Baseball’s Never-Ending Love Affair With Mechanics

Why are people so infatuated with mechanics within the world of baseball and softball?

Swing mechanics. Pitching mechanics. Throwing mechanics. Fielding mechanics.

Slow-motion video. Positions. Angles. Checkpoints. Screenshots with lines drawn all over them.

We absolutely love breaking movement apart.

And to be clear before we go any further: mechanics matter.

If they didn’t, I wouldn’t own a $1,500 Sony camera that films video at just under 1,000 frames per second.

(It’s really cool. At 1,000 FPS, it takes about a minute for one second of movement to play back.)

How you move matters. There are more efficient and less efficient ways to accomplish a task. There are movement patterns that can potentially improve performance, and there are certainly times when an athlete needs help changing the way he or she moves.

My issues aren’t with mechanics themselves.

My issues are:

1. Our obsession with consciously coaching mechanics while an athlete is trying to perform a highly dynamic movement.

2. The age at which some folks insist on bombarding players with constant talk of mechanics—through lessons, instruction or endless verbal cues every time an 8-year-old hits a ball off a tee.

Those are two different issues, but I think they come from the same place.

We have become so obsessed with how athletes move that sometimes we interfere with their ability to simply learn how to move.

These Movements Happen FAST

Baseball, softball and golf are somewhat unique among popular American sports because their most important skills involve extremely fast, dynamic movements.

A baseball swing happens incredibly fast.

So does throwing a baseball.

So does a golf swing.

And the faster and more complex a movement becomes, the less opportunity the athlete has to consciously control the individual pieces of that movement while performing it.

That’s not my opinion.

That’s how motor learning works.

Yet baseball instruction frequently operates as though the exact opposite is true.

We give hitters five different things to think about while they’re trying to hit a baseball.

Keep your hands here.

Stay inside it.

Don’t pull your head.

Load into your back hip.

Keep your front shoulder closed.

Get the barrel here.

Now, here comes an 85 mph fastball.

Good luck.

Think About How We Coach Other Sports

A kid shoots a free throw and misses.

What do we normally do?

We give him the basketball back.

He shoots it again.

Maybe he misses long.

Next one is shorter.

Maybe that one goes left.

Eventually he starts finding the basket.

We allow the athlete to use the information provided by the result to make adjustments.

Interestingly enough, shooting a free throw is actually a relatively slow and simple movement compared to swinging a bat or throwing a baseball. If there were ever a movement where an athlete might have enough time to consciously process a verbal mechanical cue, a free throw would be a pretty good candidate.

Yet we generally don’t feel the need to dissect every missed free throw.

Imagine if we coached basketball the way we sometimes coach hitting.

A kid misses a jumper and we immediately stop him.

“Your elbow was about three degrees too far outside your body. Your wrist didn’t extend correctly. Your knee started extending too early. Your release point needs to be two inches higher.”

Then we send him back out there and expect him to shoot naturally.

That sounds ridiculous.

Heck, it sounds ridiculous before I even bring up the fact that, without slow-motion video and time to analyze it, the idea that someone can accurately comprehend everything happening during a dynamic movement and then correctly alter it on the fly is just…wrong.

I’m sorry. It doesn’t work that way.

But I digress.

In baseball?

That’s Tuesday.

The Body Is Pretty Good at Solving Problems

This is the part I think we underestimate.

The human body is an incredible problem-solving machine.

Give an athlete a clear task. Give them opportunities to perform it. Give them accurate feedback about the outcome. Then give them enough repetitions.

They will begin making adjustments.

They don’t necessarily need to know what those adjustments are.

That’s important.

If I throw a ball at a trash can and miss three feet to the right, nobody needs to explain the biomechanics of my throwing motion to me.

I’m probably going to throw the next one farther left.

If I throw it over the trash can, I’ll probably throw the next one lower.

The result itself contains information.

This is one of the reasons I believe good training environments are so important. The drill, constraint or task can often teach the movement without the coach having to verbally describe the movement.

Instead of constantly telling an athlete how their body should move, sometimes we’re better off giving them a problem their body has to figure out how to solve.

Young Athletes Make This Even More Important

And I think this becomes even more important the younger the athlete is.

A young kid doesn’t need an advanced understanding of swing mechanics.

He needs to learn how to swing.

He needs to learn how to throw.

He needs to learn how to catch.

He needs to learn how to move his body through space.

The disconnect occurs with the word “LEARN”.

Most people hear the word “LEARN” but are thinking “TELL”.

He needs repetitions doing those things while focusing primarily on what he’s trying to accomplish, not to be told what six different parts of his body are doing.

Throw the ball there.

Hit the ball there.

Hit the ball hard.

Catch the ball.

Run fast.

Those are problems a young athlete can understand.

And this is where I think our obsession with mechanics can do the most damage.

An 8-year-old doesn’t need every swing turned into a lesson. He doesn’t need to hit a ball off a tee and immediately look at an adult waiting to hear what he did wrong.

Which is actually a whole separate problem within itself.

I have lost track of how many times I’ve had a young player around 12 to 13 years old at our facility that is hitting well off the machine or front toss, etc. , that will look at me and say “hey can you watch my swing? It just doesn’t feel right”

The kid has been hitting missiles all day, but because we’ve turned them into coaching-addicts they don’t even know which way is up or down.

We’ve completely robbed them of the ability to look at the outcome and say “that swing was good because the goal was accomplished”

Sometimes he needs to hit the ball.

Then hit another one.

Then another one.

Let him miss.

Let him figure some things out.

Let him learn what his own body can do.

There will be plenty of time to refine movement as he develops.

The more we make young athletes internally focused on individual body parts, positions and movements, the more likely we are to interfere with the natural process of learning how to coordinate those movements.

I’ve watched young hitters step into the box looking like they’re mentally going through a preflight checklist.

Hands.

Elbow.

Hip.

Stride.

Head.

Shoulder.

At some point we have to let the kid hit the baseball.

Does That Mean We Never Coach Mechanics?

Of course not.

That’s usually where these conversations go off the rails.

Someone says we shouldn’t constantly bombard athletes with mechanical cues and somebody interprets that as:

“So you think mechanics don’t matter?”

No.

Mechanics absolutely matter.

The question is how we go about changing them—and when.

There are times when direct instruction is appropriate. There are times when video can be incredibly useful. There are times when an athlete needs to understand what they’re doing and what we’re trying to change.

But understanding a movement and consciously controlling that movement during competition are not the same thing.

Our goal should be to eventually make the desired movement automatic.

Because that’s what athletic movement has to become.

You don’t have time to consciously organize your body when a baseball is traveling toward you at 90 mph.

Why Do We Keep Doing It?

I think part of the reason baseball has such a love affair with mechanics is because mechanics are easy to see.

I also think it starts early with well-intentioned parents watching their 8-year-old swing and throw.

It doesn’t look right, so naturally they want to help.

Problem is, they’re 8.

They can barely walk in a straight line.

And young athletes generally aren’t great at taking complicated verbal instructions about body positions and immediately turning those instructions into stable, repeatable movement.

Even more confusing is that sometimes they can do it temporarily.

You give the kid a cue.

He changes the movement.

You leave the lesson or garage hitting session happy.

Then the game rolls around and he’s right back to his old movement pattern.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the instruction was good and the player “forgot it.”

It may simply mean you changed the movement for 30 minutes.

That is very different from changing the movement permanently.

There is a Grand Canyon-sized difference between getting an athlete to produce a different movement during one lesson and creating a new, better movement pattern that becomes automatic and survives competition.

That part takes time.

It takes repetition.

It takes the right environment.

And, in many cases, it takes far less conscious thought than people realize.

Mechanics are also easy to talk about.

They’re easy to put on social media.

You can freeze a video, draw three lines and two circles on somebody’s body and immediately look like you’re explaining something incredibly sophisticated.

And sometimes you are.

But identifying what an athlete’s body did is not necessarily the same thing as knowing why they did it, whether it actually needs to change, or what the best method is for changing it.

Something I’ve learned from using the slow-motion camera I mentioned earlier is that many of the common things we cue athletes to fix are actually symptoms.

They’re the visible result of something that happened earlier in the movement.

The hands did this because the torso did that.

The torso did that because the pelvis did something before it.

The foot landed there because something upstream already put the body on that path.

Then the coach sees the most obvious thing—the symptom—and attacks it directly.

That’s when the law of unintended consequences starts taking over.

You fix the thing you can see and accidentally create two new problems somewhere else.

That’s where things get considerably more complicated.

Sometimes the mechanical flaw we’re staring at isn’t actually the problem.

Sometimes it’s the body’s solution to another problem.

And sometimes our attempt to consciously fix that position creates two more problems somewhere else.

Coaches Need to Know When to Get Out of the Way

I think that’s probably the bigger point.

Good coaching isn’t measured by how much information we can give an athlete.

Sometimes good coaching means giving them information.

Sometimes it means designing a better drill.

Sometimes it means changing the environment.

Sometimes it means asking a question.

And sometimes it means shutting up and letting them figure it out.

That’s difficult for coaches.

We’re coaches.

We feel like we’re supposed to coach.

But every repetition doesn’t require our commentary.

Every miss doesn’t require a mechanical explanation.

Every imperfect movement doesn’t require an immediate correction.

Especially with young athletes.

Give them a clear objective.

Give them an environment that encourages the movement you want.

Let them compete.

Let them fail.

Let them adjust.

Let them become athletes.

Then intervene when you actually have a reason to.

Mechanics matter.

But the ultimate goal isn’t to create an athlete who can explain his mechanics.

It’s to create an athlete who can perform the skill without having to think about them.