Can an Average Guy Hit a 95 MPH Fastball? | Above Average Joe | GQ Sports

better up better up i feel like i'm making pretty decent contact with the ball how fast are you throwing these though yeah these are about 25 miles an hour i'm clay skipper and i got two days to hit a 95 mile an hour fastball okay this is above average joe [Applause] today we're talking baseball if you watch baseball on tv the speed probably doesn't translate but the average pitch in the mlb is 92 miles per hour for those of you doing the math at home that means the pitch gets to the plate and about 425 to 450 milliseconds now the average major leaguer can get his bat around about 110 milliseconds but they've been practicing their entire lives i love baseball but it's not my sport so i figured i'd call in some pros so they could watch me take a few cuts and give me a few tips thank you appreciate you uh joining us this morning do you have a sense of what task i have ahead of me here i have a sense uh i heard that we're gonna hit some baseball i'm trying to hit an mlb fastball so like 90 95 miles an hour you haven't experienced how to play or play ball before or do you know how to grip a bath i played baseball until i was seven or eight i quit because they went from underhanded coach pitch to using a machine and i was scared of the machine so you were scared when you were seven oh gosh if we're gonna put you on a 95 mile an hour fast well let me explain this it's one thing to have somebody throwing 95 but when this machine is just sitting here and you get to watch the ball like slowly roll down and then shoot it out at 95 miles an hour it's gonna look like a bullet coming out yeah what would you find more intimidating hitting a 95 mile from a pitcher from a machine definitely a machine i mean i see a pitcher throw them all all the time you could see a body movement you know so you got something that you could really time up because usually with a machine it's probably more of an advantage because after you take a couple pitches you're going to know the general area that it's going to be in when you face a major league pitcher they have a lot of movement on their pitches especially a fastball and not only that but they can locate in certain areas of the strike zone they can throw one up and in if they want down and away the upper upper-class pitchers are able to do that it's still hard you don't know when you know what's coming it's still hard to hit it tomorrow i'm headed into the 95 mile an hour fastball oh timeout i don't get to see this today oh no i'm gonna take some cuts for you right now but what are your three tips to me see the ball hit the ball that's it all you have to do that's it it can't possibly be that easier more people would do it don't think about it just go kill it get your hands up get your front foot in the ground okay and hit the top of the baseball it's not gonna go down it may look like it's gonna go down this ball is gonna rise hit the top of the baseball you'll have a better chance nothing about this sounds simple at all zero where do you grip the bat i hold it at the end of the bat you may want to choke up a little bit on this one okay that's going to help you to get a little bit more speed up your bat too that's good how big is your bat where does it say [Laughter] 32 32. that's good so you can choke up a little bit but remember just be strong with your grip because it's going to hurt the ones i've made contact it stings my hands that might just be because i'm a bit of a wimp but if you make good contact in the sweet spot how does that feel it literally will feel like nothing you know when you've hit that ball well and you hit it on the barrel part of the bat you know like that when you hit the ball in the sweet spot you don't feel it when you get that little stinger in your hand oh that doesn't feel too good especially in cold weather i'm gonna take some swings for you if you've got any um tips on my swag too i'll take that you know baseball players always look so cool we're gonna put them at 50. 50 our batting practice guys throw harder than 50. i got to start somewhere gonzo i know baby steps oh i got the pressure on i know you're watching if you're making contact here we go [Music] [Music] one see the ball hit the ball there you go you see it that's simple man the machine is still scary but not quite as scary you got to get started a little earlier clay you're getting you're hitting that ball almost behind you one more let me get one more hit all right what'd you see now when you were hitting right there you were getting the ball and the home plates right here you were hitting right on top of the plate most good hitters want to hit the ball out in front of the plate that's how they get the barrel of the bat out and the ball just explodes off so i would just try to get a little bit further back in the batter's box because you're gaining just that extra millisecond up there that you have remember that ball is going to be on you just as fast as the time that you blink your eyes because it's 95 miles an hour i'm going to tell you right now you're going to try to leg kick like you just did right now and the ball will already be past you [Laughter] you're almost kind of cheating to get to that fast ball early one thing i want to make sure i asked you was about nerves i'm gonna be nervous going up against a 95 mile an hour fastball you've been in some very high pressure situations including the 2001 world series against my new york yankees when you hit the walk off hit two questions on that one why'd you have to break my heart and two how did you calm your nerves in a scenario like that or what advice can you give me about staying calm when i'm in the box tomorrow it's more of getting in your comfort zone major league players are very superstitious in a lot of different ways if they're hitting the ball well they'll take the same route to the ballpark same time that they do things you're not always going to have good games but when you have those good games you try to remember what you did that day that'll prepare you for the next day to try to do it again i commend what you're doing it's always easy you know we're all armchair quarterbacks you know we're like oh that's easy to do but you put yourself out there in front of 50 000 people there's no security blanket you're not in the comfort of your home on the couch no i hear you that's the whole premise of the show in some ways except instead of doing it in front of 50 000 people i'm doing it on youtube in front of you know an entire millions of people who and it will stay there forever if i embarrass myself all right didn't feel super great coming in today definitely feel a little bit more confident part of that was the batting practice part of that was talking to some pros getting some good tips tomorrow we're gonna say some prayers see if i can't hit a 95 mile an hour fastball today we're at new york empire baseball we're gonna work with coach jordan baltimore to get me a hit of fastball hopefully knowing nothing about my swing right now just judging by how athletic i look what kind of shot would you give me to be able to do that i'll give you the downside you've got less than 400 milliseconds to do it from the time that ball heads on its way so less than four tenths of a second the time it takes for your brain to think about it and actually swing is more than four tenths of a second so it's impossible but we're going to teach you how to do it anyway i mean i think the thing that's pretty illustrative is that the hall of famers do it one out of four times so can you really control around that and a round ball and the millimeter at which you hit that ball the answer is no but if you have a great swing and the plane of the swing is right over time on average you will have great contact meaning a hard hit ball that's a line drive or a low fly ball but in the absence of that no if you have a bad swing on average you won't have good outcomes or even good output first you'll learn to swing then you'll learn to hit what happens to people who try to hit before they swing you introduce a mental threshold instead of swinging as hard as you can or nearly as hard as you can your goal becomes can i just make contact that's not the goal hitting a ball that bounces 20 times in the infield and then you're out by 40 feet and then you go back to the duggars hey good contact that wasn't good contact yeah that wasn't interesting at all and swinging missing is not necessarily a failure did you have a great swing then let's understand why you swung and miss swinging missing with a great swing is better than contact with a poor swing you sound like you have a lot of knowledge to impart on me walk me through what you're going to have me do what we're going to work on how this is all going to shake out today sure so we'll start with a movement screening i just want to understand your strength and mobility because the reality is if you can't physically do a movement and i stand here insisting that you do that movement that ends in one or two places frustration or failure or both then we'll hand you a bat and tell you to swing and we're gonna watch you try to accomplish a task and then we'll start to build some of the mechanical movement involved in the swing and we won't even use a baseball to do it all right let's get started so i've brought in dr james he's our director of performance we're going to take you through the on-base you hitting screen to understand all of your joints how do you move why do you move let's look at the strength and mobility and dr james will take you from there i feel better as a doctor here in case i get hit by a 95 mile [Laughter] there are certain segments of your body where we want to see more mobility and certain segments we want more stability this is your kinematic sequence when you're swinging going from the floor up we want our foot to be very stable we want our ankle to be mobile the knee to be stable the hip to be mobile the core to be stable the spine to be mobile so as we work our way up it's very interesting how it works where we see this alternating pattern of demands of our body for mobility and stability this is our seated rotation test go ahead and sit down here slide out to the end of the chair get your feet under your knees so you'll have kind of an l or a 90 degree angle on your knees bring your feet together your knees together and can you go ahead and cross your right ankle over your left ankle squeeze those knees together take this bat put it behind your neck hold it over your shoulders a little mike trout style this gives us an idea of how well you're moving and rotating your thoracic spine so by locking your knees and your ankles together we're blocking out the movement of your lumbar spine the lower part of your spine so we're just getting an idea of how that's rotating because that's a key driver of creating that separation in that swing and creating that good rotational acceleration so if you can't rotate then that's something we have to address before we even put a bat in your hands turn to your right as far as you can so he's about 45 degrees go ahead and cross your left ankle over your right ankle now turn as far to your left as you can so i'm at about 45 what's good so we want more than 45 degrees that's not bad okay bad would truly be pain anything else we can either work around or train with corrective exercise go ahead and stand up i'm going to put this back down right here i want you to step right outside the bat so your feet are aligned i want you to hold your hips with your left foot only turn your toe in and try and touch the bat handle we're looking at internal rotation of your hips right now and now you're right a little more mobile all right it's much easier to get that is that good has a righty or is that so that's something that we're going to need to address because that left hip being able to internally rotate during that swing is critical and that's something that we're going to address with the drill later so i'll just hit lefty you might not hit at all let's go ahead and now rotate your hips now can you look to turn in a rotational way rather than kicking the hip out side to side so when you're doing it on your own you're relying on your own system to be able to both stabilize and to move right if i take you and i hold you i'm doing the stability part for you and now we're just saying do you physically have that range of motion without having to worry about creating your own intrinsic stability we got to work on both that's a nice way of saying i am it seems to me to be so instinctual but you can actually train someone to get better at that oh absolutely and the key is to train someone to do it unconsciously the left part of your brain asks questions right how am i going to accomplish a task and a lot of people call it analysis paralysis right your left brain operates about 40 instructions per second which is extraordinary right the right brain operates at 11 million instructions per second you don't want to be in left brain thinking about swing thoughts yeah when you're in the batter's box and a baseball is coming in at 95 miles an hour i want to already be in right brain the neural pathway is already built you're prepared and that preparation is going to build confidence even though i'm swinging the bat with my arms and my hands the most important force actually comes from the ground up my screening showed i needed stability in my ankles all the way up through my lower half and more mobility in my hips and thoracic spine mobilizing and stabilizing specific muscles will help me with the transfer of power through the kinematic sequence so before i can even grab a bat and start hitting dr james put me through a series of activations to get those specific muscles awake and warmed up a lot of times we think about mobility deficits and we just need to stretch there's something that we see a lot is if you just tap into activating a muscle teaching your brain that it's safe to assume certain ranges of motion it unlocks us without ever doing a stretch that's going to help to unlock that extension and rotation of your thoracic spine i'm a big believer in using activation techniques to gain mobility this is usually the way i start our guys we're having difficulty hip mobility yeah give them an external cue to drive their stability so that distally at their hips that allows them to free themselves up because this allows me to instead of using my upper body and my hips it's just isolating the hips yep you're going to see guys playing for the yankees that go through these hip mobility drills because it primes the body the way it needs to be primed kick that left leg out to the side we're getting that loading into your hip we're working on ankle stability you're keeping that foot rooted in the ground that burns just hold for another five four three big chest two one and relax wow for our athletes that we work with we can't expect them to create powerful rotation so our body has to be able to control rotational movements before we can create explosive power the big focus is working on disassociating your upper body from your lower body that's going to become critical for when you're developing your kinematic sequence when we screen a player at the beginning of the off season we have months to work on the things that you just showed us right now for you opening days tomorrow but how can we take what you're presenting with right now and give you the tools that you need to make the adjustments all right well now i'm loose coach so it's getting me uh not hitting but swinging exactly what are we doing now i'm not going to limit my analysis to what i can see with my eye because the truth is you're moving too fast for me to understand everything this is one of the bluetooth enabled 3d motion analysis sensors we're going to put one on your hips torso lead arm and hand to see the chain in which your body moves we'll get those hips to turn first create that energy that's then going to be used by the torso then used by the arm and then used by the hand and if we get that efficient sequence working the output should speak for itself all right let's strap me up we don't want to just measure what your body is doing we want to see the output you're creating so we've gone ahead and put a blast motion bat sensor on here so that we also understand what the bat is doing in every swing there you go sounds good helmet on helmet on [Music] i feel like a action hero better up better up [Music] is this good sound or bad sound yes oh i feel like i'm making pretty decent contact with the ball i have no idea how my swing mechanics look to you coach but it feels pretty good how fast are you throwing these though these are like 30. yeah these are about 25 miles an hour clay what i'm curious about can you show me how hard you can swing a bat right now wow that's a little different yeah now i'm going to say on a scale of 1 to 100 one being the less than average joe and 100 being clay's best that was about a 65 okay not even thinking about hitting anything you just swing as hard as you've ever swung so clay i'm gonna throw you a few balls right now and i want you to swing harder than you've ever saw in your life but i'm gonna ask you to do something that's gonna be almost impossible don't try to hit the ball okay okay all right my work here is done it's like it's like your coach i mean it's bizarre because i'm not even looking at the ball and it just hits it so you have to be comfortable with that last swing and miss because the swing was good let's work on output not outcome okay that felt pretty great right there dr james is not going to be happy because i definitely don't have stability on the lower half stability in the lower half is absolutely critical to rotational speed because if you're just spinning out and you're not stable in the lower half we're not efficiently transferring energy from your lower half into your upper half right if it's just spinning out and we're not bracing ourselves at what we call a lead leg block and you can't stabilize the core in the lower half so that your torso can then rotate against your core then you're never going to swing as hard as you possibly can so i'm going to give you a very simple instruction when you land on that front leg and you want to swing your bat how hard can you press your left heel into the ground while you're swinging and that's going to help to stabilize your lower half better up now was that your hardest or did you slow down to try to hit that ball i slowed down and try to hit that ball yeah don't even try to hit it you show me just how hard you can swing and just how hard you can press that left heel into the ground excellent oh we have exit velo on uh 64. that's good for a 12 year old what is exit velocity exit philosophy means how fast is coming off the bat but why does that matter because the harder you hit a baseball the more likely you are to get a hit it's that simple [Music] your swing has changed because you're trying to now hit the ball and you're bringing your hands down like you're hunting for the ball yeah so now i'm going to give you one last instruction can you swing straight across your chest with no sense of where the ball is hard as you can okay go for it amazing now do it harder i feel like i'm gonna throw my back out wow let's go clay [Music] [Applause] oh my goodness so attention clay as i was watching you swing those first few swings you were just trying to hit the ball and when you did we saw low exit velocities and energy wasn't being transferred up the chain very well i asked you to free up i said don't try to hit the ball just show me how hard you can swing and immediately exit velocity jumped energy transferred up the chain went way up and we're gonna look now at your kinematic sequence but i took a little sneak peek and i saw that we went from moving like a gate where all four of your segments were moving together that thing that opens and closes yeah and then on your very last swing you moved as athletically as you've ever moved certainly while in the cage i see some fancy things happening what's going on here so we're taking a look at some of the performance graphs that we got from your movements and this was one of your first swings and what we see here we're looking at graphs of your body's movement here how we can physically and that's the kinematic change in the sequence that's the chain yeah so hip is the red torso is the green arm is that blue and then that last yellowy line is your hand your hips and torso and arm all fired at the exact same time and if you look here it says one one one one everything moved if you remember i said it kind of moves like a yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you see the separation between each of these lines is very very small right yeah we didn't transmit energy so took a look at your swing spoke to you and said here's what i want you to do for now when you start that swing crush the ground as hard as you can with your left foot right your exit velocities went up by 50 you put two things together in your training helping to stabilize your lower half by really focusing on crushing throughout that front foot but you also started to swing more freely we saw that in the improved exit velocities but we also see it in your kinematic sequence your hips fired then your shoulders then your arm then your hand and amazingly on this we didn't only have great output we also had a great outcome it's the hardest ball you hit of the day and you also hit it at your peak hand speed on your worst swing it took you 0.76 seconds to go from your very first move your load to hit a baseball and i told you you had a maximum of 396. yeah that took you 760. yeah you're pretty much hitting the ball after the catcher yeah exactly at your best you brought that down under 396 and that speaks to will you be able to catch up to the 95 and on your very best you did get under 396 milliseconds in fact you almost got to 300 milliseconds and all that depends on your kinematic chain and so working that so that you can get around more quickly and then from there that's absolutely that's when you can actually become pretty stellar but this is exceptional well i had good coaches thank you good coach good doctor now you need to learn how to hit yeah okay that's true 95 miles an hour here we come here we go [Music] practice is over the analysis is over now it's time for me to see if i can actually turn my swing into a hit that's the final showdown i got 10 strikes a couple caveats for all the youtube haters out there obviously we're inside we're not in a stadium sittings aren't open to opening day i don't have a real pitcher i have a machine because of that i'm going to swing at every pitch lastly no one's rooting for me no one's playing against me except my mom who's definitely rooting for me at home but uh that's it gotta give it a shot now's the time all right all right oh that was contact technically [Music] three [Music] i thought i had that oh those last two are close [Music] whoa [Music] actually didn't hurt that bad there we go took a little ball off the finger i don't know if adrenaline's pumping or what it doesn't hurt that bad so i think i got lucky it's gonna feel great tomorrow i think yeah clay i'll tell you as we watched we noticed your timing get better and better the hardest thing was the timing because when we were back practicing and you were throwing i got like you're looking for stitches yeah and i was like okay now when i know his hand is there i start i initiate my swing with this it's tough because you can see chris loading it but you can't really see the ball coming through so are you saying it would be easier to hit a major league pitcher yeah definitely you just swing you don't look at the ball and you can still make contact yeah it's a truly wild feeling well we're proud of you look i'm gonna be honest i'm not surprised i stand by what i said back there after watching you go from where you began to where you ended just in that short amount of training i knew you were gonna succeed today well i'm happy thank you all credit goes to you dr james good people at empire baseball i've only ever completed one of these challenges once before so i never know how to react [Applause] that felt great it was exhilarating definitely was scary at the beginning i think the biggest thing was just getting used to the speed of the pitch once i did that i was trying to nail down the timing and then as coach jordan said just swing i'm happy i did it clay skipper above average joe i don't usually actually achieve these challenges so today i can say that actually was above average signing off thank you guys for watching

Channel: GQ Sports

Views: 2,582,996

Rating: 4.8778353 out of 5

Keywords: 100 mph fastball, 95 mph fastball, above average joe, average guy, average joe, baseball, baseball fastball, baseball training, can average guy, clay skipper, clay skipper gq, clay skipper gq sports, fast ball, fastball, fastball baseball, fastball pitch, fastballs, fastest fastball, gq, gq sports, hit a fast ball, hit a fastball, hit fastball, hitting a fast ball, hitting a fastball, how to fastball, how to hit a fastball, how to hit fastball, sports

Id: lMy-7swdgkY

Length: 23min 43sec (1423 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/dirtyjc13]

I’ve faced a few MLB pitchers when they were in HS and each of them threw 90 and above at the time. I can speak from personal experience that this shit is much harder than it looks on TV.

[u/InglouriousBrad]

Yes. Lots of foul balls, though. Not to mention dribblers/ground outs...pop ups....if you're're lucky, you might hit it 200 feet. Bottom line...easy out.

[u/fsquaredx16]

Thought it was going to be more a fluff piece but actually has some interesting sport science coaching and input from a couple r/azdiamondbacks. Worth a watch!

[u/[deleted]]

I just want to stand in the box and watch 105 blow past me.

[u/SeattleSunDevil84]

Honestly wasn't expecting much from the watch, but there were some legitimate hitting tips in there that I'm going to steal for my kiddos' softball practices.

[u/am19208]

I’ve hit off of 93 or it’s equivalent at a batting cage. Once I got my timing down, hitting it wasn’t terrible but very exhausting.

Obviously not the same a live pitch at 93 but I found it impressive considering I hadn’t swung a bat in maybe 4 years.

[u/CountingCastles]

Sure, they can. They’re probably not going to make quality contact, but it’s certainly easier than hitting a curveball that looks like it’s going to hit them in the face before it drops in for a strike

[u/[deleted]]

The awkward looking bunny stance gives away newbies every time w/o seeing a single swing. Not sure why new players always take that awkward, non-athletic stance like clockwork. Nobody stands like that to do any other athletic activity. The swing itself wasn't half bad once coach got through with him.

[u/aagpeng]

Those side views really show how fast the ball crosses the plate. How does anyone bat .300 against that