Teacherman’s Approach to Pitching | General | TopVelocity Baseball Forum

Wow – I go away for a couple of months and all he** breaks loose.  I haven’t seen that much fun on the site since L.A. Skip and Mr. bezball made their fleeting appearances.  Sorry I missed this one.  It takes a lot for Brent to ban someone – in fact, that’s the first time I’ve seen him do it.  I thought you guys stood up well to such a towering intellect.  Good to see that Z is still around to carry the banner.  (Z, you forgot to explain to us how Haren got airborne without pushing off with his back leg…)

How do you argue with a guy with experience like this:  “I have had a few pitchers ask for my advice”.  And he took a pitcher who had Tommy John surgery from pre-surgery 90+ (what’s 90+ – 91? 92? 93?) right back to – ta da – 92-93!  Wow – who’s ever seen that happen before?  90+ to 90+!  And he never met the guy.  Did it on Skype.  Almost as impressive as Skip fixing Cole Hamel’s mechanics in a letter.  (Don’t scoff at these claims – when I was a kid, I helped Bob Gibson many times using mental telepathy through my transistor radio.) 

That’s the only actual pitching experience he mentions in all of that, but I’m sure he helped some of the other few pitchers who asked for his advice.  He just forgot to mention them.

There are actually a couple of nuggets in there that could have been interesting to talk about if he was more articulate and civil.  Bow-flex-bow is a Paul Nyman term.  (I think he actually got the clip from Nyman.)  Teacherman renamed it bow-arch-bow.  Wow.  That’s advanced.  And he takes a shot at describing what Nyman called pelvic load – a very interesting concept worth discussing.  Brent Strom and Ron Wolforth do it very well – and 3X addresses it without calling it pelvic loading.  He obviously studied at the Paul Nyman School of Personality also.  And I have to say he is very advanced in that area.

Brent always tries to answer guys like this – who come on the site only to proclaim their own brilliance  and everyone else’s stupidity – with more grace than I would.  I’ve had a few pitchers ask for my advice also, so I’m at least as qualified as Teacherman to have an opinion on the site – and this site is as cutting edge as anything you’ll find on pitching.  Not because Brent was the first to discover and write about every pitching concept known to man – but, because at one point in his career he had a burning desire to learn.  And he did the research and came up with as good an approach to pitching as you’ll find.  And he’s still learning.  Everytime someone asks a question or challenges him on something, he does the research and backs up his opinion with facts.  Earl Weaver said “It’s what you learn after you think you know everything that counts.”  Compare that to “No, I really don’t need to read those articles.” 

To be clear, he completely misrepresents much of what Brent teaches – hard to believe, since he had an entire day to study the hundreds of videos, articles, and postings on the site.  But, he did say one thing that I find completely believable – “I’ve found that many reject my personality.”  Hard to argue with that.    

Our posts crossed.  Your post confirms my post above.  You’re still trying to learn.  I’ll take a look at it and get back to you.