UTK Special 3/31/20

Weighted Balls from the Experts

I’d been writing about weighted balls for the better part of a week when I hit delete. The fact is that weighted balls are the most controversial topic in pitching despite the fact that they’re simply not that controversial.

The facts are that weighted balls - or more importantly, well designed programs that involve weighted balls as a tool - have been around for a while. The recent uptick in usage has made them near universal, with much credit to Driveline for that same uptick.

The problem is not well designed programs, to be sure. Or weighted balls, in and of themselves. The problem is when they’re used improperly, with poorly selected athletes that don’t have a good base for building from, and coaches that don’t understand the system, or even worse, only do part of it.

But to get deeper could take a whole book. You could read Hacking The Kinetic Chain or any of the hundreds of scientific research papers that are out there. I could interview people, dig in, and try to distill all of this into something you might like reading.

Or we could get access to something better.

The fine folks at ASMI made their round table discussion on weighted balls accessible outside of their normal Injuries in Baseball course. For many of you, this course is way beyond the level you want and for others, especially those of you in coaching or working for a team, you were probably there in Birmingham when this happened.

However, many of you don’t get to see names like Dr. James Andrews, Dr. Glenn Fleisig, Dr. Kevin Wilk, Dr. David Altchek, Mike Reinold, Ken Crenshaw, or Lenny Macrina very often, let alone talking to each other about an important topic like this.

I hope you’ll all take 55 minutes and watch this video. It’s technical, but I think most of you will enjoy this discussion. I’m very curious what your takeaways and questions are from this, and I’ll address these in a future column - or even get one of the participants to answer, if you have a specific question.

Again, thanks to ASMI and to Glenn Fleisig for helping make this possible.