Fans have been enthralled by the home run spike in MLB since the second half of 2015. While many things are being debated, one area seems overlooked – improved training in MLB athletes.
The home run spike in MLB has accompanied a significant increase in the average velocity in pitches thrown. Over the last 15 years, the average velocity of pitches has climbed 3 MPH. The number of pitchers throwing 100+ in a season used to be one or two, and now every team seemingly has one or two pitchers on the MLB roster that can reach back for triple-digit velocity.
While many have theorized that perhaps a change in the ball or the bat has been responsible for the increase in home runs, many MLB players have begun to seek out the assistance of private hitting instructors and specific baseball trainers who are focusing more on smart training to improve baseball play, not just have a player look good in his uniform as many personal trainers that a player could hire at his local gym may provide.
A number of private instructors have really become quite well known through their work with hitter swing path and hitter approach at the plate, but a few places are working on the whole player, from training the body to training the mind to learning the mechanics of the game in such a way to both maximize performance of the game and minimize injury and/or damage from the game. One of the industry leaders in that realm is Driveline Baseball. Driveline’s research associate Michael O’Connell was gracious enough to field a number of questions and provide some excellent insight into exactly what Driveline is doing in their part of training a better baseball player. Because much of the question on training starts at a young age, many of the questions focus on training of high school and younger athletes in this interview.
We will be breaking these down in the following way:
Monday: Training specifically for baseball
Tuesday: Working with pitchers
Wednesday: Weight room work
Thursday: Tailoring a proper swing
Friday: What’s next?
With that, we’ll start with today’s focus on the swing revolution in baseball, from MLB all the way down to youth baseball.
Swing Revolution
Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Much of the Statcast stuff with swing is stuff that was already coming out of Driveline. Could be a long answer, but what do you see is still not yet accepted in the game that will change offense?
Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: Baseball is way behind in utilizing technology, especially compared to other sports. There are many pro teams where the front office knows one thing from Statcast data but the coaching staff has a different way of teaching. The helpfulness of launch angle and exit velocity should be pretty much universally accepted yet there is still a good amount of pushback on whether it’s useful, which seems ridiculous.
This isn’t necessarily Statcast-related but in order to translate training to in-game situations, athletes need to be challenged more. Most of baseball practice is well below the kind of challenge you would see in-game and that’s an issue. For us that usually means trying to hit off a high velocity pitching machine or practicing hitting sliders or curveballs. If you take a step back and realize that the best pitchers you are going to see at almost every level throw harder than average and have one above average offspeed pitch, then you should probably practice hitting high velocity and offspeed.
Our Hitting Director, Jason Ochart, does an awesome job tracking and monitoring our athletes to see how they’re getting better. In the end, having Statcast data gives athletes measurables to shoot for.
Swing Revolution
Benjamin Chase, Call to the Pen: Also, on Launch Angle/Exit Velocity, what is still misunderstood/misrepresented in coverage of the trend?
Michael O’Connell, Driveline Baseball: Launch angle and exit velocity are simply measurables, accurate measure of ball flight, of what coaches consistently talk about. Every coach wants to hit the ball hard with a good trajectory, they just use different terms and then get angry with one another for various reason.
It seems pretty ridiculous that people argue about it especially considering some coaches say they just want players to ‘hit the ball hard’ and not focus on ‘exit velocity’. Though (I hope) there are only a few of them, they do exist. With the technology we have now, you can actually get a number on how hard an athlete is hitting the ball versus the eye test so it’s silly to just disregard that ability. It really is a great tool because you can track and measure progress over time to make sure athletes are improving.
Easily the most misunderstood part is whether athletes should hit fly balls or not. The short answer is obviously yes. The issue is some people like to cite batter average numbers that show that line drives are the best and groundballs and flyballs aren’t good. The issue is that in the past fly balls and grounders were calculated solely by stringers, people watching the game marking down what the batted ball was.
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There are two issues with this. The first is parallax error. Each press box is at a different angle to the field, meaning batted balls are going to look different between each park. Second, there isn’t strict classification on what makes a fly ball a fly ball and what makes a line drive a line drive. Up until Statcast it was the best way to classify batted balls. Now that we have Statcast, we can get more precise.
We can look at batting averages based off of launch angle and exit velocity and we can pretty clearly see that hitting the ball hard in the air is the most beneficial outcome. Yet some still get caught up in the grounder, line drive, fly ball debate. Instead you should be looking at what launch angles and exit velocities produce the best batting average and slugging percentage and how can I practice achieving those launch angles and exit velocities to make either yourself or your players successful.
Next: Trout has a big birthday
Thoughts:
Certainly, I can say I was in the camp that discussed that there was a launch angle that was too high and that all fly balls were not optimal, but Michael makes an excellent point in reviewing previous data on fly ball vs. line drive in that you’re not viewing on launch angle, you’re viewing on result of the hit from a stringer.
The data of results of various launch angles is now more easily accessible to the average fan who is willing to dig through MLB.com’s Statcast website, so we can compare things much better.
Enjoy the video from Josh Donaldson. The way he approaches hitting is something that most of us never heard in little league for sure!
We’ll be back with more this week!