Baseball Pitching Instructors—Why Don’t They Videotape Pitching Mechanics First

There are several ways to determine whether you will get your money’s worth from hiring a baseball pitching instructor for your son. One way is to find out whether he uses baseball pitching video analysis in the initial lesson in order to determine what pitching faults your son has with his delivery.

I spoke to the father of a 13 year old baseball pitcher yesterday who purchased a five pitching lesson package from a baseball school in Kansas City for $350.

My first question was: Did he do a video analysis of your son’s mechanics, go over his faults with both of you and how he would go about fixing those faults? His answer did not surprise me when he said there was no video analysis. This means that there is no possible way that this pitching instructor is going to be able to recognize “your son’s” own pitching faults.

So with that it becomes easy to determine whether that five lesson package is worth anything or not. In this case, it is worth nothing to the boy or his father but is good money for the baseball school and the instructor.

Not videotaping would indicate to me that this instructor teaches every pitcher the same thing. This means that every pitcher pretty much gets the same “first lesson.” But this does not make sense because not all pitchers have the same mechanical faults. If your son spends that first lesson working on his balance when he does not have a balance problem then you have just wasted $75.00.

This father told me that the instructor had his son throw five pitches into a wall and that was the initial evaluation.

Never once did he mention the boys short stride which the father even recognized as looking much too short. The instructor said that stride length really didn’t matter that much and that a pitcher should stride to whatever distance is comfortable.

This was the second reason why I would have asked for my money back. A pitcher’s stride length not being that important is like telling a golfer that it is really not that important to spread your feet apart a little more than shoulder width but that it’s OK to start with your feet close together. Pretty foolishf since the base of support is very important and a short stride does not allow the pitcher to apply all the available elastic energy of his body to help develop more arm speed and velocity. With too short a stride the small base of support will make it difficult to throw with good control.

By the way, the pitching instructor said that this boy’s control problem was the result of a poor release point. If you ever hear that then you know you are in the hands of a rank beginning instructor who knows very little. A pitcher’s release point is the “result” of a mechanical problem…not the cause of a problem.

This year, this offseason especially, the amount of money that will be wasted on baseball pitching instruction would be far better used to help rebuild the disaster in Indonesiaf and really help some people who need it desperately…because little of the money being spent on pitching instruction is going to be used to help make better pitchers. If fact, probably most will help make pitchers worse…not better.

There are some good pitching instructors out there. But if your son’s pitching instructor does not do initial and regular video analysis of his mechanics so you can see the progress…then fire him immediately. He is not a professional baseball pitching instructor. And you are wasting your time and money.

Dick Mills

If you have questions about this blog post or on any phase of pitching—mechanics, strength and conditioning, mental training, strategy send those questions to dickmills@gmail.com and I will answer them here.

If you want an explosive body and explosive mechanics you need to get my Free Report at www.pitching.nexcess.net. We won’t waste your time. We show you how to recognize exactly what is holding back most pitchers…find the problem—fix the problem. I show you a comparison between two high school pitchers and a major league pitcher who throws mid to upper nineties. You will see the biggest problem that reduces velocity in the majority of pitchers.

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