Your Prime Starts Here.

QUIET HEAD = BETTER BARREL CONTROL! Keeping the head still throughout the swing is huge! The more unnecessary head movement we have, the harder it becomes to track the baseball and make consistent contact. The goal is to keep our eyes level and our head quiet while allowing the body to rotate efficiently behind the baseball. We want the body to move aggressively without the head moving all over the place! Quiet head. Clear vision. Better barrel accuracy!

The instinct for a lot of hitters is to cheat when they feel late, pulling off early or rushing the barrel to try to catch up. That reaction usually costs more than it saves, turning a hittable pitch into weak contact or a swing and miss. The better approach is to stay in your normal swing and trust it. If you stay through the ball instead of bailing out, getting jammed does not have to mean an out. It can still turn into a single muscled through the infield. Part of that comes down to strength, having strong hands and a strong swing gives you a little more margin when you are a fraction of a second late. But it starts with trusting your mechanics enough to stay in the swing instead of pulling off or rushing to compensate. Staying late instead of cheating is not about being stubborn with your swing. It is about trusting that what you have built gives you options a rushed, pulled off swing never will.

Staying inside the ball does not mean forcing every swing into the same narrow, defensive position. The goal is to give a hitter access to more of the field, not take options away from him. If a guy has a casting problem, staying inside the ball is something he could potentially focus on. But if that is not his issue, holding him inside the ball too aggressively just turns every swing into a hit and run, forcing the ball to the right side when the pitch never called for that. Letting the barrel work more freely still allows a hitter to turn on a pitch and drive it out to left field. It does not mean losing the ability to stay inside the ball when the situation actually calls for it. For a hitter, staying inside the ball is not a rule that applies the same way to everybody. It is a tool for the guys who need it, and a cue that can get in the way for the guys who do not.

Sonny Gray is a great example of maximizing what you can do with a smaller frame. His ability to use his initial drift is a big part of what makes his delivery so effective. Rather than dropping into his back leg and then moving toward the plate, Sonny uses gravity to create momentum, allowing him to drift into his back leg while efficiently directing force both into the ground and toward 2nd base. One metric we look at on our Force Plate mounds is YZ Transfer Back — the time between peak force into the ground and peak force directed toward 2nd base through the back leg. Generally, we want to see this time as low as possible, indicating a more efficient transition between these force outputs. Sonny does an excellent job of syncing his drift with his back-leg loading, allowing him to maximize his movement down the mound and get the most out of his frame. It’s not about how big you are. It’s about how efficiently you move!

A hitting drill, method, or training tool is only as useful as the problem it is being used to solve. The same approach can be highly effective for one hitter and unnecessary for another depending on the movement, timing, or adaptation we are trying to create. The value comes from understanding what each method actually changes and knowing when it fits the athlete in front of you.

Coach Joe got back on the mound for a few live ABs against some of our high school guys. The high school guys weren't exactly lining up for another round.

BAT PATH MATTERS! Understanding how the barrel works through the zone is huge! It starts with turning behind the baseball. The bottom hand turns in the direction of the pitch while the top hand delivers the barrel to the ball, then continues working up and out through extension. The goal is to create a clean, efficient bat path that allows us to stay through the baseball and drive it with authority! Turn behind it. Deliver the barrel. Work up and out through it!

One year of Prime Performance. Over 200 athletes from across the country, college and professional signings, a Major League debut, World Baseball Classic representation, countless PRs, and plenty of milestones along the way. We're incredibly grateful for every athlete, family, and coach who has been part of our first year. Proud of what we've built, but even more excited about what's ahead. We're just getting started. Your Prime Starts Here.

Not every pitcher needs to gain weight, and body mass alone obviously doesn’t create velo. But for significantly undersized athletes, adding usable mass can be one of the highest-leverage changes they make. For some athletes, improving the physical qualities behind the delivery may matter more than continuing to chase small mechanical changes.

To create change there needs to be a stimulus strong enough for the body to respond to. Spamming mobility or low effort reps is not the key to making a change to your delivery. The throw is too violent of an action for these low impact modalities to create a great enough stimulus to enact change. They do serve a purpose for laying a foundation; however, our job as coaches is knowing how to scale and implement more demanding tasks that will then translate to the throw.

Your lead leg is the brake that allows energy to be directed towards the target. If the earth were to stop rotating, everything would be launched forward at a ridiculous speed. That is the purpose of the block, your pelvis is the earth and the arm is everything inhabiting it. We want to leverage the block side collision as something to rotate into, which in turn propels the torso and arm to deliver the ball. You can implement some waterbag work, split squat variations that force IR of the working leg, or in some small cases, a slightly closed off throw to feel the body work against the lead leg.

Often times athletes get in their own way early in the delivery, setting themselves up for failure later in the throw. Whether it's throwing a breaking pitch or upping the intensity from 85% to 100%, athletes love to change the first 90% of the throw and neglect the last 10%. In this case, the athlete was turning his breaking ball over too early, causing him to get under it and leaving it high arm side. A simple reminder to get out front with the pitch was to feel the front foot down first before ripping it. Now, this is an exaggeration of what the throw should actually feel like — but understanding the athlete was stuck on one end of the spectrum, we needed to bring him back closer to that center line. Real versus Feel: what the athlete thinks they're doing versus what they're actually doing. Small adjustments in feel can lead to big changes in real.

Give ten athletes the same cue, you'll likely get ten different results. An external cue points at an outcome, like "rotate sooner" or "drive through the ground." It doesn't tell you why the athlete isn't already doing it. That "why" is different for almost everyone. Sometimes it's a mobility restriction. Sometimes it's a stability limit. Sometimes their body just doesn't have the spatial awareness yet to find that position under speed and load. Same cue. Completely different physical problem underneath. To make an actual change, we must identify the fault in the movement, find the root cause, whether it's mobility, stability, or movement capacity, and fix the root with the right tool. Only then does cueing it actually help. A cue can't fix a limitation.

Pick and Go! Let the pick turn you as you get your body in position to throw a dime! Keep the movements quick and efficient. Let the transfer work with your body, not against it. Pick it. Turn it. Fire it!

Stacking small adjustments day after day for an offseason paid dividends for Alex this year. Simply following a plan, dedicated for Alex, with the intent needed to force change and adaptation has paid off. Seeing career bests in peak and average velocity, BB%, K%, and ERA, Alex absolutely dominated this season. Jobs is far from finished as we continue to sharpen the sword and look to get back into affiliate ball where he belongs.

When talking about extension through contact, a lot of hitters try to hit the ball, then create lift after contact. The better sequence is having the barrel already working up through the zone at the moment of contact, not searching for lift once the ball is already gone. This step back drill helps build that. The hitter steps back to load into a real hip hinge, sitting into that hip before firing from it and turning behind the ball. That turn is what lets the lower half do its job first, instead of the upper half trying to manufacture lift on its own. When the sequence works the way it should, you do not have to create backspin after the fact. Hitting the ball on the way up creates it immediately, because the bat path is already matching where the pitch needs to be met instead of catching up to it late. It is not about trying to lift the ball. It is about building a swing where the lift is already built into the path before you ever get to contact.

Back-leg depth is one of those things that gets coached like there’s a right answer, when in reality it’s just one of many stylistic strategies that can vary from athlete to athlete. The same can be said for things like coil, tempo, posture, or how aggressively someone moves down the mound. None of those characteristics exist in a vacuum, and none of them need to look the same for every pitcher as long as the athlete is accomplishing the intended task. Some pitchers are going to work from a deeper position into the back leg, while others will stay relatively tall. The position itself isn’t necessarily what we care about. What matters is what that position allows the athlete to do throughout the rest of the delivery. For us, the goal is to find enough depth to maintain flexion through the rear hip while the body begins moving down the mound. That gives the athlete time to capture a linear move, build momentum, and delay hip extension until later in the sequence, when that energy can actually be transferred. How an athlete accomplishes that can look very different depending on the athlete. A more terrestrial pitcher may naturally spend more time interacting with the ground, create more depth, and organize force over a longer window, while a more aerial athlete may operate from a shallower position, spend less time on the ground, and rely more heavily on elastic and reactive qualities to accomplish a similar task. Neither approach is inherently better as long as it fits the athlete and allows them to solve the same problem efficiently. And this is where the obsession with finding the “perfect hinge” loses me. There is no holy grail position that every pitcher needs to find. Vertical shin, more quad dominant, squatty, shallow, deep, whatever. If the strategy allows the athlete to accomplish the goal and move efficiently into the next phase of the delivery, who cares what we call it or whether it fits someone else’s picture of what the back leg is supposed to look like? The problem starts when we take a stylistic characteristic from one athlete and turn it into a universal mechanical goal for everyone else. More depth doesn’t automatically mean a better back leg, just like more coil doesn’t automatically mean a better delivery. Too shallow for a specific athlete and they may run out of the back leg early, while too much depth may put them in a position they can’t effectively move out of and slow down the linear phase they were trying to improve in the first place. The goal is to find the amount of depth that fits the athlete, preserves their ability to move down the mound, and allows them to transition out of the back leg at the right time. That’s the difference between coaching a position and understanding what the position is actually there to accomplish.