Taylor Gardner - The Backspin Tee
How Sitting In Your Legs Instead of Lunging Will "Buy Time" and Improve Your Timing
Taylor Gardner is the founder of The Backspin Tee, which was named the ABCA Most Innovative New Product at the national convention. Taylor comes from a golf background instead of baseball (though his brother pitched professionally), so he and the guys at Backspin Tee have been able to take a fresh approach to how to improve our training methods without being bogged down with "well this is what I was taught" distractions. The Backspin Tee has the largest social media following of any baseball training device, as Taylor and the team are always experimenting, measuring and challenging conventional training practices.
Summary and Action Plan below
SESSION SUMMARY
Fastball and off speed have a difference of .07 seconds,
What you do with those .07 seconds will determine your success
“Buy time” = do something other than continue fastball swing/timing
...like continue to coil, stride out longer, SIT into legs
Being on time with a hard fastball is not any harder than a slower fastball, just requires new timing.
Barry Bonds: when he faced harder than usual fastball, he slowed down. Actually just tried to “catch” the ball with his barrel, no different than a catcher.
ACTION PLAN
How you spend that .07 second difference between a fastball and an off-speed pitch will determine your success or failure. Most kids spend that extra time lunging...or moving forward.
Coach Boots Day says that we got the term "He was sitting on that pitch" completely misconstrued. Back when he played with Ted Williams and the like, they would look for the curveball, and then literally sit, move their bottom down toward the ground on an off speed pitch. They would *look* fastball and then *sit* on the offspeed. The sitting motion was a way to continue to wind up and stay loaded (actually even more loaded than before) without lunging. This would enable them to be ready to drive the off speed.
Unbelievable right! All this time we have switched "sitting on ______" as meaning he was looking for that pitch, meanwhile it is actually the key to hitting offspeed for many older players!
So try it. Take some slow soft toss and get ready for fastball timing, but when you have to wait, don't try to just keep hands back and stay still to avoid lunging, sink your rear into your legs - literally get lower. And spend that .07 getting stronger instead of lunging.