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You Don’t
Own Your Pitching Delivery…only Rent It
A couple of days ago
I was reading the sports page of the Oregonian why
having my yummy soy protein shake breakfast and I
had a big smile on my face.
First off, I can only
read the sports page any more. Ok, maybe the weather
too, but my online weather information is a lot more
current than the paper. Can’t stand the front page.
Nothing but murders, thieves, politician bashing,
and politically charged information drives me crazy.
What really put a
smile on my face was looking at the high school
baseball results. Our newspaper puts the totals of
the games in a small section. They let the readers
know who hit triples that day, who hit home runs,
and who were the top strike out pitchers and their
totals. In any given day there are about 10 to 12
pitchers listed.
On this particular
day, four of the pitchers listed were BioForce
students. As I totaled up all the strikeouts between
the four, I was amazed. The total for all 4 pitchers
came to 38 strike outs. That’s over nine per
pitcher, per game.
Think about that.
Nine strikeouts per
game, per pitcher. One of the pitchers had 14 strike
outs in his game.
Was it the poor
competition? Maybe.
Could it have been
the umpires strike zone? Who knows.
What I do know is
that these 4 pitchers are very dedicated athletes
aspiring to play beyond high school. And they all
have something in common besides being very good
pitchers.
They train very hard
and try not to let the competition out prepare them.
One of those pitchers, Mitchell, does 100 towel
drills a day….probably not on game days though. If
you watch him throw, he can hit a gnats butt 8 out
of 10 times with a baseball from 60 feet away.
Because he is a good athlete. But probably more
importantly, he works harder than most on his
delivery.
Look at other sports.
Golfers take several hundred swings a day to perfect
their game. How hard does a black belt in Karate
train? What about hitters? They swing the bat a few
hundred times a day too.
It was said by a
great former Golf champion, I think it was Jack
Nicklaus, that you don’t own your golf swing, you
only rent it.
Makes sense. You work
hard to perfect it…as much as you can…and then you
lose it. It goes away if you don’t work hard to get
better.
What’s my point?
Simple. If you want
to improve your pitching delivery, you need to work
at it very hard and do a lot of quality repetitions.
How do you do that?
How about grabbing a
small towel, maybe let it hang 12 inches down from
your hand, and work on your delivery….work up to 100
a day. Not just repetitions, but quality
repetitions.
I know I’ve talked
about it a lot in the past, but what really brought
it to my attention recently was one of our high
school students came in to get a tune up. We asked
him have you been doing your drills….no. Have you
been working on your tempo when doing
long-toss…..no.
He stopped doing what
got him to the place where he was.
Keep training hard.
Don’t stop until the end of the season and reward
yourself with some rest.
In the mean-time,
we’d love to hear from you and your successes and
even your challenges. We are here to help you!
Look for an exciting
announcement on Monday from BioForce Baseball……we
are ready to launch our new Power DVD!
Keep training like a
champion today!
P.S. Try to own your
delivery….for a while maybe….for the best it may be
into their 40’s.
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