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Ken Cherryhomes has been helping hitters for the last 25 years. He has coached hitters at every level from youth to major league hitters. He’s also an inventor of the X-Factor system.
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Full transcript:
Hi everybody, Bryan Eisenberg and I’m here with my friend, Ken Cherryhomes. Who has been helping hitters for the last 25 years. Everything from youth to major league hitters, he’s also an inventor of the X-Factor system. His specialty and what I really wanted to bring him in here today to talk about was timing.
We’re in the early season for high school and college baseball and even youth baseball across the country. And obviously pitchers tend to have an advantage early in the season. And they’re being a hitter, struggling with timing. I know you talk about timing as having three different parts, but what is it that hitters can work on immediately if they need to start improving their timing like this next week or two?
Primarily we need to work on actual distance and, velocity. The types of velocity you’re going to see. What we’re doing is we’re building a memory lexicon of events. And so we’re creating reference points and by hitting off of velocity, that is coming from that same distance that you’re going to be seeing in a game. What we’re doing is we’re, correlating when we attack the ball. Once we have success doing that, we reject all of our failure memories, other than it’s a bad tool, don’t use it again. We then encode a memory of that success and then we resource that. And so when we see a like event, being that I hit 92 miles an hour in the batting cage today from 55 feet and the pitcher I’m facing is throwing in that range. My brain will resource a memory of an event that appears to be that same event. And so I see the pitch come out. My brain says we’ve seen this before. We’ve created a solution to that problem before, and we apply that memory along with the real time information that we’re collecting, be the prediction that our brain makes of what the ball’s doing and where it’s going to arrive and when it’s going to arrive and things like that.
It’s usually why it takes a few weeks you start seeing hitters start getting their time because they’re finally seeing enough live at bats, and velocities from similar distances?
Again when we’re talking about our brain, I’m talking about memory. The other thing is, that we’re picking up the ball when we’re in the batting cage.
But what happens is when we get into space, when we’re in a field, things start to look very different. And so I have all this depth that I used to have a wall sitting back there. And so a few things start to have to be rearranged as well, which is why I’m from California, but I lived and worked in Washington for 20 years trading hitters and it rains eight months of the year.
We would go to these early, early, late winter, early spring tournaments in Arizona. And the kids would go there and we notoriously the Washingtonians. They wouldn’t have the horrible in the outfield because they suddenly were looking at all this space that they weren’t used to seeing.
And so it took not only was their timing, but that should have just their visual perspective changed because they were in a, this boxed enclosure for several months. And then suddenly you throw them out into the wind and the California teams and the Arizona teams, the Florida teams tend to excel early in the year.
All that training that the Washington kids do whereas there’s a lot to be learned when you’re playing game. And so Californians have that advantage of the experience of being out on the field or area. But the fact that these guys focus from pretty much th they, they have an internal clock that says.
Come late September, early October, that’s it. I’m in for the next four months, training hard on my mechanics, on my swinging on my pitching and all those things. And so they tend to be a bit more polished than the guys that are just out in the field beating away at it. So, there is that advantage, but definitely there’s, an assimilation when they get out on the field, they go what?
So I want to go back to something you said, you said the same similar velocity from the same distance. So it’s not the same as when you’re going into a cage and you put the machine up to 65 from 45 feet away. No, it’s not simulating any real velocity? We’re definitely not a T with a ball on it, it’s not simulating 90 mph.
No. The interesting thing about the ball and tee is the inventor of that doesn’t take into consideration that, that ball and the tee is actually accelerating. Whereas every baseball that’s thrown is decelerating over distance.
So when he does his math that says, this is the equivalent of it really isn’t, because it’s a different equivalent, but what he is talking about is and, what short screen high-velocity practice does, is it works on an aspect of timing, which is our feel. And so your, kind of internal clock. And so you’re working your reaction feel. The ball doesn’t cover as much ground. So even if it was the equivalent of a 90 mile an hour pitch, It wouldn’t be because the 90 mile an hour pitch covers much more space over fractions of seconds. So over in one second, a 90 mile, an hour pitch covers like a thousand feet or something like that. I can do the math but just hypothetically the 90 mph pitch would cover the a thousand feet.
If you took a pitch half that speed, half that distance, it would still only be traveling 500 feet per second. Does that make sense? And so the margins for error are a bit different. And so you’ll get the reaction feel because the event time is similar. But again, what our brain is doing when we’re seeing a live pitch is we are judging it’s travel over depth.
So it wouldn’t be a memory that I sourced immediately that feel memory because my eyes would be saying process this moving object. And so one of the things that we’re processing. Is something called tau, T a U. And that would be the ball we have. We have an a memory of the size of a baseball.
And when it is at a greater distance, it’s smaller as it travels towards us it dilates. And that’s how, so that’s one of our senses that we use to judge the depth of travel of an object. Same as a car driving down the street, coming towards you.
You actually described three parts to timing, right?
There’s the mechanical timing, right? Can you explain all of those? And how, when, where we, train each one of those.
So let’s talk about what, is most popularly considered timing right now, which is our, load gather time. Where within the picture cycle that we’re going to begin or an initiate that movement to get into our launch position.
And guys with higher leg kicks and longer moves might be a break of hands or at the bottom of the pitcher cycle before they turned off. Guys with shorter movements might be at the top point before the shoulder turns over and he starts coming forward. Guys with really, short moves might be right at release point, pretty much nothing after unless, you’re like nine years old in the, ball’s not going very fast right after the ball is released, just isn’t going to work anymore. And that becomes a trouble issue.
So, that’s the first aspect of timing is when do we get to our launch position? The next aspect of that is important in coordinating with that ball is our mechanical time. How long does it take to get into that gather position? So that it puts us in a position to be able to read the pitch and then attack it.
Another is how long it takes for me to get my bat from point a to point B, this is an intuitive sense. So my, brain just, I don’t know, I’m fascinated by the way our brains work, but we actually memorize how long it takes to get from here to here so that we can coordinate with another object.
And so this is a very fascinating aspect of, what we do. The other very fascinating thing is that we actually slow down our swings subconsciously to coordinate. But remember this, is the incredible thing we get to the last aspect of timing, which is judging when I have to swing when the ball is in space, based on its speed and my speed to a pre-selected contact point.
I see that this is going over the middle of the plate. I make contact with that pitch over the middle of the plate at my front foot. Therefore I have to swing when the ball is X feet away, which is why my company is called X factor or partly. So remember the ball slowing down. This is the incredible thing it’s losing about a mile per hour of velocity, every seven feet.
And so not only is my brain making a prediction of how fast the ball is moving. It’s also making a prediction of how quickly it’s decaying. And so all of this has happened in fractions of seconds, which again, when we watch slow motion video, we start to lose sort of a concept of time. But this is absolutely fascinating that we’re able to coordinate with an object that is in constant decay.
So, that, that would be two aspects. The swing time the, mechanical length of how long it takes to get to that gather position. The first one was at what point in the pitcher’s delivery do I get into that point based on how long it takes me to do all these things. And then lastly is the decision to swing at the pitch based on its velocity, its vector, it’s a arrival position in the strike zone.
We’ve talked about beforehand is measuring this timing and measuring the, concept of the swing decision and if you’re late to pitches where do you make that up? Like how how, do you, find the improvement?
Cause if your swing is slow, that’s one aspect. If your swing decision is slow, that’s another aspect. And when you initiate that swing in the time, distance is another aspect.
That’s an excellent question. That is the, I don’t know if you saw my preamble that I put up for my timing discussions I’m doing tonight.
That’s what led to all this was in order for me to make an adjustment I have to have a reference point as to when it was I swung to begin with. So the, common cue forever has been swing sooner or later. And I, would sit there and say the hitter doesn’t know when they swung to start with, so how’s that going to help?
That would be the equivalent of you telling me to be on time to work and not tell me what time work started. Then when I showed up, you said you got to get earlier and earlier than what? You’d never have an idea of that. So what we need to do in order to make adjustments is create reference points. At least have a memory of when it was that I swung, and this is where it gets difficult.
So the pitcher threw me a pitch, and I see this commonly when, people send me videos to observe their kids or, some of my professional, college players. Just recently I had a guy send me a video and his son swapped his soul swung. Just sold out on it. It was a fastball swung and missed, so he sped up his swing on the next pitch, but the next pitch was a curve ball.
So now is way out in front of it. And because we may be creating this reference point to start with. We still have to observe the information that is now coming at us because we can’t now swing it the last pitch we saw, cause the last pitch we saw, probably isn’t going to be the next pitch I see. So, that’s interesting and that’s really hard and that’s something that I worked very, hard on getting hitters to have a feel, not only a visual feel, physical field what we call universal gravitation. I have a relationship with all objects. When you’re standing on the mound, I’ll feel you there and have a sense of distance. And that’s something that a lot of people don’t really understand or think about. It’s like walking backwards into a wall.
You’re not seeing the wall, but you feel that the energy of the wall and yourself and starting to in. And so, you can use that sense of, I felt that the ball was a certain distance and now I have to make an adjustment because I was late. And so I swung with the ball is too close to me. One of the problems with watching video is, and this is happening at every level.
And this is what I would work with. My, my big league hitters with on in the video room was watching video where your swing actually starts, is roughly 200 milliseconds after you thought you started it. Because the ball is moving so fast, over such a short window of time, we don’t really realize that we think we’re swinging at the ball when it’s 15 feet away, but you actually sent a message when the ball is 40 feet away.
And it’s really hard to articulate. So I can give you an example. Here’s my coffee cup. And when I say, go get my coffee cup, I go to reach for it. I didn’t feel the delay. And yet there was a delay. I I have no concept of the fact that there was a 200 millisecond delay in my body responding to that.
That’s the neurologic system. And it just, the time it takes to do all that’s why. Sammy, who’s lucky as a pitcher because all his stuff has very, late break. So it look like it’s going to be in one place. And the next thing you know, it’s gone in any different direction. You never, you just never know.
Some of the interesting things that I plan on doing with some testing later this summer is I’m going to determine just exactly or pretty close to exactly when it is we actually see that break. And when we make that final decision on that, because again, we’re making this decision when the ball is in the first third of the three thirds of ball travel. That would be within the first safe 30, 35 or 40 feet of travel. And then we go into the second stage where we’ve already at 40 feet, made our decision to swing. But in the second stage, we refine that decision. This is why we have a viziomotor delay or, what’s called reaction time commonly. While we want to be able to move spontaneously, instantly, our brain says but we really need more information than moving instantly. So we’re going to provide you with this delay so that we can continue to make a decision for you, a subconscious decision based on more gathered information.
Otherwise we’d be falling off a cliff maybe without making the right. Oh, wait a minute. That’s about it. Yeah. Don’t, go hard left. So, I’m going to do some testing with the occlusion goggles that’s going to determine exactly how deep that ball is on breaking pitches.
Because I know that when the ball gets to. To roughly, depending on the velocity, 15 to 20 feet away, we don’t see it anymore because we don’t process blur. So what our brain does is it creates this seamless picture of what would happen, what it believes is going to happen.
Anybody who, says they saw the ball hit the bat that’s lore. They didn’t. They, saw, in retrospect they saw. The picture that your brain created for you that said your ball and your bat hit the ball and you correlate all the information. Like the ball did come off the bat, so therefore but they never really saw that.
It’s the same principle behind why eye witness reports are so bad, right? Because our brain fills in gaps. It’s what the brain is made to do.
Yeah. And then our memory is, basically 20% of the event. And the rest is 80% story that we built into it to, to fill in all those gaps because we don’t remember all that.
You just mentioned talking about giving people, cues of swing to the opposite field or, swing late or whatever it is. Let’s talk about these cues. Cause I think there’s the more I’m doing research and the more I look at some of the best coaches I’ve seen.
Actually the least amount that they talk, the least amount of cues that they actually give. Why is it that so many of these cues are actually really bad for, hitters?
We can’t, we don’t necessarily know how they’re going to receive that. First of all, because there’s all kinds of different learners.
And so they might be a tactile learner. There might be a visual learner. They might be an audio learner. So we don’t really know. Then we don’t know how they process analogies cause cues are generally analogies. So we don’t know how they process that or relate to that. Some people are very grounded and take things extremely literally, and others are a bit more ethereal and they’ll pick up things and, see between the lines.
You really have to get a feel for your cues. But one of the things, when you talk about being a bit less, cue-based, the good coaches that you see, I go back to that. I put up a video of the two year old all the time, and the two-year-old is hitting the ball beautifully. Nobody taught that two year old, how to swing.
Nobody taught that two year old, how to walk. It was a process of his brain coordinating all kinds of muscles and firing them on and off in order to stabilize and create balance. We go from that topper stage where we’re the base learner and we move on to being a more expert learner or an expert mover by the process of practice and trial.
And mirroring, right?
Cause he’s also seeing what others are doing.
Exactly. Yes. Back to that two year old is I put up a question, he’s beautiful, swing, hitting the ball. And I said, what would be different if the ball was 95 miles an hour? And the difference would be, he’d have to swing sooner.
Nothing about the swing itself would change. And one of the things that I really, try to emphasize. There, there are nuances, there are polishing of swings. There, there are shortening of moves. Things like that, but by and large, our brain will create a perfect plan for, to execute a movement to solve.
The two year old does this and the more we metal with it, the more we override the, brilliant plan that our brain would have created for us. I tried to get hitters back to as natural as possible and creating a few accused as possible and primarily. What I discussed with my hitters is, their decisions.
Why did you swing at that pitch? And I want to get back to what we were talking about earlier when we were talking about asking good questions and being good at asking good questions. The funny thing is, that in order to teach somebody how to ask good questions, you have to teach them when to ask questions because and that comes from confidence.
I will say, why did you swing at that pitch? And they’ll say because it was a strike. I said, you, formed your answer in the form of a question and what you need to do is be confident. Don’t be afraid to give me the wrong answer, because I’m not going to beat you nothing bad is going to happen.
And so I really conditioned my guys to be able to ask questions correctly or answer questions correctly with definitive answers that they’re confident in and it’s okay to be. I went off on a bit of straight, cause I really wanted to tell you that when you mentioned it earlier,
it’s interesting, cause I know I’ve seen a number of baseball players tested for whether they’re visual or kinesthetic or auditory learners. And out of all the research I’ve seen, I know I’ve spoken about this with Lantz Wheeler as well. Like in all these camps and stuff like that. It’s something like less than 6% of kids are auditory learners.
Although it’s a very powerful sense of ours.
Totally. But in terms of, the baseball players, it seems to be a lot less common. Sammy was one of the he was the only one in the, in his camp when he went, there was the only auditory learner. But yet coaches insist on all these auditory cues when it’s not necessarily how we’re going to feel it.
And you mentioned it right. Hitting and, timing. Is getting reference points. It’s visual by its very nature. So what are some of the kind of reference points that hitters could use to help themselves figure out timing? I know I’ve used look for when the pitcher hand breaks to figure out, to start figuring out when you’re timing it.
That’s the first aspect of timing. Now if, you were to get into a launch position perfectly in sync with the pitcher, which what we call timing the pitcher, as opposed to timing the pitch. If I were to get in sync perfectly with the pitcher, get down and plenty of time to see the ball.
If my decision timing is bad, it doesn’t matter. I’ll swing and miss anyway, either early or late and just, okay. I’ll be in a great position to do that. So that’s just a single aspect. They’re all so interconnected that one doesn’t exist without the other, really. What does exist is you could have a poor mechanical swing, but as long as you created the time to hit the ball, then you can hit.
Now the result won’t be so optimal, but you can hit. Whereas you can have a perfect swing. And if any, one of those three aspects were off of timing, then you would just look good, swinging and missing.
I shared this example and I’m going to get on a touchy subject here. Cause it’s social media and hitting videos.
But I remember a game Sammy was playing in and he came into pinch hit. Team is down by a ton of runs. But there are two runners on, if they don’t score, they’re basically gonna get run ruled. He comes in into three two, count, two outs and obviously it’s not the most beautiful swing, but he barreled that ball. Ground ball to the pitcher coming off the field said you almost killed me and two run scored, but of course it’s not an optimal looking video.
So many hitting instructors out there are so concerned about that appearance of the swing than did I barrel the ball. I don’t care if you swing up, you swing down. If you swing on your nose, if you get the barrel to the ball and you have a quality ball and play that’s going to play.
The other thing that really concerned with is, the outcome, right? And they’re saying the ball has to have a specific launch angles so that it can have maximum flight travel and things like that. And we get common hitting instruction gets very obsessed over the control of the ball.
This is what happened a while back when hitters were told to swing level and you had hitters, your young guys would drop their hands and drive straight to the ball. So you have this time-consuming move that has nothing to do with what my brain would have told you to do because my brain to reach a glass of water, it doesn’t ever say drop down, go forward.
It just is illogical. Exactly. And so we, get very obsessed over trying to create outcomes through particular attack angles that we think we can control vertical, bat angles that we think we can control that we discount so many things that are happening such as I can time everything perfectly. But if my collision is obtuse, which it will be.
If it’s down here, it’s a pop-up, it’s a perfect swing. You had the perfect attack angle again. Perfect timing. And you still pop the ball up because this angle right here has so unforgiving and that’s what they don’t understand. Less in trying to control outcomes, which we don’t have much control over, but we think because we can analyze these things and measure them.
We do. But the fact is, that the, result is a by-product, it’s a symptom of, and what our actual objective is to execute our plan. And that’s what we, really don’t pay attention to the little two year old says execute plan. Oh wow. I hit ball. Execute plan. He wasn’t thinking about where the ball was going to go and what it’s going to do.
And yet, because he was working from a more logical attack angle, which would be more like this, which arcs, by the way, we don’t swing down and hit down if we were late. That logical doesn’t even have to be taught, swing to the ball will produce the outcomes that are desirable and with a more I can still hit a double.
I can hit a triple, I can still hit a single or I can hit a ground ball up the middle towards the pitcher that almost kills the pitcher and score two runs. All of these things can occur. Whereas if I’m swinging up, there two possible outcomes, those outcomes are. Ground ball and flight ball. And somewhere in that flyball range, it’s going to be your home run.
Didn’t Barry Bonds called his home runs accidents or Ken Griffey, like one of the them called accidents.
Albert Pujols who was to me, probably the greatest hitter I’m going to see in my lifetime. Spent 10 years with an average of three 30 and 40 home runs.
It’s, unbelievable. And this is a guy who called himself a line drive hitter.
You talk about the timing can be measured and I know you’re working on some technology also because I think it I got really started on hitting Twitter early on because of things like the Zepp, adapter and blast swing adapter, and Diamond Kinetics.
And I think I wrote one of the first early reviews of all three of them. And like Sammy was like 10 years old. And you found that there’s limitations.
They’re pretty inaccurate for one thing. And it depends on the metric you’re looking at.
And I’ve read some studies. I’ve gotten some feedback from major league baseball teams that have done a lot of comparative study with these. You can hardwire a similar device that runs on the same memes or the, Accelerometer gyroscope, magnetometer set up and you can capture those metrics with a hardware device, which is going to be very accurate and compare the numbers that you’re getting from.
Say a wireless device. And most of the orientation metrics are going to be way off. They’re not going to be accurate. And that’s what we’re living on is creating this, again this, narrative of if I know what the vertical bat angle is for a pitch on the outside, then I can create home runs that way and which I’m going to naturally adjust to get to things anyways.
So I really don’t need to measure them. And I don’t need to correlate that with a number and then correlating it.
The engineer that I’m working with and I do not collect orientation metrics because I think they’re fairly useless.
But the, engineer I’m working with for time capture on my devices, had originally worked on some drones and he’s using the same mems systems that we’re using, but in order to keep the orientation of the drone they had to use three. That one was so inaccurate. And so I knew that going in. The other is, that the, all the companies there’s been independent studies and blast actually posts about this on their site.
And it’s I’m going to be honest about something and then therefore you’ll trust me with everything else. And that was that they had a three mile an hour plus minus on their velocity capture of your swing. So your bat speed would say 77, but it could actually be anywhere within a six mile an hour swing.
And so when we talk about progress, being made, saying, my hitters now are swinging faster after we’ve done this practice. It doesn’t have an accurate baseline because there’s a six mile an hour differential in there. Then there’s no way to create a baseline to say I got better or worse from. In a laboratory, that three, and that six is a huge gap.
We get this kind of I guess it makes you feel good when you talk about it and say, my hitting instruction has created four miles an hour, extra bat speed for this hitter and I’m going okay. Not really, but I, cause I don’t know if it was actually a worst swing or better swing than last.
That sort of stuff it’s anecdotal at best. I, actually never wanted to build a swing set sensor. I wanted to just get to my timing with live pitches and I immediately, I got a zepp first and then a blast and I can’t catch your time because you can cheat. You can actually cheat the time of these.
If you have a slight leak, because what they’re all programmed to do is,
or if you have a little bit of a backwards move, it throws it off,
A negative move, a hitch, which I do gather. With my tech, but all of these things can, affect the time. And so if you had a leak here, right?
Now the distance from point a to point B, once you’ve breached the motion threshold so that the sensors are now collecting info. Now I only have a swing from here to here, and I actually have a video of a guy who does this, he slides forward. And so he has this phenomenal major league baseball, average swing time of 150 milliseconds. This guy was really consistently in the one thirties high one twenties, and I’m like, oh, I know because he cheats it, but I show you on video and I slow it down and everything. These metrics when we set these, sort of th the, benchmarks of major league baseball was 150 milliseconds, right?
If I sent you the metrics of my hitter, and you really to know what to look for. And especially in real time, you’re not going to notice this too much. You’ll say this, guy’s got 132 milliseconds wait, oh my God. He’s incredibly quick to the ball. This guy, because of that hitch that I also capture and measure along with his viziomotor delay actually took so long to swing that hitch that he had took longer than his swing.
Almost 150 milliseconds more so he doubled his swing. He actually couldn’t hit 90 mile an hour pitches because his swing took so long, but it appeared that well, 132, of course he gets only the ball 12 feet away.
Let me leave you with the last question for the day.
Okay. I’m a parent. I want to go get help my kid, cause they’re struggling with their timing. What should they be looking for to make sure that they’ve got an instructor who actually is really going to help them and not just cash their check
Wow. It’s a hard question because. Player development in professional baseball is very fixated on the gather timing, get into a position so you can hit, and then it is quite literally swing into a space as hard as you can. Which is why we see so many swings today in major league baseball that are sold out. That you’re, going, you had no business swing at the pitch.
It never appeared to be a strike. They actually have a metric for this called good luck, bad luck. It’s hard hit ball. If you hit the ball really hard, then we look at the exit value of that ball where, okay. The hardest hit balls are usually pulled the short stops from right-handed hitters, Giancarlo Stanton record bats or ball exit velocity is a ground ball.
I’ve told people if they want it, if they want to hit their PR on a HitTrax, just focus on even that ground ball to the shortstop.
The reason why is because this pitch probably didn’t want to go to the left side of the field. So what I did was I broadened my swing arc.
So a tight swing would be a conservation of momentum. Broadening the swing arc will take longer, but it’ll create more speed of the barrel. It accelerates over a greater sized arc. And so it creates, more bat speed at the end. So then you end up hitting the ball really hard when it’s poorly hit.
So if we were not looking at the outcome, we just said, oh, was it out? And that was bad luck. I would say that’s not bad luck because he took a broad swing that is probably going to result in a ground ball to the shortstop anyway. Or you’re not going to get your coveted launch angle because when you’re coming around the ball, then your barrel is actually starting to work its way down as, it passes your hands or starts to work up and it will tip the ball like this.
They’re looking at only the numbers from the analytics perspective and I said, but you’re not looking at application. So yes, you will be able to consistently hit the ball very hard if you create a very broad swing, are you just wanna hit the ball? Very often. An anecdote is coincidental, but if you were to hit nothing but fly balls.
Statistically over the history of baseball, you would bat 2 0 8 and maybe you hit 50 home runs a year doing it, but you would hit 2 0 8. Joey Gallo’s lifetime averages, 2 0 8. So which he doesn’t only hit ground balls. I just thought it was coincidentally and funny. But the fact is, that if your focus was to only hit fly balls first of all, you’d eliminate the line drive, which is 70% success rate when you do hit it and you increase the number of ground balls because at the end of the tangential collision and being slightly ahead of it is going to take you to the top of the ball. In avoiding hitting ground balls, by going into this fly ball revolution that we’re in now, we’ve actually created more ground balls than we had with. We’ve created more fly balls
Because the bat path steeper as well.
And so there’s, it’s not forgiving that type of a bat path.
Yeah, we’ve created more grounders when we try to avoid grounders. Nobody stopped to ask how do we create more line drives? Cause we did that we’d be looking at a different ball game. And I believe obviously we’d be scoring the same or more runs because since the launch angle revolution occurred, we’re actually scoring fewer runs than we did prior to it.
So if we looked at that span of time from 2003, which I choose that because that’s post steroids 2003, everybody’s so afraid of being on the Mitchell report that they weren’t juicing. I look at like a four year span there, a five-year span there. And then I compare the numbers to current when I, what I believe the launch angle after Alan Nathan’s article on optimal launch angle for maximum flight distance came out.
I look at the statistics between the two and the only thing that increased in the current era is. We increased the strikeouts and we increased the home runs, but we have decreased in run scored, decreased in hits, decreased in average, decreased in OBP, decreased in ops.
We get into these, granular analytics, because remember the guy who’s doing the math, he’s the smartest guy in the room. And so nobody’s checking his math. And so as soon as you say, Hey, wait a minute, we were supposed to be scoring more runs. You said?
And he said, oh yeah, but we’re actually. Creating more hard hit ground balls or, more hard hit balls. Look at these numbers here. And so they just create a new metric. And this is the kind of thing you’d do in a boiler room when you’re trying to sell bad stock, is there are ways for me to convince you that this stock is going to make you wealthy.
When in fact it’s just me playing with numbers, they’re real numbers. But I’ve eliminated so many variables. Then I convinced you that this is a good idea. The current paradigm is, a terrible idea. And it will shift at some point because people will finally say Hey, the aesthetic of the game is horrible because of it.
But also it’s been ineffective in what they claimed it would do, which was create more runs because that’s the most important thing is scoring runs. Yeah, no, duh.
So parents need to look for instructors that are going to help their kids hit line drives.
Sorry. Yeah, exactly. And when you talk about timing, more importantly, getting kids into a position to be able to.
Then you’re not going to find a lot of people that are talking about actual swing timing, what my decision timing and things like that. Not a lot of people understand contact points. At the highest levels, some of the work that I did with, big league hitters was the easiest stuff in the world for me.
I took a hitter who, over two seasons hit two oh seven. I called every GM or assistant GM of baseball and said, I guarantee he’ll hit 2 85 this year and 300 next. Because he had already solved the X factor, which was, he can hit it, the major league. He could time down those pitches.
And I can’t teach that and I can’t scout that. I’m hoping my technology is able to help you with that, but it’s something that can’t even scouted because every player that’s drafted is presumed to have the tools to play major league baseball. We just can’t test it because we can’t put them in a major league baseball situation where there’s 50,000 fans and the, fastest fielders on the planet and everything else that works into that.
We can’t test that. So we just have to presume, and then the cream rises and then once again, the cream rises above that. So this hitter that I’m talking about had mechanical issues that cause timing problems. So he’s getting back to the ball. It just wasn’t positive back to the ball. This is a guy who previously had hit 300, five times in his career.
I said, this is going to be easy. I guarantee you he’ll hit 2 85, 300 in consecutive years. They all laughed at me and said, no, thanks. Milwaukee ended up taking him and he hit 2, 2 81. He broke his hand maybe at 2 81, and then he hit three 19. It was a matter of, he already knew how to time down the pitcher.
He could work within that, window of stress and time constraint. I don’t know, I would say hitting coaches that focused on hitting line drives is a great idea and making sure that hitters in a position to hit so that they can make that decision. I know how to teach you drills to do that stuff.
I developed those over 20 years of work, but I don’t know many people most of the stuff as you’ve come to learn, knowing me through hitting Twitter is I’m going to say a lot of things you haven’t heard before. I look at things from different perspectives and that was something that came up yesterday with somebody who was talking about when a hitter steps into the batter’s box for BP. The first thing they should do is hit the ball the other way. Be late intentionally. I said just because you see it happening, doesn’t mean it’s actually effective. He said little kids can’t and I’ve got 25 years of experience with little kids okay.
Those are your little kids, not little kids on a whole. When you’re late, they tend to try to walk very slowly forward making adjustments. What I get them to do is be overly early. They already know what late feels like. So they have one parameter set, but they don’t understand this one over here.
Now I say, just be too early on the ball and then you’ll know what each parameter is. Then you work off of that. And if you work backwards, reigning yourself in first of all, psychologically that says I’m in control. That’s what I tried to articulate to this guy. The hitter is in control versus the hitter that is working, trying to, adjust off of being late.
Totally out of control. He’s trying to catch up versus the guy who says I’m going to reign myself in.
For people who want to learn more about your, a slightly differing opinions, let them know where they could find.
The website is down right now, but it’s about to go back up. I, stopped my business.
That would be X factor technology.com. And you can find me on Twitter at Ken Cherryhomes on Twitter.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Ken.
Thank you, Bryan. That was great.