Meeting in Gym after school -- all level players : Wednesday 01/22/14 ( snow day Thursday after school :: We will discuss winter workouts and depending on weather there will be 30 minutes of a fitness workout outside.
Sunday workout 01/26 --6:30 to 8pm @ Humn'birds' indoor Baseball facility ( 688 RT17K Montgomery NY) :: wear baseball attire including a hat... All players welcome . Make sure to bring $20.00. Checks can be made out to Al Trezza.
Swing it like you mean it ... No mysteries here :: -- like to practice -- like to play -- challenge yourself - be willing to change- learn from failure --stay with it...have fun...
Chris Colabello Crushes in Classic (Hit Link Below):
Currently major leagues with the Twins. D3 player with no scholarship offers - not drafted out of college - Independent Player of the year - Twins AA Player of the year -- AAA player of the year,
Pitchers see below about the ' master ' : forget the radar gun.
NYTIMES ARTICLE.
For Greg Maddux, an Unassuming Presence Masked a Master of the Pitching Craft
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Greg Maddux, at the Empire State Building, has more wins than any living pitcher (355) and ranks 10th in career strikeouts (3,371).Rob Kim/Getty Images
On his first day in the major leagues, with the Chicago Cubs in September 1986, Greg Maddux found his locker and noticed the matchup he would see that afternoon. It was Jamie Moyer against Nolan Ryan. Finesse versus power. What a laboratory for an eager student of the craft of pitching.
Maddux was 20, not yet nicknamed the Professor, a long way from becoming the winningest pitcher alive. It was so long ago that Wrigley Field did not have lights, and the game was suspended. Maddux would enter the next day as a pinch-runner in the 17th inning, and lose in relief on a home run by Billy Hatcher.
The first of his 355 wins came a few days later, with a complete game. Maddux would finish his career with one more victory than Roger Clemens. He is in the Hall of Fame — and Clemens is not — because of his greatness as a pitcher who was perceived to be clean. Hitters wondered how Maddux did it, all right, but for different reasons.
“It was unbelievable,” said the slugger Frank Thomas, another new Hall of Famer, after Thursday’s news conference at the Waldorf-Astoria. “The guy’s throwing 89 with that type of movement, and you knew what was coming and you couldn’t hit it. It’s just like Mariano Rivera. You know what’s coming, you just can’t hit it. He found a way to get you out.”
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Greg Maddux, elected to the Hall of Fame on Wednesday, pitched against the Yankees in Game 6 of the 1996 World Series.Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
Thomas faced Maddux only four times (0 for 3 with a walk), but in their 1990s heyday, Maddux was impossible to ignore. Clemens snarled and Randy Johnson glowered and Pedro Martinez dazzled. Maddux? He just put the ball exactly where he wanted.
“Have a good moving fastball that does something the last 10 feet, and be able to locate,” Maddux said Thursday. “That’s what gave me an opportunity to win. If I could do that, then I had a pretty good chance.”
For Maddux, it was not a matter of fiddling much with finger pressure on the ball. He simply wanted to throw from the same release point every time.
It sounds easy, but it is the essence of pitching, requiring extraordinary — and, in Maddux’s case, rather stealth — athleticism.
Maddux was only 6 feet and 170 pounds, and often wore glasses off the mound, as if to emphasize his unassuming presence. But there is a reason he won 18 Gold Glove awards, a record for any position. He repeated his sound mechanics, over and over, and was not exactly a soft-tosser, either.
“My thing was, I relied more on movement than I did location, and in order to get the ball to move — to run and sink — you have to throw it hard,” Maddux said. “It’s hard to throw a pitch easy and create movement. The harder you throw, the more spin you can put on it, and the spin creates movement, all that stuff. I tried to be very aggressive. It might not have looked like I was trying to throw hard, but I was firing it, man.”
Maddux said he knew it was time to retire when he threw a pitch at Dodger Stadium in 2008, executed everything perfectly, peeked at the scoreboard and saw 82 miles per hour. The pitch was nothing special — “a meaningless 1-0 fastball; it wasn’t like strike three,” he said — but it told him he no longer threw hard enough to compete.
By then, Maddux was 42, just a year removed from going 14-11. He had gotten that far with much less than he had early on. By the time he joined the Atlanta Braves, for the 1993 season, he was a Cy Young Award winner who could teach others with that trophy to be better. Not with his stuff, but with his mind.
Tom Glavine, the third new member of the Hall of Fame, said that his old teammate’s main lesson for pitchers was pretty basic: change speeds and locate. But that depended largely on talent. Anyone could mimic Maddux’s other skill.
“Paying attention to details,” Glavine said. “He was really good at processing information from a hitter — how he took a pitch, how he swung at a pitch, what that dictated to you as a pitcher as to what he was looking for, and where you can go with your next pitch.
“There’s a lot of things you can process from pitch to pitch that can make your job a little bit easier, but it’s not the easiest thing to learn how to do. I didn’t do it until I started hanging around with him.”
More than anything else, Maddux said, fellow pitchers would ask how he threw his two-seam fastball, the one that seemed headed for the hip of a left-handed hitter before veering back to clip the inside corner.
“Because it’s the furthest strike from the hitter’s eyes,” Maddux said. “A little bit harder to see, a little bit harder to hit.”
That pitch helped Maddux collect 3,371 strikeouts, 10th on the career list, against just 999 walks. He did not pitch to contact and hates the term, which he finds illogical. Maddux said he never wanted the batters to hit the ball, but always knew they might.
“If I throw a strike with this pitch,” Maddux said he told himself, “this one’s the least likely to go over the outfielders.” That is all he wanted to control, he said: keeping the ball from going over the outfielders. Usually, only bad stuff happened back there.
When it was over, Maddux had his 355 victories and realized nobody on the planet had more. It seems unlikely, as pitchers work fewer and fewer innings, that anyone will match him.
But Maddux thinks it can be done.
“Yeah,” he said, smiling. “There’s probably some kid in ninth grade right now that’s pretty good. You never know.”
