How to Throw a Gangster Curveball | Trevor Bauer X Marika Lyszczyk

trevor bauer here with marika we are going to be uh talking about throwing routines some mechanical stuff breaking down our mechanics on the mound and teaching the gangster curveball which is a warren bauer creation and how i learned to throw it and served me right my entire life so we're gonna we're gonna teach you the gangster curveball i'm ready let's go what do you do for warm-up these are just weighted balls do you throw away the balls yeah okay what's your routine with weight about who well first off who taught you about what was my coach back in canada he's driveline certified driveline certified so you're familiar with the driver but uh i only know a little bit so okay so why don't you walk me through uh why don't you walk me through your routine you usually start on the one knee you go kneeling throws yeah okay the back how many do you do here like five or six and then i switch to the next one i like go back to it after i like the violence i like the violence uh most people when they do reverse throws they're just like oh like this like no you're trying to like get something out of it you know so i like i like that i still haven't seen you throw so i gotta i gotta i gotta watch that but all right clickbait coach bauer teaches me how to throw away the ball you're kind of like out here yeah right so the ball is gonna travel from outside of your body and hit the wall so as long as you're not cutting it the ball should bounce back kind of straight on this side of your body so when you throw it if you put your glove back there okay you can catch it gotcha and then it's just a real seamless catch like one solid motion didn't work if you if you just kept your glove there at the end you moved it and you moved it right off where the ball is it was there yeah you're right on it there we go there it is here right now i'm working on um not letting my back leg collapse when i throw we'll start with the back leg we'll see how that goes again every time you are throwing you're pulling the ball across all right so it'd be good if you set your eyes on a target here i'm assuming you don't usually lock your eyes on a target no when you're doing it because most people don't they're just kind of warming up but if you can find a way to lock your eyes on a target it should help you get away from the cutting action the other thing is people have a tendency to throw and want to watch the ball and so it stops their shoulders from rotating right and so when i the reason i invented catching it behind my back is so that i gave me a reason to continue my shoulder rotation okay all the way through as opposed to purpose behind the cap of course of course it's style points but it's also you know all-purpose so i'm going to grab a i'm going to grab some tape here give me a second spraying reinforcements would rate a good review on yelp sometimes some visual aids help cutting the ball off and pulling the ball across your body is generally a couple things it's either your torso is rotating before your lower body finishes or it's lack of shoulder rotation there's two ways to go about this and two coaching tips one you can start thinking about the internal the way your body's functioning internally like okay so i know my hips aren't going and i know my shoulders and i'm thinking about all that stuff the other way is to set an external cue and let that guide your body into making the changes that you need so we have an external cue here my preference is always an external cue and if we can get an external cue to guide the way your body is going to move it's a lot better because now you don't have to think about stuff and it doesn't disrupt the natural athleticism okay there you go you go you go twice through that routine yeah okay right now in your routine there's a large gap between just the shoulder rotation and then the full throw you're not really getting your your lower half integrated uh into it at all so one thing i like for that is what's called like i guess a rolling i generally do it with the green ball you're gonna you're gonna step in with your right foot you're gonna pick your target out and you're gonna take your hand to that target so it looks like this okay basically you wanna try to think about your hips being forward the entire time that's not actually square that's not actually what's going to happen because of course as you retract and your torso turns your hips are going to turn but you want to have the cue of thinking that your hips are straight forward yep there we go yep did we just break this look at that i'm so sorry that's fine this is an old one i use this thing all season so it's been it's been here for a while when you throw it your your direction you were hitting the i think actually you can see right here where the ball broke that's how i broke the ball it's not maricopa that's where it hit so like you you dotted up the x pretty well and so this shoulder rotation allowing your shoulders to basically replace each other is gonna is gonna be very beneficial that's what i see on the warm-up side of things uh you wanna play catch [Music] so one of my favorite drills is actually like a backhand drill simulating a backhand throw in the six hole so fielding a ball stopping and turning and throwing it makes me rotate my hips first so now my hips are ahead of my torso and i have to transfer the ball into my hand which keeps my arm action short and makes me actually just rotate through as opposed to getting like long or getting out of sync yeah yep and then i'll do catcher throws while i'm just getting ready for the catching part adding a little bit of movement like this uh where you're having your hips rotate keeping them in front of your shoulders and having an external focus of like okay i'm trying to hit like i'm trying to hit the logo on your chest that's what my eyes pick up right so if it if you wanted to be the head if you want to be the hip if you want to be the glove whatever just have some sort of external focus and do some sort of athletic movement and that should like without having to think about it it should tighten everything up and get rid of the automatically corrects it almost without thinking about it for sure for sure i i haven't learned that much about like throwing anything since like i was so young because like they kind of just stop i think that's the one thing is like once you get to college it's kind of like you're off on your own and i don't learn much anymore so like to pick up knowledge it's like pretty cool to like keep learning yeah you see a lot of young girls are taught to throw improperly and they're taught to like get their arm like way up here so they get this like elbow above the shoulder line and then it's like there's no power coming through and their arms kind of hurt a lot of like leaning forward kind of like this and pushing the ball or you see like kind of elbow in and like pushing the ball kind of like this um don't see any of that which is super encouraging check out my zero era in college one one inning all right you to you want to learn pitch you want to throw some off the mound what else can i help with what do you want to learn yeah let's trust them off the mountain throw some off the mountain all right all right you're getting into my realm now this is where i this is where i exist is where i live you occasionally get up here sometimes yeah sometimes every now and then you got a radar gun behind the mound with the radar board on so you can judge your intensities that's what i usually do so i have different levels in my in my training program sometimes i'm at a max intent where i'm trying to see what what number i can get sometimes i want to be at 80 whatever the case is and then we got a t with a ball on it and now i like this better than throwing to a catcher because it forces you to pick a singular focus again what we talked about with the x on the wall the external focus so i sit here and i try to throw and knock the ball off the tee with each pitch i'm actually going to take some film of you from the side and from behind we'll do a quick mechanical breakdown okay and then we'll jump into some of the like curveball stuff because i think that'll be pretty fun okay let's see what we got here so ideally we'd see the front foot down in this position with the hips your lower body's in a great spot here um but we'd see the torso be more in like this position closed off once more closed off right and so this is kind of what we talked about a little bit earlier with the cutting so now your heels down the torso is open so now it's going to just come here and then kind of stop rotating and then you rotate again afterwards after the ball releases some of the rotational drills we've talked about the straight pick off the short stop throw yep getting the hips to go first will be will be very beneficial but overall i mean the segments all move very well they're just a little bit of a break in the timing between the lower half and the upper half but the movement pattern is very good go through your normal delivery did you feel any sort of stretch in your obliques yeah anything else yeah okay let's try it let's try it again this time i'm just going to kind of pin this shoulder forward so right about like right when you get your foot's about to hit yeah i feel like a big pressure into my hand and it's because your shoulder wants to wants to turn and open up as your hips are going and that's what we want because that's when your hips are actually really starting to turn over and they turn over really well but as they are turning over your torso's going with them and that's where i feel the pressure into my hand so when i put pressure on your shoulder you should feel like a little bit of stretch kind of like oh man that like you felt that stretched my oblique here some people feel on this side but you should feel a little bit of a delay where it's like oh hips and then shoulders kind of awkward yeah just that little bit of delay means that your foot can get down and your shoulders are still here and then they've stretched and that's that stretch that you're feeling that little delay and so now the heel is down so now it all springs forward but you have something firm to rotate against 64. just hit my uh my uh pr right there gonna learn a curveball absolutely the there's three keys on a curveball all right the very first thing is you want to keep a stiff wrist and forearm okay so a lot of times people think that on a curveball you want to like snap the wrist that's what i've always been told right so it doesn't move yeah that's exactly why it doesn't move so the thing you think about first is a stiff wrist so the way i tell people is that there's a board over here and you're going to have to karate chop through the board okay how would you do that and it'd be like a stiff wrist right so that's how you throw a curveball first get this stiff then you're going to position the ball in where you're this finger because this is the finger you want to come off of your middle finger yeah that's what's going to impart the spin okay so you're going to position that on a seam somewhere it doesn't really matter uh where but you want to make sure that you have it on kind of the inside you don't want to be on the outside part of the scene where you're going to be pulling against the leather you want that's usually where i'm in like on the inside yeah so whatever grip feels good find a place on the seam so you're gonna go stiffest put the ball in the where the seam hits your middle finger and you're just gonna curl it into your hand kind of like this so these two fingers so i'm holding it with just my middle finger pressing it into my palm thumbs off see how all my fingers are off yeah can you take your thumb off so now you want this so this is going to be stiff it's not going to be cocked this way or this way it's just in a neutral position stiff wrist and now what you have is what my dad likes to call you have a gun right here the pistol yeah and you're basically just going to shoot when you throw this you're going to shoot whatever target you want to throw it at okay and what's going to happen here is when you're in this position you see how my finger is in front of the ball yeah so when i shoot the target pow this ball is going to roll out of my hand and have top spin okay so i don't have to do anything in from this grip i don't have to do anything with my wrist i just throw the ball and if i shoot right at you see how it see how it has a topspin yeah so try that real quick exactly so you see how you can create spin without doing anything with your wrist yeah just the orientation in your hand the next step in throwing a curveball is you want to divide the ball in half with your thumb and your middle finger and my thumb so this is on the inside part of the seam and my thumb goes on this seam so now when you look at it it's split you can do it on the two seam here if you want to pull on that and your thumb just kind of goes split in half right so find a position on the on the ball that's good make sure it's split in half and again you want to make sure that you can hold it with your thumb and your middle finger in a way that your wrist is going to maintain being locked in make sense see how my wrist is straight okay you've gotten good at doing this and creating the spin so now we need to work that back a little bit towards the delivery so very good next we're going to go just to a normal throw okay start in your normal throwing position point and then go through your arm swing and finish the throw but make sure that finger like as you're releasing it points towards me and then follow through oh see how you finished yeah okay this brings me to the last point when you finish you have to you have this gun yeah this is the way my dad teased it teaches it it's not cool to just shoot a gun you have to shoot it like a gangster that's what my dad tells all the kids that he teaches all right so what he means by this is as you're coming through you stiff wrist it the ball is released but you have to turn the ball over this way you have to pronate through the release okay as opposed to like you just finished that last time you finish like this see how your hand is up this is supination you're familiar with supernational permission so you're finishing in supination the only way you do that is if you're breaking the wrist or doing something around the ball and you're finishing like this right when you throw you don't finish like that you throw and then your hand turns over yeah right so the next the last piece of it is you have to pronate through the release and the way he talks about it is taking your gun and turning it into a gangster's gun yeah when you go to throw this you're going to feel really weird trying to turn it over but the main thing to think about is drive your hand to me and just let it let it like let it finish without flicking don't don't stop right yeah exactly okay it's time to rip it okay it feels like way easier yeah it takes a lot of the a lot of the timing because if you're trying to like do this at the right time it's super inconsistent you know so those are the three keys i'll let you tell them back to me what are the three keys of a curveball all right first of all we start off with the stiff wrist yep and then we have to have a straight line going through cut the ball in half yeah and then it's the when you're coming through with the straight and then turn because you got to be a gangster that's right now shooting with the gangster gun so that's the uh that's the warren bauer gangster curveball that's how i learned that's how i learned to throw it so that's what i got for you on the curveball that's sweet

Channel: Momentum

Views: 573,196

Rating: 4.9417233 out of 5

Keywords: baseball, momentum, strikeout, ball, bat, watch, documentary, story, movie, video, pitching, hitting, mlb, milb, major, league, leagues, minor, minors, reds, cincinnati, cities, culture, the game, the show, commissioner, rob manfred, trevor bauer, mike clevinger, major leagues, watch momentum, pitcher, pitch, bauer bytes, live at bats, marika lyszczyk, how to throw a curveball, athletic movement, how to pitch, pitching tips, pitcher catches ball, throwing tips, dodgers, driveline baseball, throwing

Id: T21TLQAn7m0

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021