JAMMED EYELIDS

by Jordie Henry, with clutch help from Ilan Joffe Introduction If you are anyone in baseball, you know that much has been observed about ball flight tracking over the last several years in the baseball world. The rise of technology like TrackMan, Hawkeye, and Rapsodo has changed the way pitchers develop for the foreseeable future. Such aspects of tracking ball flight include in-season and live game pitch analysis, training and development-centered pitch design processes, and areas where those concepts might overlap as an athlete monitors their personal progress over time.  The types of questions, analyses, and conclusions that can be drawn from this tech are seemingly endless. For specific examples of how these tools can be utilized, check out previous articles from the blog here , here , and here . In this post, we will look at yet another and possibly stupid example of how this tech and its data can be used. *For sake of specificity and to avoid going off on tangents, the rest o...

The other day, I came across a Pitcher List  article  by Michael Augustine that talked about Bauer Units and how the concept can have real world application with samples of MLB pitchers. First, a quick review of  Bauer Units . BU = spin rate (RPM) / velocity (MPH) This normalizes the effect of spin on a fastball relative to velocity for comparison among pitchers. The league average Bauer Units is 24. The higher the Bauer Units, the more "hop" or "rise" is perceived on a fastball, and the lower the Bauer Units, the more "sink" on a fastball. One of the players in Augustine's sample of pitchers with average Bauer Units was the Yankees' Luis Severino, who notched an average of 24.31 BUs on his 4-seam FB through August of 2018. The article went on to explain how, essentially, Severino had more success living  lower  in the zone but that it didn't mean much considering his OBA on FBs alone (.273) was not very impressive. What could have c...

(Note: this was a post I wrote in March 2019 for True Grind Systems, a sports performance training facility in Austin, TX. You can find the original post here . All media included is my own or was extracted from Rapsodo Cloud. Because I've learned a considerable amount since this post was written, there have been some added notes and corrections italicized in bold throughout.) Of the many new trends throughout the baseball training world, one that I keep seeing pop up is the role of “intent.” Intent can be defined in several different ways, but for the sake of specificity within this post, I’ll simply describe it as the overall level of effort within each repetition. In this case, let’s say our repetitions are individual throws off of a mound. High intent can help us gauge how our training outcomes will translate into game scenarios and can allow us to better facilitate preparedness for our next outing. Generally, we can have a good idea for what type of arsenal we’ve equipped...