Shock and awe
Top pitching prospects Martin, Whitley eclipse 110 mph on ‘pulldowns’
Forrest Whitley captured all of the attention on the second day of baseball’s winter meetings.
Inside an enclosed bullpen at Dynamic Sports Training in Tomball, Whitley gripped a three-ounce ball with his right hand. He sprinted forward, crow-hopped twice and fired it into a black net at 110.6 mph.
The video sharing his accomplishment garnered more than 500,000 impressions on Twitter. Justin Verlander responded with a photo of himself holding a radar gun. Reporters in Las Vegas prodded Astros manager A.J. Hinch and general manager Jeff Luhnow about the clip on the same night it appeared. At an annual convergence of baseball’s powerful and prestigious, a kid stole the show.
Online aggregators far and wide rushed to work, penning the latest headline for Houston’s most heralded pitching prospect of this decade. Whitley left them with little material. His tweet contained only an emoji with shrugging shoulders, part a flex for the absurd number and a challenge for anyone to approach it.
Corbin Martin accepted. He is another of DST’s clients, an imposing list that includes Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman and Tyler White. After Whitley’s video surfaced, lighthearted jeering at Martin’s expense was abundant.
So on Jan. 29, the Astros’ No. 5 overall prospect told Kevin Poppe to record his run-and-throw — part of a drill more commonly called a “pulldown.”
“Corbin originally wanted to do it out of
competition,” said Poppe, a minority owner of DST, which boasts three locations in the Houston area.
Martin, a righthander, sprinted forward two steps, crow-hopped, bore all his weight on his left leg and hummed the ball toward the net.
“111,” a DST employee shouted. Whatever adrenaline Martin manufactured aided a string of excitedly uttered expletives. He and Poppe shared the development with Whitley through a text message.
“I don’t believe it,” Whitley fired back.
No matter. Martin’s video surfaced on Twitter and still resides on Instagram.
“I wasn’t that mad,” Whitley said Feb. 2, having had four days to mourn his shattered benchmark.
Major league hopefuls
On Wednesday, Martin and Whitley will report to West Palm Beach, Fla., for their first exposure to major league spring training. The fifth spot in the Astros’ rotation remains vacant. Luhnow and Hinch mention both prospects when discussing who might fill it.
Even if neither righthander breaks camp as a member of the 25-man roster, their major league debuts appear imminent. Recognizing this, most of the thousands who viewed Martin and Whitley’s offseason drill on social media are therefore perplexed.
Why would they endanger themselves? And what was the point of this drill so many saw and so few can comprehend?
“Sometimes it does get used almost as a gimmicky kind of drill,” Poppe said. “But I think if it’s used the right way with the right people, who have a good understanding of how their body is moving, it’s a good drill.”
Blowback to Whitley’s and Martin’s videos was swift. Martin has deleted his from Twitter.
Whitley, an eloquent 21-year-old who prepped at Alamo Heights High School, wrote three responses to critics. He opted not to post them.
“It was horrible,” Whitley said. “People were just very incompetent, but it’s not their fault, because they just don’t know enough about it.
“There’s just a lot more that goes into it than throwing a ball into a net.”
Adapting to stress
The extraordinary velocity numbers attract attention. Cleveland Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer once threw 116 mph while performing this drill.
And yes, pulldown drills aid pitchers in gaining velocity.
But Poppe, who oversees operations at DST’s Premier Baseball of Texas facility in Tomball, seeks to dispel the theory that suggests that is all the drill can accomplish.
“The main goal of the drill is to prepare your body for the forces they’re going to have to handle in a game,” he said.
During the offseason, mimicking the feel of a major league game borders on the impossible. Pulldown drills accomplish what weight rooms and bullpen sessions cannot. They train the nervous system to accept stressful situations.
A gain in velocity, Poppe says, arrives because a body is more equipped to handle such situations. The athlete’s top and lower half — this drill works both — find a rhythm. The nervous system can be introduced to, and accept, this new pattern.
Were he simply throwing an offseason bullpen at DST, Whitley might reach only 92-93 mph. There is no batter in the box. Spikes are not on. Stakes are not high. Reaching his in-season average of 94-97 mph is almost not feasible.
“Traditionally in baseball, you’re basically expecting them to be able to go out on the field and have their bodies handle 100 mph from day one,” Poppe said. “What we’re trying to do is prepare their bodies for the actual stresses of the sport and even more so.”
A pulldown drill consists of 18 throws spread among three balls of varying weight. DST uses balls of seven, five and three ounces. A regulation-sized baseball is around five to 5¼ ounces. Throwing the seven-ounce ball is termed “overloading,” and tossing the three-ounce ball is “underloading.”
Seven-ounce balls build rotator cuff strength, Poppe said, and present the least stress. Studies completed in 2016 by the American Sports Medicine Institute concluded the torque on an elbow and shoulder decreased as ball weight increased.
Three-ounce balls, which train the nervous sytem to accept a faster arm speed, get the eye-popping velocity numbers. Bauer holds the DST facility record with a 113.1 mph throw. Seattle Mariners minor leaguer Cody Brown, a Houston native, hit 112.
The drill could be done from a flat position, but giving the pitcher a running start and crow-hops solidifies his lower half. Before the pitcher unleashes his throw, he braces all of his weight on his plant leg. In Whitley and Martin’s case, it’s the left leg.
“Stability in the landing leg and the ability to brace is a huge indicator in velocity and in command at high levels,” Poppe said. “If they already do a pretty good job of it, exposing them to higher forces is only going to make them better and better at stabilizing that leg. It’s just the same idea as lifting weights.
“The more momentum I can build in, the more force my leg has to absorb. Then when I get on the mound, it’s going to be a fraction of that, and I’ll be able to handle that really well.”
Pulldowns are not uncommon. Driveline Baseball, the pioneering data-based training facility near Seattle where Bauer does most of his work, first popularized them in the mainstream. Now they’re done “pretty much everywhere,” Poppe said.
The drill is not repeated frequently. Whitley, who spent about a week this offseason at Driveline, estimates he did one every two or three weeks. Martin had never attempted one before his 111 mph throw.
“When you’re moving that fast and that athletically, your body is going to move like in its most efficient patterns,” Whitley said. “To be able to train that and do that as many times as possible, it eventually translates into more velocity and less fatigue going later in the games.”
Jarring appearance
Picking pitchers most suited for a pulldown begins with their arm path. Ideal candidates should have clean paths, measured by their elbow’s position at the moment their landing leg hits the ground. Having a built-up base of long-toss work is essential.
Elbows bent inside 90 degrees generally indicate good arm paths, Poppe said. Bending outside 90 degrees when a landing leg strikes the dirt usually does not bode well. It’s imperative when completing a pulldown that a pitcher keep his arm path pristine through all 18 throws. Disrupting that can lead to injury.
Therein lies perhaps the most pressing question. Are pulldowns worth the risk?
To a casual observer, the drill is jarring. Some might even deem it violent, considering the crow-hop, viciously quick arm speed and audible grunting participants often unleash. On the surface, the chance of injury seems prevalent — perhaps more so than with the inherent danger assumed by devoting one’s life to pitching.
Bauer has never had an arm injury. Neither has Whitley, though he hurt his lat and oblique during his minor league season last year.
Michael Kopech, a Chicago White Sox prospect drafted in 2014, threw 110 mph on a videoed pulldown in January 2017. Last September, he underwent Tommy John surgery.
“That’s a risk that comes with throwing in general,” Poppe said.
“But I don’t think it’s specific to a drill that we’re doing.”
At DST, pulldown drills are preceded with a dynamic full-body warmup. Pitchers do their specific arm movement preparations before playing long toss, adhering to Alan Jaeger’s technique that emphasizes putting arc under throws with minimal effort. Once the pitchers reach their farthest distance, they throw with maximum effort to reach their partner consistently.
When the two athletes walk closer to one another to conclude long toss, compression throws occur. Those require putting a ball on a line from a shorter distance. During compression throws, pitchers have to bring the ball down from the arc — “pulling it down” on a line.
Thus, the name of the drill. “It’s fatigued,” Whitley said of his right arm after pulldowns. “And that’s the point of it. You’re supposed to fatigue. It’s all about conditioning your arm. Like after running a marathon, you’re tired, but the next time it should be easier. That’s a pretty solid analogy for it. If you do it responsibly, things should work pretty well.”
Astros open-minded
Whenever videos like Whitley’s and Martin’s emerge, Luhnow has a consistent reaction.
“I wince every time I see someone throw a ball 100 mph into a screen right in front of them,” the general manager told the Chronicle last week.
Confronted with Whitley’s accomplishment during the winter meetings, Luhnow emitted a nervous laugh. He acknowledged it wasn’t the most comfortable video to watch — this is, after all, his organization’s most heralded prospect — but seemed otherwise unperturbed.
“We don’t get to throw it from that distance or don’t get a running start,” Hinch added with a smile. “Other than that, it was great.”
Neither Whitley nor Poppe was contacted directly by the Astros’ front office about his video. The Astros are aligning with most major league organizations in accepting these somewhat unorthodox methods of offseason training.
Whitley, who has trained with weighted balls since he was 13, lauded his franchise for taking a “pretty liberal” stance on any training he or other prospects have done.
Luhnow has seen the facilities at Driveline Baseball and said places like it do “a good job of helping players become better.”
“We’re a pretty open-minded organization, and many of our pitching coaches are very aware of not only the techniques that are used in MLB but also outside with a lot of the coaches and programs our players access during the offseason,” Luhnow said.
“We’ll talk to our players during spring training and figure out what they got out of it and why they did it. My primary worry is that they do too much too fast and get injured, but so far everybody is very healthy.”
On to the next drill
Whitley is actually beginning to move away from pulldowns. Because he has done them for so long, their benefit is growing less discernible. He is instead moving to mound-velocity sessions. He throws 20 fastballs as hard as he can, utilizing the stamina and seamless rhythm acquired in part by pulldowns.
Though Poppe called Martin an “athletic specimen,” pulldowns were not in the prospect’s regimen at DST. This was the Texas A&M product’s first season at the complex, to which he was referred by Astros catching prospect Mike Papierski.
Because Martin was bound for major league spring training, Poppe would have preferred he throw more off a mound. But Poppe also believes a pitching prospect trying to make an impression on a front office can be helped by pulldowns, saying they facilitate consistency in one’s throwing motion and assist in recovery time.
“I don’t force anyone’s hand,” Poppe said, “I don’t say, ‘Hey, you have to do this, you don’t have to do this.’ ”
Martin insisted.
With the seven-ounce ball, he topped out at 94 mph. (Anything over 90 is “pretty much heat,” in Poppe’s estimation.) With the fiveounce ball, Martin touched 100 mph.
The three-ounce ball? Well, you — and Whitley — already know.
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