By Jonathan Massey –
We all know the guy who, after every bad performance, blames the mound for not being the right slope or the umpire zone being too tight or “insert any number of excuses here”. Maybe it’s you, maybe it’s a buddy of yours, but either way, the reason it happens on a regular basis is because that athlete has become an adapted athlete rather than an adaptable athlete.
An adapted athlete is an athlete (or pitcher in this case) who has to have, as they say, “the stars aligned” in order to have a good outing. The mound has to be right, the umpire needs to have the right zone, etc. for him to have a good outing. An adaptable athlete, on the other hand, is exactly what it sounds like. They are able to adjust and adapt to the different types of mounds, umpire zones that shift from game to game, and whatever else gets thrown their way. This does not mean the adaptable pitcher is guaranteed to have success every time they go out there, it just means they are better equipped to handle less-than-ideal scenarios.
The question isn’t which athlete is better. We should all strive to be the adaptable athlete. The question is what makes (or how do we develop) more adaptable athletes?
The first step in becoming an adaptable athlete is to not get bogged down in your routines. Now, I’m not saying routines aren’t important. In fact, I think having a routine is a really, really good thing! But the flip side is that if you are constantly doing the same throwing drills with the same weighted balls to the same target, it will lead to being an adapted athlete. The fix to this is to add some variability to your throwing routines. It can be as simple as changing targets on your throws or changing up the drills that you do. One of the things that I like to do with players to change up the routine is to have them cycle through the weighted balls instead of doing each ball individually. (I.e., they’ll make one throw with each weighted ball three times through instead of doing three throws and then moving to the next weighted ball.) I like this because the weight difference of the balls challenges the player to make slight adjustments for each throw.
Another thing you can do is throw on different mounds. The simplest version of this plan is to throw in the visitor side’s bullpen instead of the home side’s. Another version of this, which I got from Coach Wallace, is to throw after someone else threw their pen. This is really good to do if you are a reliever, as you never come in a game on a perfect mound, so throwing on a mound that has already been used is a good way to simulate a game-like scenario. At the Texas Baseball Ranch®, we take this to another level. We will actually have our players throw on extreme downhill slopes, extreme uphill slopes, slopes with your toes higher than your heels, and vice versa. Again, we do this because it differentiates the throws and adds a higher degree of adaptability to the program.
There are many other ways that a player could train adaptability than the ones I have mentioned, but the point is that it needs to be done. The more adaptable a player becomes, the better odds he gives himself and his team to be successful.
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