Tanner Olson

Former @MLB player John Vander Wal nailed it on his @facebook post! #shegone The game is in an awful state. I scouted professionally for two organizations over a ten-year period, and a lot of what we’re seeing today is being misunderstood or flat-out misrepresented. First, velocity. Pitchers are not throwing significantly harder across the board. The perceived jump in velocity is primarily the result of technology and measurement changes — specifically where the device picks the baseball up out of the hand. As radar and tracking systems moved closer and closer to release, the readings increased. The arm didn’t change — the measurement did. Now hitting. We’ve reached a point where “gurus” who never played the game at a high level are applying golf swing principles to baseball, largely because golf embraced analytics to identify the most efficient swing paths. The problem is that a baseball bat is not a golf club. In golf, you dump the club to get it on plane. In baseball, you cannot lose the barrel on the back side and still stay on plane consistently. Yet the tech community began preaching backside barrel dump as the answer. Front offices filled with non-baseball “propeller head” GMs bought into the presentations, and this philosophy was pushed aggressively through the minor leagues. I saw this coming as early as 2014. The result? Hitters now dump the barrel in an attempt to get on plane, but they: • Struggle to stay inside the baseball • Lose adjustability • Operate with slower effective bat speed On the pitching side, it’s no better. Pitchers are taught max effort on every pitch. Starters rarely exceed 90 pitches or five innings, work almost exclusively to either arm side or glove side, and live in deep counts. Relievers are almost universally max effort, arm-side only. The consequence is obvious: • Poor command • Inconsistent control • Little ability to sequence or adjust Despite all the technology, pitching command and overall feel are as bad as I’ve ever seen at the big-league level. More data didn’t make the game smarter. It just made it louder — and in many cases, worse. facebook.com/share/p/15V3ETT… @notgaetti @BobFile @twuench @billdubs @iamrags @SliderDominate @slider_sinker @CRAIG_LAPINER @hittingguru7 @BLocsports @TheRealJHair @WillClark22 @DMEASrecruiting @GDBJr5 @mikepiazza31 @JLucroy20