Bulking Up
While many will throw out the “bash brothers” of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire as poster boys for steroids, the Oakland Athletics were also one of the biggest innovators in strength training.
In fact, the Oakland Athletics were the first major league baseball team to hire a full time strength coach when they hired famous strength coach Bob Alejo in 1993.
Prior to Alejo joining the Athletics, frequently teams had either no strength facilities at all or had a Universal Gym set up with tons of pulley machines, which if anyone has done lifting, you know that those are basically the opposite of what you want to use to increase athletic and functional muscle.
In fact, one reference that Greg Shepherd, the founder of Bigger Faster Stronger, has mentioned multiple times when referring to baseball training is a major league scout in the early 1990s for the Kansas City Royals who told him about how his team would never use free weights because it ruins baseball players and attempted to cite examples (all poor examples of guys not doing lifts properly or lifting without proper supervision or knowledge of what they were doing).
The research into training the body for baseball has been increasing in droves every since that first hiring, though it took until 1999 for even 50% of the team to have a full time employee in strength and conditioning in their employ.
Frankly, explosive lifts like squats, deadlifts, and power cleans are perfectly aligned with the explosive power needed in the hips and core in a baseball player. I mentioned in a recent article that Bryce Harper was given loads of praise for a deadlift that was not only in bad form but probably not targeting his body in the way that would be best for baseball.
This is part of the issue still rampant in baseball training. Players utilize their own trainers, who know what it means to train a football player or an MMA fighter, but training for baseball-specific activity is quite different.
Many players began to at least find the benefits of free weights in the 1990s, and one particular player has been cited for his “deflation” after his playing career – Jeff Bagwell. Bagwell was notorious for his dedication to free weight lifting, and his career was ended by a shoulder issue. Those who are familiar with core power lifts know that a shoulder issue would make nearly all power lifts impossible to complete, and Bagwell has mentioned that he had to back away from power lifting for an extended time to allow his shoulder to heal.
So even clean players were getting better training, but that should have helped the pitchers as well, right? Well, maybe if they were throwing to the strike zone actually in the rule book…
Next: Shrinking Zone