Major-league players are turning to football-style training to prepare for spring training.
Carrying their bats and gloves, they leave the weight room and walk the palm tree-lined path past the baseball diamonds to the track.
Weight sleds and tires await the boys of summer for the kind of workouts typically reserved for men who make their living on the gridiron in the fall. At the Coach Tom Shaw Performance camp at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex, it’s common to see Rockies free agent Carlos Gonzalez, Martin Prado, Ender Inciarte and several other major-leaguers working out alongside football players preparing for the NFL scouting combine and doing the same drills.
Players believe these nontraditional winter workouts, a mix of strength and endurance training, football cutting drills and some more common baseball moves, make them quicker, more prepared for spring training and better equipped to stay healthy for the 162-game season.
“Quickness, footwork, all the stuff you use in baseball he perfectly adapted to our workouts,” said Prado, an infielder for the Miami Marlins who has been working out with Shaw since October as part of his ninth year in the program. “He tried over the years to combine football workouts with less intensity for baseball players . ... He mixes it up in a way that you actually feel comfortable working out with football kind of workouts but converting to baseball.”
Shaw won three Super Bowls as the speed and conditioning coach of the New England Patriots, and his facility is known as a place where Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, potential draftees and other football players come for intense workouts. He had no baseball background prior to nine years ago when Prado and Jordan Schafer were among the first players from that sport to seek out a different kind of offseason training regimen.
Over the better part of the past decade, more players have joined. Gonzalez tried the program after injuries limited him to 70 games in 2014.
“What we all do here, we feel ready,” Gonzalez said. “We feel ready from the getgo, from the first day of spring training. Obviously your body’s going to feel stronger and you’re mentally prepared, too . ... It’s a great way to keep us in great shape during the offseason. When you feel that strong and you feel healthy, all you’ve got to do is just maintain through spring training and the regular season.”
There are 31 players of various levels all the way down to high school taking part in Shaw’s baseball program, which prioritizes explosive speed.
“Speed changes the game, so all the drills that we do here, they correspond to every sport,” said trainer Kelsey Martinez, who runs Shaw’s baseball program.
One day, that means loading sand bags into tires and first walking and then sprinting down the track. Another day, it’s cutting like wide receivers or using the sand pit to provide some extra movement resistance.
Sure, there’s work in batting cages and on the field, but it’s not your typical winter wind-up.
“It’s all about building athleticism,” said Schafer, a natural outfielder who’s also now pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals. “If you can build athleticism, usually you can make adjustments quicker. The more athletic you are, the more core stability you have, the more explosiveness.”