I will be conducting an experiment on myself over the next 4 weeks. I have been wanting to do this experiment for some time, however I was inspired by Murphy Baseball, @murphybbperform on Twitter, to finally go through with it. I will be training my off throwing hand, my left, to see how hard I can get myself to throw.
I got baseline numbers, plus some video, today. I topped at 64.9 mph on a crow hop. Here is the video:
I also got some video of a roll in from the side:
A couple quick observations:
-It doesn’t look that bad. I have messed around with throwing lefty a little in the past, nothing excessive, but that is probably why it doesn’t look absolutely brutal.
-The lower half looks decent enough to throw 75-80. That is not where I will direct my focus.
-The upper half/arm action is where I think the biggest improvements will come from. My front arm doesn’t clear very well which leads to my whole torso basically rotating at the same time with no stretch being created across the pec region. My focus will be directed at improving this area, trying to get more separation between the front arm pull and arm acceleration (positive disconnection as it is known).
You can expect weekly articles detailing how it is progressing. For this coming week I will be throwing 4 times a week, working on the specific things I mentioned above. Stay tuned for an update next week.