The Hit Mill

USCL Baseball came out to break in the new pitching mound 👀

Early hip extension toward the opposite batters box or opposite field kills barrel direction and accuracy.

Lack of mobility, lading the quads (knees in front of the toes), rocking or swaying back, rotating with the upper half, pulling with the front side, etc…

These are all flaws that amateur hitters and even many elite hitters struggle with.

Be stubborn with your posture and move with the middle/backside of your body.

If you still have an issue, don’t be afraid to play with cheating rotation by using the back knee. Just make sure to move that back knee more toward the front knee than home plate.

How many games is too many games?

Enter the danger zone with caution. Suarez awaits. Eugenio starts fairly upright, but notice how he fights for posture over the plate as his hips rotate & he drives through the ball.

Full Shohei Ohtani swing breakdown coming out next week on YouTube.

Spoiler alert: he's kinda good.

Can't make it to the facility? No worries, all we need is a PVC pipe and some grit 😤

Forward bend (hinge) should turn directly into side bend (tilt). This keeps the chest over the plate and your eyes behind the ball - allowing hitters to maintain barrel direction through the middle of the field. ⁠
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Try it out.

It's usually not a "dip" of the back shoulder, it's an inability to avoid early tilt.

Without true understanding of human anatomy, movement and motor preferences, and what the athlete is "feeling" it's nearly impossible to prescribe the proper programming and give the athlete appropriate cues.

Stop reaching for the ball and start trusting that you'll rotate behind it 😤

The cutter is an awesome tool in the arsenal to keep hitters off balance. It’s a bridge between a fastball and a slider that allows you to maintain effective velocity while still featuring a glove side break similar to a slider.

Knowing this about the pitch, we can take that into our grip and mindset with how we throw it. If we want it to be hard like a fastball, we need to feel behind the ball. If we want it to have glove side break we need to come through the outside of the ball. The catch comes with finding the blend of the two so we don’t lean too far behind the ball or around the outside. This comes in the form of wrist angle, grip and finger pressure.

Gavin’s formula is to feel like he is behind the baseball like a fastball while trusting his grip to set himself up to create the glove side break.