The Yips: A Love Story
admin2026-03-02T18:59:00-05:00I cried last week — about five times. Anyone [...]
I cried last week — about five times. Anyone [...]
Unless you’ve been living in the baseball equivalent of a Himalayan monastery, you’ve heard pitching and hitting coaches avowing the importance of “hip-to-shoulder separation.” I’m not exactly sure when it began, but sometime in the last several years, someone coined the term, and it spread like wildfire. According to advocates of this tenet, pitchers and hitters should rotate the pelvis while the torso remains closed for as long as possible. The resultant diagonal stretch through the trunk allows the athlete to take advantage of the elastic properties of the abdominals, and chest muscles to store and then unload energy to be transferred from the lower half to the arm or bat.
The bottom line is this: Pitching is like picking up chicks. The first move is critical. You have to get the first move right, or you probably don’t have much of a chance.
Nearly every other day, we get a call from a player or a parent or coach of a player with arm pain that has bee diagnosed as tendonitis. The player feels a little pain in their shoulder or elbow after throwing. It’s nothing major -just a pinch or a dull ache. They ice it, take some Motrin, Advil, or Tylenol, grease it up with Icy Hot and try to “throw through it.” The pain persists and eventually gets worse. They take a few days off, but when they start throwing, it hurts again.
The UCL, Labrum, and rotator cuff aren’t the most highly vascularized tissues, they do receive some blood flow, and therefore under the right conditions, they are capable of remodeling themselves to resist the stresses under which they are placed.
The first thing Justin Verlander said to me is “I’ve got a problem. In my start today, I was sitting at 88-‐91. That’s not going to get it done. I’m a stuff guy. I’ve always had great stuff. I’m not the type that will be ok learning to pitch in the low 90s. I need to get my velocity back."
24 mph in just over three years? For some, that may seem unrealistic, but gains like that are not uncommon here at The Florida Baseball ARMory. They happen so frequently that we’re no longer surprised. We’re always thrilled, but never surprised. And with the right individualized training plan, they can happen for anyone, including you.
It turns out that HOW you learn or refine a skill like hitting, throwing, or pitching is more important than WHAT you actually learn. We have emerged as an industry leader in applying this leading-edge motor learning science to baseball training.
In 2019, Jake Odorizzi went from being a promising middle of the rotation arm to one of the best starting pitchers in baseball. Jake trained with us for more than 3 months and according to an interview he did on MLB Network, the he credits the work he did at The ARMory for his success.
History is replete with examples of uncommon men who have found the courage to scorn their critics and their own demons of self-doubt to produce uncommon achievements. Orval and Wilbur Wright, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, and too many more to name have all faced their critics and doubters. I’m certain that at some point each of these iconic heroes was met with the same kind of pivotal moment when self-doubt threatened to dash their dreams and disrupt the trajectory of their lives, when they said ....“I can do it.”.