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up everyone morey croson here from the performance lab of California and we have a new breakdown for
you today on improving your overall pop time as a catcher and we are starting off with the breakdown
of JT Realmuto which I feel like it's just a no-brainer in terms of if you if you want to
actually improve your pop time I mean watching how he's able to get the ball out of his hands
and what is overall mechanics are is gonna be something that is definitely will have a direct
correlation from your overall ability to perform now as a catcher and your pop Tom now and seeing
what what he does what are some small little critiques you could do in your own pick your own
catching and your ability to transition that can help you in maximizing your ability to increase
your pop time so we'll go ahead and hop right into the breakdown here so you know the thing
that I really like about how he overall moves and you know what are some of the things that he does
very well is he relies on you know some of the the biomechanical principles that I know we talked
about but I just are kind of established within the community which is to be able to have a lot
of overall stabilization and also to work on the efficiency of the mode of the movement so we'll
go into how he's able to do that first we'll talk about from a lateral stability standpoint or also
lateral force standpoint and how that's that's generated so you can see the the ball here and
and what he does I mean does this basically every time that he catches the ball so it's
kind of a habit that he does where he's just from his right leg to his left leg as he's catching so
you know he starts off he has more weight on his right side and then as the ball is getting closer
he just naturally shifts over to his left side so now most of his power is off of the right leg
which gives him the ability to be very very quick and in being able to get off of his right foot so
now when he's moving you see he'd just very easily transition off of his right leg and he
just doesn't get too much vertical movement when he initially catches the ball right so he's here
boo he just transitions and he stays very very low looking how much been Diaz in that in that
back leg even look at how much money he has in the front leg and then his overall you know shoulder
height is very very low in comparison to when he releases the ball right so you can see that as he
what he's doing is he's using the lateral force and lateral stability to be able to load and then
from there when he's actually throwing the ball it's all about verticality right so he's very
low and his legs here and then as he's getting rid of the ball everything is getting more and
more vertical so that's where he's creating most his core so what would end up being a great way
for him to be able to improve his pop time would be to increase his overall vertical jump because
of how his you know force is going that way now I see a lot of guys that immediately pop and stand
up and they're when they when they first gets the ball so they go from here to being very straighten
the legs doesn't have very they don't have very much knee bend and their shoulder height is very
high from the beginning which makes it so now they're relying a lot on their rotational force
which isn't a bad thing necessarily but what JT Realmuto does is he uses both vertical force and
rotational force because of the lateral stability yes okay and so it's just a difference of being of
what is your actual technical use of the the force production and making them so you can then be very
very quick in in the release so if you stand up right automatically where's extra time that
goes into the throw because you have to go and actually stand up right so this time that he get
catches the ball boom we can see 25 85 here okay so we'll just go right through the actual process
28 585 until when he gets to his loading position 26 25 right so that was not very much time at all
point four seconds to just get him from you know in in that catching position to being able to have
the ball ready to load right just this point four would be ahead of a lot of guys that we've done
breakdowns for or guys that we work with so point four there and then from here gets the ball out
at let's say 26 fifty-two so it's still under a second okay so so far he's used up 0.67 seconds
from the time he caught the ball to the time the ball gets out of his hands okay and then usually I
say you know he the ball gets about halfway let's see you can see the ball right here so it gets to
the catcher or to the pitcher oh he lost it there 2696 so now we're over a second okay we'll only
by a little bit we're at one point one one seconds okay when he's halfway and it actually gets to the
second baseman's glove 27 76 or sorry 79 right so he's that he's a little bit under a second here in
terms of his pop time and this is you know being able to throw somebody out who's on second this
isn't as steel as his throwing somebody out that you know it's just leaning off too far and get
some fairly easily because again it's all based on we just look at the pure numbers here right I mean
it's all just based off of how he's able to catch the ball low right transition himself very quickly
get to this get to that position where he has that ball you know loaded ready to go very very
quickly I mean it takes him only 0.4 seconds to catch the ball and then get himself in a position
where he's you know being in a throw and then from there being very very forceful and being
able to create vertical force and rotational force and the throw says I'm a so he get that velocity
to be able to get the ball there right if he if he was just going in standing straight up and relying
on the rotational force which again I see a lot of guys do now that that's what increases the the
time that's amazing so it takes more than you know two seconds to get the ball there a lot of guys
are able to actually get the ball out of their hands fairly quickly but you know the when they
get the ball out of their hands fairly quickly their ability to get the ball to second face is
not very good or you have the other side of the coin where they're just not able to flip their
hips as well they're not able to transition to the throw as well or through the motion as well which
makes it so you know now that their release takes a little bit more time and then when the release
takes more time you know than 0.67 seconds now you end up getting a you know harder throw but
you still don't have the the has gonna pop time because you know you're just releasing the ball
too late so you have to be able to play with the both of those things and again the the two big
things that he doesn't really really standout is one being able to shift his from the right leg to
the left leg keep his body low because he does that he's able to keep his body low right so he
gets this position very very quickly and then from there he uses vertical force as well as rotational
force to get the ball out of his hand so there's two things you guys can work on catchers if you
have a high pop time it's because either one you're not getting the ball on your hands fast
enough which you know working on that ability to laterally shift stay low get the ball out will be
something that you can work on there just working on that drill right there just go here shift from
your right if you're right-handed catcher shift from your right leg to your left leg stay low get
the ball out of your hands okay or if you're able to get the ball at your hands quickly you need to
just work on your ability to generate more force stay lower as you're transitioning through so
then when you're creating force you're creating more vertical forces as well as rotational force
because I'll make the argument that you're probably using almost all rotational force
in order to throw the ball down which is making it so you're decreasing your overall velocity
so you get the ball quick where you stand up to to fast which makes it so now you're you don't
generate as much force as you can if you use both vertical and rotational force during your actual
throw alright so hopefully this helps you guys if you have any questions you can always reach
out we have a lot of resources that we could use for you we have a individual break down that we
could do comes with a lot of different exercise a lot of different drills we obviously do this for a
wide variety of different types of sports just really you know everybody here at the perform
side of California has a big fascination for the improvement of movement and and really the
efficiency of movement so being able to you know really connect to that and understand how you can
as an athlete move better move more efficiently get more out of game is going to make it so you
can have a elongated career have more successful performance perspective and that's what we're
trying to do and that's that's our big goal so if you're interested in getting a breakdown let
us know we'd be happy to do that for you again it comes with drills comes exercise comes with
a breakdown just like this to really focus on what it is that you need to improve from
an athletic standpoint we don't only do it for catchers we obviously do for baseball pictures
you know catchers we do it for you know athletes that that are working on sprinting running five
ten five jumping there's a lot of different things you can you can check out our our page here the
link is below to get some more information and again if you have any questions you can just
email us info at your performance lab comm or you can email me more at your performance lab comm all
right as always guys thanks watch this video and we'll see soon you know I hope you really enjoyed
it if you did you could subscribe down below in that way you get updates on any of the new videos
that we get also if you want to check out some of our other breakdowns for speed and throwing
yet exercises also jumping mechanics videos a lot of great stuff within our channel hope you enjoy