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PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. -- The critique was stinging but true.
“Your body is telling you how it wants to move, and you’re ignoring it,” said Nick Serio, the GM of Velo University, near the end of my hourlong session.
The baseball and softball training center regularly works with individual high school, college and pro players, and I had undergone a robust battery of tests: a movement evaluation, multiple force plate drills, an ArmCare assessment and a dozen pitches in front of a TrackMan radar.
This data fuels the training programs and guidance VeloU offers its players, with hybrid options available for on-location and remote training. It developed a custom app, built upon white-label provider Everfi’s foundation, and guarantees responses within 24 hours, although typically VeloU coaches respond within an hour and a half.
“Our big promise -- what we feel was the biggest gap in that industry -- is our ability to communicate with an athlete,” Serio said. “We were always trying to think what is missing when you’re talking about remote training, and it’s the feeling that you have this connection to a coach.”
Serio, a former college baseball player who later earned a doctorate in sport and performance, had seen me squat comfortably into a deep stance but lack hip-shoulder separation -- I have limited upper thoracic spine rotation, meaning I don’t generate much force from the twist of my torso, and my hips aren’t flexible. This much I knew, dating back to a Springbok Analytics scan when I was told in no uncertain terms that my hip flexors were struggling.
This is not my first -- or even my second -- summer spent chucking baseballs in the pursuit of speed. What VeloU diagnosed is that I try to compensate by over-rotating my trunk to increase the whipping action of my motion in hopes of eking out a few more precious miles per hour. But, as Dir of Pitching Thomas Jankins noted, I didn’t have the pelvic control to benefit from that move.
“To be honest, you are older -- you’re just not going to have the same separation as a 19-year-old,” Jankins told me in a comment that was somehow both reassuring and devastating.
The downstream effect of these mechanics is that, when I ultimately pitched the ball, I lowered my left shoulder in an exaggerated fashion, and my right hand came over the top at an extremely high arm slot.
“Your rotation mechanism right now is basically just pure thoracic extension and tilting,” added Jankins, who rose to Triple-A in the Brewers system, explaining that I bring my arm over the top to create energy because, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t easily whip my torso around, thereby not taking full advantage of my lower half’s ability to generate force.
As Jankins put it, pitching mechanics are a byproduct of the body’s strength and flexibility. The throwing motion is a way to feel comfortable within those limitations. Serio believed I should prioritize generating force from the ground and through my legs because it ought to be more fruitful than whipping my upper body around.
“Most of the time, we don’t worry about the end of a race,” he said, referring to the throwing motion and likening my pitch to the finish and my mobility to the starting line. “We worry about the start of a race. In my opinion, you’re not built to wrap the way you’re wrapping, and that’s throwing everything else off.”
Performance coordinator Paul Franzese chimed in with some helpful weight room tips to emphasize the proper hip position when lifting. Serio noted that my squat during the movement assessment should be better leveraged in my pitching motion.
“You have too good of a squat for somebody that’s your height to not try and work on getting into that [position],” Serio added. “You’re avoiding loading your hip.”
KinaTrax, the high-end motion capture system, is set to be installed later in the summer as well as a set of Bertec force plates built into a mound. In combination, that’ll give richer data on biomechanics.
Projecting velo for U
VeloU has built its own custom player reports, and Jankins led the creation of a proprietary algorithm predicting an athlete’s capacity for velocity. The end result is a total energy score analogous to the max throwing velocity a body is capable of throwing.
The algorithm, which Serio said will soon be licensed to college programs, is built on four metrics that are all composites of the individual assessments:
- Energy potential (body composition).
- Energy production (weight room metrics).
- Energy transference (med ball, force plate).
- Arm health (ArmCare).
My total energy score was 81.8, and that’s right on the nose. A couple summers ago, I touched 82 mph. More recently, I topped out at 81 mph while throwing on a Pocket Radar. The big test, though, would be throwing on VeloU’s TrackMan. I had never thrown on an enterprise device like that; it formerly powered MLB’s Statcast and remains a leading provider in top colleges.
As I neared the end of my throwing session, I had been maxing out in the upper 70s when Jankins gave me a final charge.
“We’re going to go just one more fastball to finish,” he said. “Give us 80.”
I rocked and fired, the ball sailing well wide of the strike zone as I put far more effort into velocity than command. TrackMan flashes a preliminary speed immediately before taking a few seconds to display the confirmed final number, initially showed 80 mph as the half-dozen VeloU trainers watching me cheered ... before settling on 79.3, with the background noise descending into groans.
“One more,” I said, knowing the pressure was on.
This time, TrackMan began north of 80 and stayed there, registering 80.5, a reading met with a sustained cheer around me. Someone in the crowd equated the anticipation to one of their regular trainees trying to hit 98mph for the first time.
It was a supportive comment to show how invested the group was in my success, but it also reinforced for me how far away I was from the elites. I felt very much like a retiree auditing a course at VeloU.
