testimonial on your behalf.

Your Teammates

If you haven’t heard it before, one of the most fulfilling things to have in competition is the respect of your peers.  Being a good teammate is displaying character when you are having a great game or the worst game of your life.  Again, no one is perfect.  True competitors SHOULD be upset with poor performance.  If you are reading this blog, there is a good chance you are one of the better players on your team.  Set a good example example for the players that look up to you.  Show the rookies that you respect the game, always play hard and instill a positive and encouraging behavior that defines your program and leaves a lasting impact.

Your Fans

As a father of 2 young future stars, I’ve noticed that my sons watch a high school “ball game” much differently than I.  They lock in on their favorite player, which probably includes you, and they watch your every move.  They watch you before the game.  They watch you in huddles, on benches and in dugouts.  They observe your body language, copy your mannerisms, style and attire….and yes…they can even read your lips.  You are a role model and your actions and behaviors influence the youth in your community. It is an HONOR to represent your school in competition and if you are lucky enough to participate in front of supportive fans, please do so with class.

If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.  - Thomas J Watson

We’re all about success and winning. It feels good. We feel smart and the rewards are plenty.

But how you get there is much less appealing. It requires a lot of failure and loss along the way.

So how we respond to failure might just be something we want to learn; the skill of managing our losses or

Failure Management.

The ability to manage undesirable results by maintaining the necessary discipline so that the breakdowns are contained, correctly interpreted and even accepted with a peace of mind knowing that a larger plan is in motion.

It is an understanding that failure does not define or destroy the future. We make those choices.

Failure management rips the powerful core from failure and therefore circumventing its destructive force.

It takes that potentially negative energy and uses it as a refining power like no other.

Those who don’t regularly take risks challenging their aptitude can reduce the painful experience of loss. And even though it may be reduced, it can’t be avoided,

In the end however, they will never experience the euphoric power of true victory or cultivate the powerful instincts required to overcome devastation and loss.

Those skills only come from personal experience.

Corey Stenstrup – IMG Performance Institute

Many baseball players have on field routines and will workout to try and stay in shape but an often-overlooked performance element is the warm-up and warm down. They add tremendous value both in season as well as during offseason training. Overuse injuries and reduced capacity performance are very common if not the norm in baseball due to a demanding schedule. In my opinion a strategic warm-up and warm down can help buffer the negative aspects of a heavy playing or training schedule while also helping the athlete feel and perform better day in and day out. By helping your athletes structure a warm-up and warm down your giving them the tools they need in their routine to help maximize their performance. The following are some ideas I would recommend considering when structuring the routines.

The AD (athletic-dynamic) warm up they complete will be reflective of what activity they are going to do; pregame vs. pre-training are different, pitchers vs. position players are going to be different, and so on. The idea is to match the warm up to the requirements of the activity. This would include blending and sequencing open/closed chain mobility, active flexibility, dynamic transit series, and postural cuing/low level strength exercises. The net goal of warm up is to prime the body for all facets of activity…more specifically neuromuscular sharpness and tissue readiness.

Just as the warm-up is a multitier process so is the warm down and recovery strategies. Giving the body a jump-start on recovery and ensuring that the intended signal lingers in the body when exiting activity. To accomplish this I recommend a period of aerobic activity followed by some of the same things the athletes did before the workout just applied a little differently including; open/closed chain mobility, active flexibility, low-grade muscle action exercises and vibration plate use. Following this some aqua therapy including movement and/or cold bathes can be done. Compression is another means of helping to stimulate recovery; Under Armour has a line called “Recharge” which is designed to be worn following activity to provide compression to major muscle groups. Finally, later in the evening some light (mild) static stretching can be done.

You can see the difference between the tradition static stretch before and/or after you play and all the other techniques available to athletes today. Good habits are critical, the earlier you can teach athletes the right way to do things the more they will gravitate to it because they will associate value with it. There is not a one size fits all solution but by combining sound science with some deductive thinking you can create a pre-activity and post activity routine that will help the athletes in both the short and long term.

Take a look at some of the MLB athletes that train with me at IMG Academies in their off-season going through several elements of their warm-up: