Trevor Bauer (トレバー・バウアー)

An offspeed pitch 4 to 10 mph off your fastball gets almost no swing and miss. There's a weird triple range for how far off your fastball a pitch should be. 10 mph or more off your fastball: it gets a lot of swing and miss based on speed alone. The hitter is geared up for the fastball and is way out in front. Between 10 and 4 mph off: it gets basically no swing and miss. You'll get a lot of off-barrel contact, but the speed gap is too small to fool timing and too big to hide. 4 to 0 mph off: it gets a ton of swing and miss again. Hitters can't tell it apart from the fastball out of the hand, so the movement is what beats them. That's the game Yamamoto plays. His splitter is 92 and his four-seam is 96. You can't see the difference, but one has about 2 inches of vertical break and the other has 20. So the hitter tries to stay on top of the four-seamer, and that's the worst possible swing for a splitter. Know how far each of your pitches sits off your fastball, and what that speed gap is actually going to get you.

My big league success started when I stopped throwing so many fastballs. The Indians wanted me throwing 55 to 60% fastballs. But my curveball was my best pitch at the time. So I started throwing a whole bunch of curveballs, to righties and to lefties. That's when I started having a lot more success. It's easy to get obsessed with pitch percentages. What should my mix be? I have five pitches, so I should throw them all, right? That thinking gets in the way. You don't have to figure it out on your own. The hitters will generally tell you what your best pitch is. The stats will generally tell you too. Once you know, throw it the most. Your best pitch is your best chance of having success, so throw it a lot. Having five pitches doesn't mean you have to use all five. Use the one that gets hitters out.

I Took on a Former Tigers Prospect

Your kick change should feel like your middle finger got chopped off. The whole idea of a kick change is that you're throwing a splitter with your ring finger and your pointer. The middle finger's only job is to get out of the way. The most common mistake is a grip that's too tight. If your fingers sit too much on top of the seam and too close together, you end up behind the ball, and it won't do much. Spread your ring finger and pointer wider. You want it to feel like the ball is slipping out between those two fingers. Your middle finger just rests on top of the ball. It naturally pushes the ball forward a little, but it isn't doing the work. Your thumb isn't pushing the ball either. It just holds the ball in place and acts as a guide. Keep as little tension in your hand as you can. The more tension you have, the more likely the ball is to stay in your hand, and that's not what you want on a kick change. You want it to slip out.

When I pitch badly, it's usually because I go to the target too early. If you rush forward at the start of your delivery, you run away from your back side. Then you don't have anything left on your back side when you need it. I use 3 cues to fix this. 1. Relax and go slow in the beginning. Trust that the power is going to be there at the end. You don't have to force it early. 2. Elevate your glove side. Sometimes I think about taking my glove straight up into the sky. It doesn't actually end up that high, but thinking about it helps me stay back a little bit. 3. Keep your head over your back foot. Don't lean backwards. As you move forward, let your head stay over your back side instead of diving at the target. I have this same problem. I look at the target and want to go get it. When I'm good, I stay back, and then everything lines up.

Most pitchers mess up the slide step by going forward first. When you go forward first, you run away from your back leg. That's why the slide step feels so off for a lot of guys. It's also why everyone feels better in the windup. You get a leg kick, and the leg kick has to come down. So you're naturally thinking down first, without trying to. In the slide step, your center of gravity is already in front of your back foot. You don't need to push forward. If you just drop, you go. That makes everything way simpler. I've noticed it gets everything on time easier. At first I was getting a little late, but now my only cue is breaking my hands. When I break my hands, the drop happens without me thinking about it too much. People overcomplicate the slide step. Drop your back leg, then throw the ball.

It doesn't matter how your hips get open. It only matters that they are. Every pitcher's body moves differently. My hip doesn't rotate much at all. I don't have the range of motion for it. Mason Miller's back knee goes way in. Chapman works from the inside. Sasaki gets both legs open and then everything just spins. They all look different, but they're solving the same problem. When your front foot lands, your hips need to be open enough that you can rotate. If your hips are still closed at landing, there's nowhere to rotate. Everything just goes forward instead of turning. So don't copy someone else's knee or hip position. Your body isn't built like theirs. Figure out how your body and your hips get open by landing. Maybe it's your back knee turning in, maybe it's turning out. However you get there, that position at landing is what really matters.

First start in the DR

Most pitchers try to throw harder with their arm. That's exactly why they're stuck. The arm doesn't generate the velocity. The shoulders do. The arm is just along for the ride. Here's what actually happens in a good throw: The arm gets loaded back. The scapula hits full end range. Then the shoulders rotate as hard and as far as possible — and the hand just slicks out front on its own. You don't drive the hand. You rotate the shoulders and the hand follows. When I'm throwing well, it goes: load, full scap end range, shoulder rotation, hand out front. In that order. The arm is relaxed the whole time. When I'm throwing bad, my arm hits this position and I stop rotating. The arm lands and absorbs instead of whipping through. The shoulder stops doing its job and the arm tries to compensate. That compensation is what kills velo and destroys arms. Playing catch makes this worse if you're not careful. You get lazy. You stop rotating the shoulders and just deploy the arm out to the side. Do that enough and it becomes your default. The fix is simple but hard: relax the arm completely and rotate the shoulders as far as they'll go. The longer you wait and the more relaxed the arm stays, the more the shoulder rotation can do its job. Tension in the arm cuts the rotation short. People chase hand speed. Chase shoulder rotation. The hand will take care of itself.

Most pitchers are training wrong in-season — and they're doing it by working too hard. Here's the thing nobody talks about: you already get your volume in the game. Every pitch, every sprint, every explosive movement on the mound — that's your volume work. So when you go into the weight room and grind out high reps or long runs on top of that, you're not building fitness. You're just stealing energy from your next start. The fix is simple: 2 sets of 3 reps at 95% of max. That's it. That keeps your muscles firing without digging into your recovery. It's not flashy. It doesn't feel like much. But that's the point. I used to train heavy AND high reps when I was younger. Lots of running in August and September. I thought I was putting in the work. I was actually just getting in my own way. Now I know where my weak link is: power. Not volume. I can throw 120 pitches and not get tired. Volume is not my problem. So why would I spend time training it? The smart move is to attack what you're actually bad at. For me that's strength and power. So that's where my time goes in the weight room — heavy, low reps, high intensity, low fatigue. Train your weaknesses. Maintain your strengths. Don't let the weight room wreck your game.

Most pitchers throw pitches. Elite pitchers throw tunnels — and there's a massive difference. Here's how I think about pitch sequencing: Picture a tree. Trunk grows from the mound toward the plate. Then branches split off at different points — some early, some late, some longer before they break. Flip that tree on its side. That's your tunnel. The trunk is the shared path all your pitches travel together. The branches are where each pitch breaks away — into the zone or out of it. The hitter can't tell which branch you're on until it's too late to adjust. Your job is to find where the most branches land in the strike zone, while keeping at least one branch that chases out of it. That's a complete tunnel. For me it looks like this: Four-seam up in the zone, gyro ball middle elevation, splitter down — all off the same tunnel. Batter sees the same thing, gets three different results. Curveball back foot to lefties. Sweeper off the plate to righties. Two-seam black away. Once you know your tunnels, you stop guessing at sequencing. You build it like architecture — start with the trunk, map the branches, know exactly where each pitch lives relative to the others. Most guys never map this out. They just throw what feels right in the moment. That's leaving a huge edge on the table.

If strikeout rates keep climbing, bunting might actually become the smarter play — and the math backs it up. Here's the thought experiment: Say the K rate is 50%. That means you only put the ball in play half the time. If you hit .300 on contact, your real average when you factor in all those strikeouts drops to around .150. That's brutal. Now look at bunting. Bunt success rates sit somewhere in the .200 range — maybe low twos, maybe even the ones. But here's the key: a bunt attempt wipes out the K rate entirely. You're making contact by design. You're forcing the defense to react. So if your true average with a normal swing craters to .150 because you're striking out half the time, and a bunt gets you on base at even a .200 clip — the bunt is the higher EV play. That's not a small-ball romantic argument. That's just arithmetic. The deeper question is what batting average on bunts actually looks like at the MLB level. My gut says low twos. Could be lower. But even in the ones, it might still beat a .150 effective average from a hitter who whiffs every other at-bat. As K rates keep rising across the league, the math on unconventional contact strategies is going to get harder and harder to ignore.

Late movement on a pitch isn't an optical illusion. It's real, and the physics behind it finally clicked for me. Here's what's actually happening: When you throw a sweeper, the spin axis is tilted a certain way. That axis creates movement in a specific direction. Simple enough. But here's where it gets interesting. As the ball travels forward and starts to DROP, the direction the airflow is hitting the ball CHANGES. The air isn't just coming from in front of the ball anymore — it's attacking from below as the ball descends. That shift in airflow relative to the spin axis is what creates late movement. Take a gyro with a slight upward tilt — not a pure gyro, but tilted maybe 5 degrees toward sweep. Early in the flight, the airflow hits it head-on. Zero movement. The gyro does its thing. But as the ball drops, the airflow starts hitting it from underneath. That changes the effective angle of the spin axis RELATIVE to the airflow. Suddenly the axis looks like it has backspin from the air's perspective. And that generates sweep late. The ball didn't change. The spin didn't change. The airflow direction changed — and that's enough to flip the movement profile. This is why late movement is so hard to square up. The ball looks like it's going one place, then breaks somewhere else. It's not random. It's not luck. It's the geometry of the flight path interacting with the spin axis in a way that changes mid-trajectory. Physics doesn't lie. And once you understand it, you can engineer it.

Most pitchers think power comes from dumping the torso forward. That's exactly wrong. The real move: keep your head vertical, stay patient, and let everything move away from it. Then fire. When you dump your torso, your head tilts and pulls. You lose control of where the ball goes. Your body is fighting itself. I used to do this. My head would drag over the top, and the only way I could get my curveball to reach the plate was to dump my whole upper body, then snap my hand straight up and down at release. It worked — until it didn't. The second I tried to straighten up, my curveball fell apart. Because my brain was wired to: dump, deploy. That sequence was baked in. I had to rewire it completely. New sequence: rotate, relax, relax, relax, flex — then deploy. Once that clicked, I could make the ball go up AND down. More movement, less effort. You're not forcing it. You're patient enough to let your hand get to the front of the ball naturally. Patience IS the power. Head stays vertical, body loads away from it, then you fire. That's it. Most guys are working twice as hard to get half the result because they never fixed the sequence.

Most pitchers try to force velocity. I had to learn to do the opposite — almost nothing. For years I'd lift my leg and immediately attack. Tense up, fire hard, try to muscle through the throw. It felt powerful. It wasn't working. The breakthrough came when I stopped trying. I'd lift my leg, put my glove arm up around shoulder height or slightly above, and just... let my body do what it wanted to do. No forcing. No rushing. What happened next surprised me. My head naturally hung back over my back hip. I didn't put it there. It just went there. And once it was there, my hips wanted to open on their own. I wasn't driving them — they drove themselves. That's the key most people miss. Your head position dictates everything. If your head is forward too early, your hips have nowhere to go. Your body physically can't sequence right. It's not a strength problem or a flexibility problem — it's a geometry problem. When my head stayed back over my back hip, the only natural path down the mound forced my hips to rotate exactly the way they needed to. The mound finished the job. I just had to stay out of the way. Patience is the whole mechanic. Not patience as a mindset — patience as a physical position. Hold your head back, hold your glove up, and let your body follow the hill.

Most pitchers use the curveball wrong. It should not be a primary strike pitch. Here's how I actually think about it: Fastball, changeup, and gyro are your strike pitches. Those are the ones you attack the zone with. That's your foundation. The sweeper and curveball are chase pitches. You throw them off the plate. You make hitters chase. Now — yes, you steal strikes with the curveball sometimes. You throw it slower, the bat slows down, and that works. I'm not saying never throw it in the zone. I'm saying that's not its job. The real move with the curveball is late in the game. Second or third time through the order, your velo is down a little. But your curveball isn't losing anything. It stays sharp. That's when it becomes a kill pitch. Third, fourth, fifth inning — when hitters have adjusted to your heat — that's when you bury the curveball and put people away. Use your pitches for what they're actually built for. Strike pitches attack. Chase pitches finish.

Running is slowing your recovery — and most athletes never figure this out. Your cardiovascular system matters for recovery. Higher VO2 max = faster recovery between sessions. That part is true. But every time you run, you're pounding on your legs. You're adding mechanical stress to a body that's already trying to rebuild. You're stealing from your recovery to improve your cardio. That's a bad trade. And here's the bigger problem: steady-state cardio isn't even what you do in a game. You don't cruise at a fixed pace. You spike. You peak. You recover. Then you spike again. So why train in a way that doesn't match how you actually perform? Here's what I do instead. Throwing. Fifteen minutes of catch gets your heart rate swinging between 130 and 160. That's not warmup. That's your cardio for the day. Then lift. Thirty minutes. Keep your heart rate above 100. The second it drops to 100, you pick up the weight again. You stay in that 100-130 range the whole session. That's your recovery cardio. Built into work you were already doing. No extra miles. No extra mechanical stress. No separate cardio block eating into your recovery. You're already getting the stimulus. Stop adding more load on top of it.

Most pitchers never learn hip rotation — they just fake it with extra upper body tilt. My whole life I've thrown by leading with the hip first and letting everything else lag behind. Even with a big lean and coil, the hip drives it. The arm is just along for the ride. Here's where it breaks down for most guys: They use counter-rotation as a crutch. That big wind-up and stretch back gives them a feeling of loading — but they've never actually learned to fire the hip. It feels like rotation. It's not. So when you try to fix them — take away the counter-rotation to force real hip engagement — they go neutral. And neutral with no hip education means everything opens up early. Arm, shoulder, chest — all dumping out together. No separation. No sequence. But you can't just leave them in the counter-rotate pattern either. If you counter-rotate early, you take all the slack out of the system before the hip ever gets to move. You've already used up the stretch. Now there's nothing left to drive. So you're stuck between two bad options: Counter-rotate too early — you kill hip rotation before it starts. Stay neutral — you open up early because you never learned to dissociate the hips from the upper half. The fix isn't a drill. It's developing the actual feel of the hip stretching away from the shoulder. Until you have that feeling, you're just guessing.

10 Pitches, 2 Strikeouts, 1 Inning

Win Or Go Home