March 2025 ENewsletter

Gentlemen… Start Your Engines

Summers in the 70’s and 80’s consisted of riding our bikes to the local park for indoor basketball or monster wiffle ball games. For 3 hours about 5 of our friends would jump on our bikes and ride about 2-3 miles to the closest gym in Burbank. After we finished that part of our day, we rode our bikes to the local McDonalds for lunch, go 2 stores over to a video arcade and play pinball or Asteroids then head back to the gym for more baseball. Around 3-4pm, it was time to head to my house to go swimming in the pool for an hour and then head to baseball practice for our summer team with all of my friends, day after day for almost 3 months. There was the beach day that all of our Mom’s took us too but for the most part, sports played a big part in summer months, all sports but especially baseball. No video games, we of course were not going to stay inside with limited A/C and read a book. It was an adventure every day!

We loved our summers and we trained and trained and trained, unknowingly but still trained nonetheless. Then travel ball started for our own kids and those days of summer seemed like centuries ago, but we move on!

We are right in the thick of the spring baseball season. The Foothill League which consists of all 7 high schools in the Santa Clarita Valley starts their league games this Wednesday (rain pending). Some observations for the first 3-4 weeks of the season thus far:

• 2 of our high school programs have multiple players immediately thrown 100+ pitches in the first week of games. In my opinion and based on past history, I believe that these particular arms (6 of them) will run into arm health issues over the next month, or their velocity will be down a lot. Winning is important but pitching that much early is dreadful for long term health.

• I have been told that we have had our first major elbow with one other high schools with a pitcher in the first game of his Senior season. Most likely Tommy John surgery but not 100% sure yet. Unfortunately, I have been talking about this endlessly in past newsletters and it has been ‘accomplished’ again. I am 99% sure this pitcher did not have enough ramp-up time to throw that much in his first game.  This elbow issue has been brought to my attention with youth ball where travel and rec league teams are focused more on winning that the health of a young arm, and this is more of an epidemic that being unlucky at this point in youth ball, very very unfortunate. 😦

• Speaking of starting your engines, in SCV, league games are starting this week, rain pending all of this week’s games. During these delays, it is very important that a player’s throwing schedule doesn’t change. Whether it is throwing indoors like our facility, another facility like a batting cage, or in a gymnasium at a high school, pitchers and position guys alike throw, throw and then throw some more.  Throwzone Academy has all equipment needed to get loose, train and advocate for weighted ball training for speed or conditioning on an every day basis.

• Once the next 2 months gets us to the end of the spring season, then it is time to start training and getting the body back to ‘normal’. This happens by weight training and getting your arm strength back that normally starts to slow down due to games up to 3 times/week, along with practice 3 more days. Sundays are always a relief to players because they go 6 days/week in the spring. Now, as summer moves towards us, training for another big summer/fall/winter/spring season will be here before you know it. Throwzone Academy can help you build your body and arm strength back to normal and then some with our Summer Training program with us! 4 to 8 weeks of training with us during the summer, 3 days/week, 2.5 hours/day, will allow your body to get back to full strength and even more velocity!

It is very important to plan ahead as summer camp is less then 3 months away. Young or more old, Throwzone Academy has something for everyone, including thrower harder, arm recovery much more quickly and having a plan of attack to move forward.

Until next time…

– Jim