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Pitchers and catchers are to report to their major league camps in a few weeks, but most of us amateur ballplayers don’t have nearly the time, resources or work ethic to train like professionals do. Going to the ABI with Kyle the other week really drove that point home. The ABI training was in a very professional manner, with a very professional price… both in time and money. Understanding this is easy; it takes absolutes of time, effort and resolve to change yourself into a MLB prospect. The whole thing made me want to be 21 and fresh off the bus to Seattle… but I’m neither. So my focus during the visit was to soak up as many drills and as much culture as I could during those few hours. It has definitely affected the way Kyle and I work out, and now that I’ve received my official release from the Red Sox (by my request) I have tryouts to train for.

I really like some of the pitching philosophies we heard about at ABI, though I think it’s disappointing that the ‘philosopher’ himself, Dr. Mike Marshall, carries such a negative stigma. But hey, I’ve been a black sheep myself my whole life and never doubted the validity of my thought and ideas, so we have some common ground. Aside from being completely single minded, compulsive and utterly confident, I think ‘Doc’ has some good things to add to the game. What Dr. Marshall has failed to embrace is that baseball is about results and relationships. This former Cy Young winner seems to be solely focused on the former with little regard to the latter. Some folks are scientists, others are diplomats. Very rarely are they both.

So unless an earth shattering blog-for-training agreement is reached between myself and ABI, I won’t be training there. I will however be using some of the tech I learned there in my preparation for this season. Don’t get me wrong I would love to train there, but the specific time of the workouts is impossible for me to accommodate without giving up my career. The cost was also too high monetarily for myself, but if the goal was a pro baseball contract it could seem reasonable. So I’ve had to come up with an adaptive solution, an extension of the realizations that I’ve been coming to on how to prepare for my season.

From throwing a curveball to learning how to run a successful business I’ve always been the kind of person who needs to be able visually see something in order to retain it. Therefore my low-tech approach to training is based on of some calendars printed off of my Imac. I’ve developed a little system of notation that becomes bigger as I progress through the months before tryouts and become more active. An ‘X’ through the date marks a day on which I stretched out really well, it’s the baseline for all workouts. An ‘O’ around it means nothing was done at all that day. Workout sets are usually denoted with two letters and a number, indicating the exercise and the intensity. For example, ‘BP1′ means ‘bullpen 1′ or 25-30 pitches to location after a thorough warm-up. December 2007 was a very light month for me workout wise, I was going to physical therapy for shoulder tendinitis and working a freakishly busy retail job 50 hours a week (with split weekends). I stretched only 9 of 31 days, and only averaged 1.5 workouts per week. Pretty tame.

Tame, yes… but a baseline nonetheless. This month has been much better, I’ll post it after we’re into February. Writing this all down has definitely provided feedback on how hard I actually work, and it has given me a incremental way to better myself.