What's up, Coach Dan Blewett in today's video?
Let's talk about pitching lessons.
Should you pay for them?
How often should you do them?
All those good things.
Obviously, I used to own a baseball academy.
I'd done thousands of pitching lessons in my life.
And so let's talk about it.
Let's go through it.
Should you be paying for pitching lessons?
All right, so if you're new here, I'm coach Dan
check out the links in the description below.
That's where you'll find my too soon to be three baseball books.
You'll find my online pitching courses and other videos related to this one.
So in this video, let's talk about pitching lessons.
So again, I gave pitching lessons over and over over the years, you know,
sometimes 14 lessons in a single day half hour lessons
and we would charge we would charge $100 an hour.
And this was a couple of years ago.
And depending on where you are in the country,
that's not even that expensive. It varies widely.
But obviously, you get what you pay for with instructors as well.
So anyway, let's talk about a how much should you be charged?
Which should you be paying for a lesson?
So number one, obviously cost of living is a big thing.
I live in Washington, D.C.
If you live here, you're going to pay somewhere between
probably 90 and 150 an hour for any kind of personal training,
any kind of like boxing, like one on one pitching lessons, hitting lessons,
all that sort of stuff just because cost of living here is so high.
Obviously, depending where you are, it's going to be lesser, but you're in general
going to get what you pay for.
And if you're finding it in the structure, an instructor who charges,
you know, 2030 bucks an hour, they probably can't do that full time
because it's so hard to make a living if you have
all the overhead of a facility, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So understand, you know, we charge $100 an hour, but we had our own facility.
We paid employees we to keep the lights on.
There was a lot that comes out of that 100 dollar per hour that,
you know, only a small percentage is it only a small percentage of it
eventually trickles in to my pocket and my business partners pocket.
Or we could go home and pay our bills, buy our groceries, et cetera, et cetera.
So just understand there's a lot that goes into it.
That's just a little bit of the business side.
But again, don't be afraid, unfortunately,
that good instructors, they are expensive at times.
Number two, if you want to lower your cost, group sessions are great.
We did this at my academy for hitting and pitching and strength training to
where, you know, if you have a group of four to six kids
in a pitching class where they come in two or three days
a week, it's going to be much cheaper per session than for private lesson.
You know, if we were charging 100 hour for a private lesson,
you know, our group rates are probably like 30 an hour.
I can't remember exactly something like that.
So $15 for half hour session or 30 for a whole hour or whatever.
And then you can afford to do that multiple times a week, which is great
for some players.
For most players, I would say, but not necessarily all players.
Now the big question is, do you need pitching lessons?
And I think the answer is yes for almost all players.
And the reason is at team practice, it's just really difficult for a coach
to spend enough time with a player to really help them
make substantial progress with their mechanics
or teaching them a breaking ball or a change up or any of that stuff.
It's just it's really
there's a lot of obviously, as you would watch my channel, it's complicated.
Learning how to pitch like my book is called.
Pitching isn't complicated,
but it's not an easy thing to be really, really good at,
especially to learn a change up to get the feedback that you need.
It takes a lot of one-on-one contact time.
So for a coach to do that
when they're trying to get situational stuff in
and get everybody their ground balls, they're hitting their bullpens.
There's just a lot going on, so it's unrealistic to expect your head coach,
even your pitching coach, to just get all that stuff done.
So you're going to need to go to someone, probably to have them to have your son
be able to keep up with the rest of his peers
as far as improving his pitching and all that stuff.
So let's talk about lesson frequency.
This one's pretty simple.
In the off season, I suggest once per week or once every other week
less than that, and it just becomes a very sporadic monthly checkup.
And it's hard for players to stay on track,
and it's hard for an instructor like myself to also stay up with them.
So in the off season, October to March,
depending on where you live, obviously once a week or every other week,
if you're doing private lessons, if you're doing group stuff,
you know it's going to be twice a week or three days a week in the summer, like
during the season, so high school season or for spring season for youth players.
You know, every other week or once a month
or not at all, if you feel like you're OK, you're going to have a pitching coach
if at the field.
So you're going to have someone to help continue to keep you fine tuned.
And really, it's more like a doctor's checkup during the season against again
every other week or monthly is totally fine.
And if I don't see a kid that summer,
if you feel like he's got it and his pitching coach
is going to keep him kind of fine tune, he knows his routine totally fine.
one of the big things is what I really want to stress is yes,
there is value in pitching lessons, even if they get expensive,
and I understand they can definitely be expensive.
The big thing is your kid has to be a self coach
and the self-exploration is very important.
Even if you worked with me, I think I'm a good pitching coach.
You know, if you talk to my clients, they'd say the same thing, I hope.
But even if you worked with me or some major league pitching coach,
you're only going to see them, what a half hour a week, an hour a week tops.
And then you're going to spend all these other days, like all your other hours
throwing with a friend or with your dad or with a, you know, to a catcher,
whatever that's going to be on you, you're going to have to be self coaching
and making the adjustments, doing what your pitching coach told you to do.
So. I kind of calculated this out years ago, if you throw consistently
throughout the year now and still take some time off.
You'll probably make about 10,000 throws in a calendar year
that does factor in like a two or three month off season.
If you just factor in all the practice throws, all the bullpen,
throws the game throws about 10,000 a year.
The vast, vast majority of those throws are going to be made,
with no one giving you feedback except for your catch partner.
So even if you did lessons with me all the time, it'd be only like
maybe 1000 of those throws or 2000.
Maybe that'd be a lot of lessons.
So still, like 90% of your throws are going to be only supervised by yourself.
So a big problem with
players today is they don't really absorb them the info.
They don't go home and practice
a ton and really start to figure out what are my mechanics?
How do I feel when I pitch? How do I feel when I hit?
This isn't limited to pitching and how to be your own maestro,
your own coach and understand what you need to do.
If you look at pro ball and college ball to a high extent
as well, a lot of these guys, they're really their own coach.
I didn't have a pitching coach in college into my last year,
and I was just kind of figuring it out on my own.
I read a lot of pitching books. I talked to a lot of people.
I picked my coaches brain as much as I could
of my head coach with the outfielder, and my assistant coach was a catcher,
so I had to be my own coach to a high degree.
So just remember, you're going to grab little bits and things from everyone,
but you have to encourage
your kid to not be completely dependent on these weekly lessons
that they've got to take the lesson and they've got to go home and internalize
it and make the information their own and really practice.
And if your kid doesn't practice, don't expect them to be a high level player.
They've got to really, really love the game.
They have to have a really deep passion for it,
and they have to have a passion and a tolerance
for the tedious work that they'll put in any Olympian.
They're doing their Olympic.
You know, you watch these Olympic weightlifters,
they're doing that same squat, that same snatch, that same clean and jerk
hundreds of thousands of times.
How many times is does a does a snowboarder
or a skier go down that same mountain?
Pretty much, right?
All these moves are extremely repetitive.
I've thrown a baseball millions of times in my life.
You've got to be OK with the fact that it's not super exciting on a day
to day basis.
That's a big thing about being a good ballplayer.
So despite the fact that, yes, I do think lessons have their place
and are important as a piece of the pie.
But the big thing is players got to go home and practice on their own.
And as an instructor, ask any instructor out there.
And it's not a
I mean, it requires
no thought, but basically like, Hey, if you said, who's
who are your best students who gets the most progress,
who gets better, faster is always the kids to go home and practice more.
So the the lesson, even if you do a weekly,
it's still just a doctor's checkup.
If you go home and don't do the things the doctor says,
you're not going to get healthier. You're not going to get better.
It's the same thing with all this stuff with lessons.
Final wrap up recommendations.
Off season, once a week or every other week.
Less than that, you're not going to make a lot of progress,
I don't think during the season.
Once a month or every other week, if you really want to.
But if your budget is stretched thin, I'd say go once a month or cancel
in the summer and just lean on your pitching coach on your regular team.
You're going to learn new stuff from every coach that you talk to,
every coach that you have.
Even if you have an amazing coach and then a not very good coach,
you're still going to learn stuff from both.
So just because you have a pitching coach at home that you really love
and you just feel like
everything he says is gospel doesn't mean you can't not go to him in the summer
and just lean on your pitching coach who maybe isn't quite as good
but still cares about your kid and wants to see him get better.
So just again, absorb everything you can,
you know, try things out, tinker.
And again, you as a parent
and as a player, you've got to be students of your craft.
Learn as much as you can.
So parents,
you can help your kids as much as you can playing catch in the backyard.
That's a really big piece of the pie as well.
And players, you've got to learn to be your own coach.
So when you go to these lessons to get your money's worth,
you've got to be really internalizing what they're telling you
and going home and practicing it and making it your own
and beating into the ground with so many different with so many reps,
reps, reps, reps, reps, reps
and put in the time.
And that's how you're eventually going to get where you want to go.
All right.
So hopefully, this video is helpful if you have any more questions about
pitching coaches, about lessons group like all that sort of training stuff.
Leave it in the comments below, and I'll see you here in the next video.