THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

"I struggle to throw the ball 120 feet”

Haha Pelfrey. That’s a bit of an exaggeration… There’s definitely no one trick for everyone, but long toss is a great way to give your throwing muscles a safe, strenuous workout. Plus it encourages a long, mechanically sound throwing motion. When you give a ball to someone and tell them to throw as hard as they can towards a target 60 feet away, some tend to “muscle it” or throw inefficiently - not use their legs, fail to fully turn/step/extend etc. But there’s no cheating in long toss. It forces you to use your entire body to throw the ball. It’s great for young kids to learn how to leverage all of their power. Plus, who doesn’t love trying to throw a ball as far as they can…

This obviously isn’t the best place for this, but I was just flipping past ESPN and baseball tonight had a spotlight on Chris Carpenter featuring his xFIP from last year and this year, and it had a little blurb about his BABIP against in the respective years.
How long have they been doing that?

I would LOVE to have full disclosure on who does 300-foot long toss and who doesn’t.

@WW, ESPN has been doing that for at least this baseball season in their “Next Level” segment. I mentioned this before, but the downside is the host brings it up, reads the stats, and then Aaron Boone and Mark Mulder say nothing. Mulder could easily tie in FIP to what pitchers are trying to do, but they don’t.

years ago pithcing coach Rich Dubee got on myers case about not long tossing enough.  his velocity came back over the season as kept up with his long tossing program.  he was throwing from home plate to the wall routinely. 

its definitely something every pitcher should do

I don’t know about “definitely” and “every”.

What is definite is that you don’t cookie-cutter every pitcher.  And Brian Cashman talking about pre-hab programs is just wishful thinking.  That by excluding long toss from a program, that that is necessarily a recipe for success.

He doesn’t know, and I don’t know, and really, no one knows.

It’s like telling Vlad and Soriano how to hit.  They know their bodies, and they know their skills.  And to tell them, or any long-tossing pitcher, that they should NOT do something, even though they’ve had tons of success until this point doing that is a huge risk.

You are basically saying that are successful despite doing what they do.  And the better bet is that they are successful because they do what they do.

No guarantee of course.  But you can’t just go zero-tolerance policy on their a$$ when it comes to their training and approach to things.  They aren’t automatons.

Have you ever seen Dominik Hasek play goalie?  Completely different from everyone else.  Fairly risky.  And yet, for a period of 6 or 7 years, he was the best goalie in the world.  Aren’t you going to treat small David Cone differently from big Roger Clemens.  Both hugely successful at the same time, and I have no idea what their workout programs were like, but whatever it was, I’d keep my mouth shut on it.