Backspin Blogger

Driving on I-25 towards Denver in the early summer of 2004, I was on top of the world! I was to test my new found "Facts of Hitting" teaching program on one of the best American Legion Teams in the country and do some fly fishing! Heaven!!! With the 107 degree Arizona heat in my rear view mirror, so was my inferior, theory-based coaching style!  But I was nervous as a fish out of water! How was it going to work? How would the kids and coaches receive the information that was so foreign to me, a baseball lifer, just a few months earlier? Am I walking into a perpetual mine field called baseball tradition? Would they like me as a coach? Would they respect me? But most important of all... would it truly make each one of them better?!? And would there be an explosive hatch while I was their so my fish stories wouldn't be fish stories. The whole trip, I had fished thoroughly through my mind for answers to try and be prepared for any and all questions. Arriving ea...

The Study - What Swing Mechanics Do All Elite Hitters Share? Video I tapped every source I could muster up on the top Major League hitters I could. I ended up with hours and hours of video and hundreds of still photographs comparing the players swing mechanics. As I started watching the video and comparing them with the stills, my small one-bedroom apartment became a hitting laboratory. I still didn’t know exactly what I was looking for except what was really happening in their swings. As the days went by, the plan started coming together. I started to identify a certain movement or position in the swing and give it a name. I went back and forth for weeks and ended up identifying 24 positions or movement-types in the swing. I know what you are thinking now, either this guy has no life or he has some problems. Actually it was a combination of the two. Then I had to have something tangible to record this crazy idea of mine. I bought the biggest piece of poster board possible and s...

. The ALL Star and the Rookie While working out, on swing mechanics and general mental approaches, with one of the 2008 US Olympic baseball team members in the off-season (I know… tough life), he told me a great story … In the 2008 season, one of the San Diego Padres young catchers watched as the best hitter on the planet (at least that season) dug into the batters box. This guy was a star of stars and the catcher was just a “rookie nobody.” As the hitter got in the box, planting his back foot, he told the rookie catcher that he had a nice swing and was just doing a few little things wrong. He went on to tell him he was getting his front foot down late. Here is the funny part! He then told the rook to take the first pitch in his next plate appearance and work on getting that foot down on time. Then look out to the outfield where the star of stars was playing. “If I take my hat off, you were good, you were down early.” The catcher couldn’t believe this was happening.  Q...

Driving on I-25 towards Denver in the early summer of 2004, I was on top of the world! I was to test my new found "Facts of Hitting" teaching program on one of the best American Legion Teams in the country and do some fly fishing! Heaven!!! With the 107 degree Arizona heat in my rear view mirror, so was my inferior, theory-based coaching style!  But I was nervous as a fish out of water! How was it going to work? How would the kids and coaches receive the information that was so foreign to me, a baseball lifer, just a few months earlier? Am I walking into a perpetual mine field called baseball tradition? Would they like me as a coach? Would they respect me? But most important of all... would it truly make each one of them better?!? And would there be an explosive hatch while I was their so my fish stories wouldn't be fish stories. The whole trip, I had fished thoroughly through my mind for answers to try and be prepared for any and all questions. Arr...

"What is a good athletic position?" I ask that to every kid and coach in every clinic I put on? The most common answer is ridiculous!!! But wait... we don't know what we don't know... so how can the hitters or coaches answer the question correctly if they don't know the REAL answer? Rhetorical question? Maybe, maybe not. Let's address the problem baseball and softball, along with other "industries" have and don't deal with it well enough. We TEACH WHAT WE KNOW without sometimes stepping back and analyzing it and CONFIRMING what we teach is good stuff? Sometimes when I say this in a coaches clinic, I get the look a dog gives you when it gets curious about something... a turn and lean of the head implying, "What are you talking about?" OK, answer this as an example of possibly teaching something without thinking it MAY be not really a good technique to teach... 1. Hitters should squish the bug... I SAID IT FOR YEARS!!!! Dead wr...