Chris Colabello

Over the course of my career, it became abundantly clear to me that I was really passionate about helping the next generation of athletes. Watch this video. 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻 It will explain everything…

I stopped writing when I stopped working with hitters full-time. Here's why I'm back and what we're building with @PeloteroApp. bobbytewksbary.substack.com/p/why-im-back-…

The NBA is certainly not “being taken over” by Euros. The United States is still very much the dominant global force in hoops as is proven by another gold medal at the Paris Olympics (among other things, including but not limited to the fact that all those top foreign players are 1-of-1 in their respective countries). To omit players like KD, LeBron, Steph, Booker, Tatum, etc. when making blanket statements about who the best players are is also egregious as it relates to the absurd notion that the US model is less viable. Let me again be clear in saying that the “pay to play” model is also flawed (like every other system in the world), but being good still is (and always will be) the formula for getting where you want to go. Players can train their skills any time they want to… in any sport. So to say, “playing games is the problem” is just lazy. The lack of training and volume of gameplay aren’t the problem. The lack of awareness of what it means to actually “be good” and the lack of aligning the appropriate competition are much more of an issue than gameplay itself. As it relates to the initial topic, which is the European model “being better,” the lack of training, training capability or the amount players spend to play, is much less the catalyst for why the US men’s soccer team is not a top 10 team globally. The kids playing on that team grew up in towns and cities that idolized LeBron James, Derek Jeter and Calvin Johnson - not Cristiano Ronaldo. The global inter connectivity that the internet and social media have created is allowing younger kids to have more exposure and awareness of soccer. It’s much easier to watch a Premier League match, or a Champions League game now, than ever. Soccer is beginning to infiltrate American culture much more, but it still has a long way to go before the civil discourse leans more toward scoring goals than throwing touchdown passes…

It’s not just soccer either. There is a reason that the NBA is being taken over by Euros. In Europe the focus is more on training and skills. In the US, the focus is on tournaments every weekend, league games during the week. Individual skill work doesn’t make money for the youth sports programs. Games do. That is why the best players in the NBA now are all European (and one Canadian).

In Germany, a talented 14-year-old earns his club money. In America, his parents pay the club $15,000 a year. That single inversion explains why "we will not" is the most accurate line ever written about US soccer. FIFA built a global system for this. Training compensation and solidarity payments send a cut of every transfer fee back to the clubs that developed the player, from age 12 onward. Develop one future pro and your academy gets paid for a decade. Barcelona's La Masia, Ajax, every Bundesliga academy runs on this logic. The kid is the asset. US Soccer refuses to enforce those rules. When Seattle's Crossfire Premier claimed its $60,000 share of DeAndre Yedlin's transfer to Tottenham, it got nothing. Claims on the Dempsey and Bradley transfers died partly because the federation couldn't even produce the youth training records. So American clubs earn zero dollars when a kid turns pro. They earn when a kid enrolls. Which makes the parent the customer, and the product is whatever keeps the parent writing checks: travel tournaments, hotel weekends, $500 showcase events, private training at $100 an hour. Elite pathways run $8,000 to $20,000 a year. A comparable academy spot in Italy costs about 120 euros. Follow the incentive one level deeper and it gets darker. A club dependent on fees can't cut its weakest paying players, so rosters optimize for retention over development. The scouting pool shrinks to families who can afford the cliff, which appears around age 11, exactly when development matters most. The country runs a talent filter sorted by household income instead of ability. Every four years someone proposes fixing this. The proposal always requires the people profiting from the $15,000 model to vote themselves out of business. They will not.

🔮 7/15 We’ve been working on something big. #playerintelligence

If your logic was correct, then why does the US produce the best basketball players in the world under the very same model you’re saying “doesn’t work for soccer?” I’m not one who tends to agree implicitly with the “pay to play model,” but I think there is a much deeper issue which you are completely overlooking and that has much to do with the framing of where the sport sits within our own national conversation. Italy has run the same exact model for every other sport (baseball was the one I participated in as a kid) and has failed to create relevance globally, outside of Italian American players wanting to participate. I think this has far less to do with the model, than what you are giving credit for…

If winning is not driven by development then we are wasting time and resources. And that’s where we are right now. The entire system is broken. Something has to give. And it will. A pretty major shakeup is around the corner for baseball/softball 👀 Credit to @YouthInc

@JermaineCurtis It’s almost as if I built an app to do all of this…

One of the biggest mistakes I made as a hitter... I thought hitting was all about my swing. - If I struggled, I'd fix my swing. - If I hit a ground ball, I'd fix my swing. - If I popped the ball up, I'd fix my swing. Then I got to professional baseball. After being around Major League hitters, I realized something. The best hitters weren't obsessed with their swing. They were obsessed with their operating system. - They knew what pitch they were hunting. - They knew what pitches they could drive. - They knew what type of contact they wanted. - They had a plan before they ever stepped into the box. That completely changed how I practiced. I stopped studying my swing. I started studying myself as a hitter. I did this by... Going to Walmart, bought a notebook, and started tracking everything. - Every pitch I saw. - Every swing I took. - Every ball I hit. - What I was thinking. - What I was feeling. At the end of each week, I'd go back through my notes and look for patterns. Then I'd build a plan to improve my operating system. I wasn't trying to build a better swing anymore. I was trying to build a better hitter. Because here's one thing I learned from being around Major League hitters: The swing wasn't the starting point. It was the result of everything that came before it. Thank you for reading, Jermaine Curtis P.S. - If you enjoyed this and thought it was helpful, please share it. (This tells me you want more content like this.)

Honest question… what is a hitting lesson?

You know what matters way more for development than where you are ranked?? …that you are playing against appropriate competition. Way too many youth games are completely mismatched right now and it’s not helping anybody.

I’m not sure where or when this got lost in translation, but every hitter in the history of - EVER - will tell you that they would have wanted to hit every ball they ever hit in the air to the pull side… IT’S JUST NOT THAT EASY. AND THERE IS ABSOLUTELY ZERO TRAINING ON EARTH PROVEN TO HELP DO SO. The amount of exposure that a player creates when they focus solely on pulling the ball is astronomical. Creating training environments where there’s massive focus on air pull leads to massive holes. People forget that pitchers are actively pitching to get players to not do that. There are very very few hitters in the history of the game who could be considered “elite” that pulled the ball at extremely high clips. And that’s not because they wouldn’t have wanted to - it’s because the game doesn’t afford players the luxury to approach hitting that way. And no - Donaldson did not sell out to pulling the ball. Donaldson talked all the time about hitting the ball in the air but never explicitly talked about pull. As a matter of fact, I’d be willing to bet that his homer spray chart in 2015 was a pretty even split line to line, and most would say that was the best year of his career

@CC20rake Obviously you would know more than me, but in my view, the old school/high school way of hitting (going with the pitch, take what the pitcher gives you, hard ground balls) isn’t conducive to success in the modern game. It’s just too hard to string hits together

Crying "Driveline!" about every struggling hitter is just laziness. If you want to argue that the Red Sox are too stuck on a one-size-fit-all approach to hitting instruction, that's a fair argument But Drivelinephilosophies (pulling the ball in the air, exit velo, bat speed)

@DanBFox1287 That is in regards to you saying “that’s how you develop good hitter in today’s game…”

@DanBFox1287 According to who?

Has anyone considered that he had the shortest off season of his life? That it was a completely different one that he has ever had? Have they considered that he may be hurt? Sore? Fatigued? Have they thought about the fact his motivations may have changed now that he’s gotten paid and that he’s played in the last game of the year? Nope. None of those things could possibly impact the player… Just one of two choices which won’t address the actual problem… which ultimately is just a better understanding of self… The only person that can do that is the individual themselves… Oh and thanks for pointing out that people should air pull more… nobody has ever tried that in the history of the game.

Travel Ball… podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pel…

New podcast. Tomorrow. 11 AM ET. @CC20rake and @AntGranato Let’s put players on a better path.

Gaethje 🇺🇸

@CoachGilly6 what else was he going to do... just let the ball go out and not pretend he got shot? (New replay review overturned the call)

This is it, this is why I can’t watch.

Many former elite pro players now entering travel sports and having the same, "WTF is going on?" moment. It is a mess. Lots of complaining, nobody is happy, coaches are leaving sport left and right. Change requires an alternative path.

And when you aren't playing appropriate competition, the game STINKS and no development is happening. Winning 43-0? How are you being challenged. Losing 43-0... why show up? Things are WILD out there.

i would argue it has very little to do with it. Yandy Diaz is hitting there are 3 players in Major League Baseball hitting over .330 as of this tweet. One of them happens to be Yandy Diaz who also has 12 homers. Then there's Yordan Alvarez at .316 with 22 homers. Are those guys just Unicorns? Historically there have been players who have hit .350, .360, .370+... There weren't a lot of them, but they existed, but for the most part, the best batting averages in the league over the last 40 or so years have sat in that .330-.340 range. How is it possible that Alvarez, Diaz and the likes are hitting for average so well and others can't? Would these guys hit .430 in 1985? The answer is no. For every MPH and inch of vertical and horizontal break that pitchers have gained, they have lost command over guys that were pitching 20 years ago. And let's not forget for one second that the strike zones has shrunk dramatically from the days of Livan Hernandez and Greg Maddux getting 4 balls of the plate. It's impossible to make generational comparisons, but I feel very confident in making this one. I also use examples like David Ortiz (who played for 20 years). @davidortiz had the 3rd best batting average of his career in his last year of his career which (based on this premise of "better pitching/stuff") would be truly impossible. The one thing I will tell you however (especially about Diaz/Alvarez/Ortiz) is that if you go look at their batted ball profiles, they have a massive willingness to hit the ball to the opposite field and the big part of the park. That (humbly speaking) is what allows them to hit for average the way they do and a lack of willingness from most young hitters to do that - is what doesn't.

@CC20rake @JeffStanek1 In your opinions, how much does the current level of pitching in the league as a whole have on the decreased batting averages?

Can someone explain to me how we can be THIS in depth with hitting mechanics, and yet still seemingly have multiple hitters in every MLB lineup hitting under .200? I'll start. Paralysis by analysis / information overload.