JAMMED EYELIDS

Introduction For those familiar with the integration of technology in today's game, you have probably heard of the term "pitch design" before. Pitch design has become somewhat of a blanket term used to describe the pitch development processes that range from tweaking an existing pitch in an effort to increase its effectiveness to the introduction of an entirely new pitch to a pitcher's arsenal.  There has been some controversy on the semantics of the term that has centered around the idea of whether a completely "new pitch" can actually be created. This is not the idea that the term is supposed to evoke. To some degree, any type of manipulation that a pitcher imparts on a pitch creates a movement profile that has likely been thrown by someone, somewhere, at some point in time at least once, if not millions of times, before. But to "design" a pitch in the sense that most of us use "pitch design," it is simply the process of attempti...

(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...