When Saquon Barkley plants his foot and stares down a defender, he is not just running with speed and strength. He is organizing his body into what Frans Bosch calls an option posture. With his hips pressed forward in a stance sometimes described as “scare the monkey,” essentially showing the mid-crotch to the opponent, Barkley is not simply holding ground. He is creating a posture that hides intention, a position that keeps his options open. From that stance he can cut left, slice right, or explode straight ahead.
The genius of the option posture lies in what it withholds. Defenders are constantly searching for specifying variables, movement cues that allow them to prospectively anticipate what an opponent will do. Just like a tennis returner begins moving before the ball leaves the server’s racket, a linebacker is not reacting to what Barkley has already done but to what his body is about to make possible. The option posture confuses the specifying variables. It delays or even denies the defender the information needed to predict. That hesitation is all Barkley needs to gain the edge.
Now let’s take that same concept and walk it onto a pitching mound. Because in baseball, deception lives in a very similar place. The pitcher who can achieve authentic extension through hip lock, pelvic closure, and three-dimensional slack regulation creates the same type of uncertainty for a hitter that Barkley creates for a defender. Instead of broadcasting his intentions, the pitcher conceals them, limiting the batter’s affordances and multiplying his own (Sullivan, 2023a; Sullivan, 2023b).
Stability Before Explosiveness
Both agility and pitching start from a simple but profound rule: first stability, then explosiveness. Bosch (2020) describes in Anatomy of Agility how movements must be stable at every level, from the microscopic organization of muscle fibers to the gross coordination of hips, pelvis, and torso. This concept is echoed in my book Integrated Anatomy of Pitching (Sullivan 2024)
In Barkley’s option posture, stability comes from locking the pelvis forward, balancing across three planes of motion, and resisting the collapse of the torso. This sets the foundation from which elastic recoil, diagonal loading of the abdominals, and rapid direction changes can explode. Without stability, the variability of open-skill sport becomes chaos, and chaos means missed tackles and injuries.
Pitching is no different. Authentic extension, the act of riding down the mound, bracing the front leg, locking the hip, and then whipping the torso forward, is not just about reaching further toward home plate. It is about maintaining anatomical stability in order to preserve options. When stability is achieved through attractors like hip lock, rotation around the hip, and pelvic closure, energy can be transferred explosively without leaking through compensations (Sullivan, 2024).
Slack Regulation: The Hidden Foundation
Here’s where it gets subtle. Beneath all the visible posture and movement is the invisible problem of slack. Slack is the looseness in the system, the micro-gaps in muscle tension that delay force transfer. Elite movers, whether in football or baseball, regulate slack with remarkable efficiency.
In agility, slack regulation allows Barkley to load muscles into isometric anchors, not just elastic counter-movements. Those anchors give him the ability to spring explosively in any direction without delay. In pitching, slack regulation ensures that when the hip locks and the pelvis closes, the chain of muscles from the ground to the fingertips is already taut. Energy moves like a whip through a tightened rope, not a slackened one (Sullivan, 2023b).
When slack is regulated in three dimensions, sagittal, frontal, and transverse, the pitcher gains a rare gift: the ability to disguise intentions. His posture does not give away whether the ball will sink, run, cut, or carry. That uncertainty is the pitching equivalent of a running back who freezes a linebacker in his tracks.
Deception and Specifying Variables
James Gibson’s ecological theory of direct perception explains why these postures are so powerful. Opponents rely on specifying variables, the subtle, law-like cues that directly inform action (Gibson, 1979/2015). In baseball, hitters do not wait to see where the ball travels before they swing. They are already committing as the pitcher moves into foot strike and rotation (Sullivan, 2023a).
If the pitcher arches the back into lumbar extension or tilts laterally to the glove side, those movements act as specifying variables. They tell the hitter, subconsciously, that only certain pitch shapes are possible. Backspin is coming. Carry is coming. With this information, hitters can make early adjustments to their swing path and timing, giving them a decisive advantage at the plate.
Authentic extension changes the game. When pelvic closure is stable, hip lock is held, and slack is regulated, the pitcher can create induced vertical break without broadcasting the movement cues. The same posture that can yield carry can also yield sink or run. The hitter has no perceptual foothold. Just like the defender staring at Barkley’s option posture, the batter is left in limbo, stripped of affordances (Sullivan, 2023a).
The Option to Disguise
Think of it this way:
- Option posture in agility creates multiple movement affordances for the ball carrier and hides intentions from the defender.
- Authentic extension in pitching creates multiple ball-flight affordances for the pitcher and hides intentions from the hitter.
Both strategies rely on anatomical attractors that simplify complexity. Hip lock stabilizes the pelvis, proximal-to-distal sequencing funnels energy cleanly, and a still head anchors the visual system. These attractors are universal, yet each athlete expresses them differently (Bosch, 2020).
In football, the defender cannot overcommit until the option posture resolves into action. In baseball, the hitter cannot decisively adjust until the ball is already in flight. That is the essence of deception. It is not about trick plays or funky mechanics. It is about keeping your options alive longer than your opponent can perceive.
Explosiveness: Elasticity with Control
Explosiveness is not just raw power. It is controlled variability, the ability to tap into elasticity without losing stability.
Barkley’s hips thrust forward not to lunge recklessly but to coil energy across his abdominals and glutes. The option posture allows him to spring elastically in either direction, yet because slack is regulated and hip lock is stable, the explosion is channeled and safe.
The pitcher’s authentic extension functions the same way. The back hip hinge loads the 4-bar system of hamstrings and rectus femoris, centering the femur in the acetabulum. The glutes maintain pelvic tilt until the precise moment of internal rotation. Then, as the lead leg braces and closes the pelvis, energy is released through the torso in a diagonal pattern, not a compensatory tilt (Sullivan, 2023a).
Elasticity without control creates predictability. Elasticity with authentic stability creates deception.
Athleticism as Emergence
One of the deeper lessons here is that athleticism is not mechanical. It is emergent. You cannot coach authentic extension by saying “reach further” any more than you can coach option posture by saying “stick your hips forward.” These patterns emerge when athletes are placed in environments that demand stability under uncertainty.
Perturbation drills, aquabags, water balls, and other variable tools are not gimmicks. They are contexts that force the body to self-organize into authentic solutions. When the environment requires stability across three planes, slack regulation happens at the microscopic level. Muscle fibers sync, fascia tightens, and movement patterns emerge that no verbal cue could ever create (Sullivan, 2023b).
This is why authentic extension looks different pitcher to pitcher, just as option posture looks different from athlete to athlete. The principles are universal, but the expressions are individualized.
Deception as the Purpose of Pitching
At the end of the day, the purpose of pitching is simple: to create a mismatch between what the hitter perceives and what actually happens. That mismatch is deception.
Velocity matters, but hitters adapt. Induced vertical break matters, but hitters learn to read it. Authentic extension, built on stability, hip lock, pelvic closure, and slack regulation, is what allows velocity and movement to stay unpredictable. It keeps specifying variables hidden, just as option posture hides Barkley’s cut until the last possible millisecond (Sullivan, 2024).
Deception is not about fooling hitters with tricks. It is about denying them affordances. It is about preserving your options while erasing theirs. That is the art form that sits beneath the science.
Conclusion: Training for Options, Training for Deception
Whether you are coaching a running back or a pitcher, the lesson is the same. Stability breeds options. Options breed deception. And deception wins.
The option posture in agility and authentic extension in pitching are mirrors of the same truth. Athletes who master these postures are not just strong or fast. They are stable, explosive, and deeply deceptive.
So the next time you watch a great pitcher ride down the mound, hip locked and pelvis closing, think of Saquon Barkley staring down a defender. Both are playing the same game. Both are saying with their bodies, “You will not know until it is too late.”
And that, after all, is the essence of athletic greatness.
References
Bosch, F. (2020). Anatomy of agility. Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: Athletic Skills Model.
Gibson, J. J. (2015). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York, NY: Psychology Press. (Original work published 1979)
Sullivan, R. (2024). Integrated anatomy of pitching. Lakeland, FL: Self-published.
Sullivan, R. (2023a, December 12). Authentic extension and the secrets of the pelvis. The Florida Baseball ARMory. https://floridabaseballarmory.com/authentic-extension-and-the-secrets-of-the-pelvis/
Sullivan, R. (2023b, October 3). Slack regulation: The hidden key to power, precision, and arm health in pitching. The Florida Baseball ARMory. https://floridabaseballarmory.com/slack-regulation-the-hidden-key-to-power-precision-and-arm-health-in-pitching/
Randy Sullivan, MPT, CSCS CEO, Florida Baseball ARMory
