Strength in Numbers #29
It’s been over a week since the ABCA conference, and the conversations I had with people are still echoing in my mind.
I have been to many baseball conferences in the past few years, and I found I learned so much from the attendees at the 2022 ABCA event. The people who attended the conference have varied backgrounds working across many competitive levels. Some attendees were current players, some were coaches, some were business owners, school administrators, scouts, you name it.
I had a rare moment in my life where one of the players I had coached in professional baseball stopped by our booth to tell us that he’s now an assistant pitching coach in the Milwaukee Brewers organization. I think that’s when you have entered your wisdom years in the sport—when you have coached the coaches and ones who are excited to serve others.
It was a great mix of people, but I think the one interaction that left a long-lasting impression was being face-to-face with Tom House.
Tom House & His Legacy
For those of you who do not know Tom House, I will sum it up in a nutshell….he’s Neo from the Matrix in the game of baseball.
To learn more about Tom and all of his developments click here to check out our podcast with him.
Everything from his past has shaped our future in the sport. In his coaching history, he can go back in time and identify something he did that we are only starting to get into now in mainstream baseball coaching.
He’s pushing 80-years old and developed a new venture called Mustard, a markerless motion capture app with financial backing from Mark Cuban, Drew Breese, and a few other prominent names.
It takes his pitching model and uses artificial intelligence to provide coaching cues to players veering too far away from the ideal delivery.
Tom has worked with a plethora of Cy Young Winners, the most notable being Nolan Ryan, and he received a standing ovation at the conference for what he has contributed to the sport of baseball. We shared a booth, and I sat down with him and started to talk a little about some of the books he has written.
Lessons on Strength
I asked him to sign his book, “Fit to Pitch,” which details his preparation process, training periodization schedules, and workload assignments that he provided to his athletes.
It’s a cool read, and it even has thermographic images (heat mapping) of Nolan Ryan’s arm after pitching that was accompanied by Nolan’s training approach for each day in his pitching schedule.
Some sessions were listed as heavy, some moderate, and some light, but he was working on strength daily, and you can see that the redness in his arm cleared up after heavy strength training, which was interesting to me.
The bottom line is that Nolan Ryan lifted weights every day and he is a living testament that STRENGTH MATTERS MOST!
He almost made a debut at 50 years old, only to retire a year shy. He also pitched most of his career with a partially torn UCL, long before PRP injections were even a thing.
Good old-fashioned strength and a relentless mental commitment to him thinking he was made of steel rather than porcelain (I’m sure Nolan’s mental approach would be backed by Tom as well, who is a Ph.D. in Sports Psychology.)
Tom also crafted a very unique workload formula, indicating how many foot-pounds of force have to be trained in the throwing arm to match the workloads experienced during competitive games. Seeing the calculations, athletes must put the training intensity in to match the demands of the game.
The Art of Pitching
Although, what I find most interesting in Tom’s conversations, writings, and teachings is that he doesn’t talk much about velocity!
Instead, he talks about pitchability.
Pitchability is how pitchers can appear more deceptive to hitters by placing the ball in certain locations, the importance of release point extension in the delivery to increase the optical effect of velocity for the hitter’s perception, and mixing pitch types.
It has made me wonder if we are more focused on throwing hard than pitching well?
In this week’s More Than Velocity podcast, we talk about the importance of having secondary pitches and, more so, having platoon neutral options in the pitchers’ repertoire.
It’s an interesting listen, as Jordan Oseguera, our pitching mastermind, talks a lot about his coaching experience as a professional pitching coach, but also one that was groomed by Tom.
Jordan was a player for Tom and later became one of Tom’s coaches. The best part of what Tom said to me is that he is ready to pass the torch. He only wants people to appreciate what he has brought to the table and expand on it.
So, while throwing hard predominates our industry, we might swing a little of that pendulum back toward pitchability—the art of getting batters out, controlling maximum effort, and prioritizing arm strength before arm speed.
Related Content
-
The Secondary Pitches You Need to Excel (More Than Velocity #22)
In this week’s Podcast, the ArmCare team covers the arsenal a pitcher needs to get looks and find success.
