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Pitching Velocity Before Ball Movement

I have worked with a lot of “Side Arm” Pitchers who are worried about losing movement when I am training and coaching them to increase velocity, with 3X Pitching. I am not talking about pitchers who throw upper 80′s, because most of the pitchers I work with are more like upper 70′s. It just blows my mind that an upper 70′s pitcher would rather have ball movement than more velocity.

The reality is, not until you get to professional baseball will ball movement start to become an important factor and at this level you will actually have coaches who will coach this with pitch grips. I really believe that changing mechanics to enhance ball movement is not a healthy approach for a pitcher. A great example was John Smoltz, at the end of his career the Atlanta, Braves made him a closer and also dropped his arm angle to a side arm position, so he could get a more natural run on the ball. This was effective at first, then he was put on the DL with bone spurs in his elbow. I believe he cut his career short when he made this mechanical adjustment for ball movement. Read more

Does ArmourBite™ Increase Pitching Velocity?

ArmourBite is here! So Tom House has retired from USC as the pitching coach and he is now with the Rod Dedeaux Research for Baseball Institute. I believe this is good news for the pitching world because he will spend more of his time on research than coaching, which I feel he is best at.

Now that he is back, Tom House is claiming that he did some research on the new ArmourBite™ and he found that it will add 1-2 mph to your fastball when using the plastic mouth piece. This is the info coming from the home page of his National Pitching Association website.

National Pitching Associtation ArmourBite Claim

New Mouthpiece Improves Velocity!

Yep you read that right. Our research team at RDRBI lead by Tom House did some testing with the ArmourBite® to see if it could improve velocity. It works! Read more

Welcome to the 90 MPH Club!

“Welcome to the 90MPH club,” is the catch phrase that we all would love to hear in our careers. More than likely this is your ultimate goal as a pitcher, because if you make it to the 90MPH Club, then you have put yourself in the recruiting pool for Professional Baseball. If you have ever been to a MLB tryout Camp then you will hear this phrase a lot, “Throw 90 or go home!” At most camps they are not as blunt but this is what they are thinking when they are holding that gun to your back when you throw your first pitch. Read more

3D Doppler Radar Launches 3X Pitching

This may be the first sign of the beginning of a new era for baseball. A Danish company called Trackman has planted some 3D Doppler Radar’s in Major League parks across the country and the data is revolutionary. They can scientifically produce data that shows why two 90 MPH pitchers are not the same. Why one may be seen as having a “Sneaky” fastball when the other is throwing the exact same velocity. This is because this new technology uses distance and speed to measure velocity, instead of only using speed. Therefore, someone throwing 90 mph with a release point that is 53 feet away from the hitter is throwing harder, as perceived by the hitters eye, than the pitcher with the same velocity throwing the ball 55 feet away. Trackman has determined that the average release point from the rubber for an MLB pitcher is 5.10 feet but some of the “Sneaky” fastball pitchers are reaching release point distances of 7 feet or more. The ESPN Sports Science video about Chapman, which I cover in one of my previous articles, made this same discovery but Trackman is calculating this information on the fly. Based on their data one foot past the average 5.10 feet equals about 2 mph in increase perceived velocity. Trackman feels that this 3D Doppler Radar will eventually make the radar gun, as we know it today, the thing of the past. This is because their data gives an organization a lot more scientific data to evaluate talent than the traditional radar gun. This 3D Radar can also record spin rate of all pitches. Pitchers with higher spin rates have higher strikeout percentages. Read more

How to Gain 5 MPH on Your Fastball?

Adding 5 MPH to your fastball can be a tough challenge if you do not know what you are doing. You definitely will not accomplish this using conventional wisdom. Old school approaches like extreme long toss, weighted balls or speed chains may get you close but the velocity increase will eventually go away or may not even transfer to the mound. It is important to understand that you want to add 5 MPH to your fastball on the mound, not only on flat ground. Throwing from the mound uses  a different kinematic sequence than on flat ground. This must be a main focus of the velocity enhancement program.

When I developed the revolutionary approach to pitching velocity called 3X Pitching, I first analyzed some of the hardest throwers in the game to try and discover their secrets. I wasn’t as interested in their training programs because most of these hard throwers, I felt, had superior genetics. I knew that if I could learn what they were doing mechanically, which was causing them to throw so hard, I could then try to emulate these mechanics through training my body to move like theirs. I believed that this was a good strategy for success. I soon learned that this was true. Read more