Selected Passages
Selected passages
#Perspective #Faith
“Rather than try to make order out of things, instead embrace the randomness of it,” Note: Replace “random” with “Godliness”...
#NaturalMovement #Biomechanics
He began studying predators from nature, the big cats and the wolves, to see how they generated so much power as they ran and jumped through the air. It was immediately clear to him that the force was generated in their heels. This ran counter to the common wisdom about hitting: “Be on the balls of your feet.” When he started watching the great hitters through that lens, he saw that they in fact strode off their heel, not the balls of their feet
#TedWilliams #BatPath Williams
wrote that because pitchers are standing on a mound, by definition the flight of the ball will always be down. An upswing will put the bat “flush in line with the path of the ball for a longer period,” essentially giving hitters more margin for error
#MindsetShift #MechanicsChallenge
There came a point in the swing where Tewksbary was sure that Pujols’s hands should be moving forward. That’s what he was always taught: that as the front knee moves forward, so do the hands. That’s what he taught his clients. That’s what just about everybody taught. Except Pujols’s hands weren’t moving forward. They were actually moving backward, the exact opposite of everything Tewksbary had believed for his entire life. This was the epiphany. “If this was the best hitter on the planet,” Tewksbary realized at that moment, “then what I think is right is actually wrong. The world is upside-down.” … When he watched video, he wasn’t looking for what made swings different from his. To the contrary, he was conditioned to look for the similarities, which only reinforced what he already believed. When he finally opened his mind to seeing the exact opposite, he said, “it was shattering.”
#MentalCue #SwingCommitment
In the past, Colabello would see a pitch and quickly determine whether to swing or not swing. But using Plante’s humming drill, the mental cue was different. He had already decided to swing and would keep swinging—unless he decided to stop swinging. It was a key distinction
#Upswing #PowerHitting
“I tried to hit every ball I ever hit in the air,” Williams says. At one point, Mattingly says, “I want to make more outs on the ground, I think I’ve got a better chance of getting a hit.” Williams jumps all over that, asking Mattingly how many extra-base hits he had in the season before and then reminding him that he didn’t get them by hitting the ball on the ground
#Conviction #Ownership
Six words in particular stood out for him: “Fail doing what you think works.”
#UpwardPath #BackBarrelMove
The common idea among all of these coaches was that the ideal swing doesn’t involve pushing the barrel down and forward to strike the ball, but moving the barrel backward first to generate momentum behind the ball and connect with it on an upward plane