Excellent PowerPoint presentation that provides testing procedures for baseball/softball players. Also includes standardized norms--in other words, where you rank for your age and position--for the following items:

body composition, flexibilty, strength, vertical jump, speed, throwing velocity, and bat speed.

http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~fspaniol/NSCA/2007%20NSCA%20S...al%20-%20Spaniol.pdf

really good stuff..

Equipment makes it a pain to actually find exact readings to compare yourself, but useful nontheless.

I saved a copy and I am going to give this to my coach. I was very confused about some of the data for the speed work, and I'm sure others who read it can attest to that as well. But I think it is important that someone conduct a legitimate scientific study like this to get things rolling and I think this did a very good job. Hopefully someone will follow up on it. Lastly, I did not like the vision testing, but that is based on my opinion about vision training.

I sked the author of the presentation how the data was gathered and how reliable it was. Here was his response:

All the youth, high school, and college data was collected over the past ten years by me and/or my research assistants. The professional data was collected by me or was provided to me by professional baseball organizations. Some of the data has been published in the literature and we are continuing to submit data for future publication. The numbers to which you refer are valid and reliable. As you know, most parents (and some players) have a tendency to overestimate the skills of their kids:-) Go figure!

UpstateNY, what part of the speed data were you confused about? Maybe I can help......

Some of the average 60 yard dash numbers were equal to the best 60 yard dash numbers at the same level. The only way this is attainable is if everyone ran the same time, and judging by the size of the sample I do not think that happened.

Upstate, I tried to find what you were talking about, but I'm not quite clear--can you tell me what level/position you are speaking of? If there is a discrepancy, I can ask the author to clarify for us. One thing that I noticed is that sometimes "Pro" is used to describe major and minor leaguers in some sections, and then in other sections the athletes are broken down in A, AA, AAA, and MLB. Maybe that's the issue?

Were the data intrepreted correctly by me? Near the end, it stated that D1 velocity at 87 MPH is in the top 1 percentile? Is this correct? Is this for pitchers?

Bum,
If you go through the D1 data the pitchers threw slower than the position players. I don't think they got all that representative of a group of D1 pitchers, even considering they were throwing on flat ground from a stretch. I would however believe that 87 mph would be in the top 5 percentile for all D1 pitchers despite claims from the parents of our weak hitting varsity that every pitcher in our HS league threw "90+". 2 or 3 actually did including an early round pick who was low 90s with control but not much movement and a college bound kid who didn't throw that many strikes. Typical for our league is 2 or 3 around 90 with most teams having one mid to high 80s type. This coming season our team will have one high 80s type who has hit 90, one high 80s type, one mid 80s type and a rising sophmore and rising junior (both going on 16 yo) who each have a shot at being mid 80s types this coming season. The potential mid 80s rising junior, who has the best control and movement, may be kept on JV.

CADad.. on a Jugs or a Stalker? Bum, Jr. cruises 84-85 Stalker..topped out at 86 Stalker at the Stanford camp.. I believe that to be 87 Jugs (cruising). Are you saying he is in the top 5th percentile for D1? He is a LHP. My guess would be that he's in the 25th-30th percentile. As he's still 17 I'd be happy with that!

The top 1% of pitchers at the DI level throw over 90 mph. That is one out of 100 pitchers. There are approximately 3,000 DI pitchers who throw in a game during a season. If 3,000 were the correct figure, 1 % would mean only 30 pitchers in all of DI throw 90 mph. There are specific colleges that will have a half dozen or more who throw 90. I could name 30 pitchers who throw 90 or better in several conferences, let alone all of DI. In fact, I would guess, that at the very least, 10% of all DI pitchers throw 90 mph or better. That is based on one of every ten pitchers, or around an average of ONE at each DI college.

87 mph would be middle of the pack at the DI level.

If 87 were top 1% in DI, what would the bottom 10% be?

Bum, you’re probably pretty close regarding your “lefty” son. I would say more towards the 50%-60% range, but that’s still very good at his age.

Thanks, PG.. he went from 79 at one of your events last year to 86 this year (a gain of 7) and he recently verbally committed to Washington State. He is hoping to have another big offseason and get that to 90 next year. He works hard, that's for sure.

Throwing from a stretch, flat ground, on a Stalker I'd say 87 would be in the top 5%. Most D1 pitchers throw well under 90 mph. I'm sure most D1s have one or two throwing 90 who didn't get drafted but then I'd guess that there's a bit of a drop. Having said that it looks more to me like they were using a JUGS in one photo.

Saw a AA game a few weeks ago and saw one warmup pitch over 90. Other than that 89 was the max and 86 or less was the norm. Most of the 89s were on pitches up and out of the strike zone, i.e. to set up an off speed pitch.

The numbers I quoted for the pitcher from our league were off the mlb site so most likely a stalker, the numbers for our team were from a JUGS gun. I believe he was a 3rd round pick who was 5-3 in our HS league.

Just the way I look at it but your son throws about 85 and is about average velocity for a D1 pitcher right now. If he tops out at 90 by the time he's in college he'll probably end up pitching at about 86 or so as he'll need more command in college than he does in HS. I agree about 86 to 87 on most JUGS. I generally look at cruising as being about 3 or 4 mph below max velocity, however if he was just pitching and not trying to throw for the gun at all then the 86 on the stalker probably wasn't what I'd call max.

I've said it differently but I think I'm just agreeing with PG.

CADad, at the Stanford camp he threw 5.7 innings scoreless innnings, 10k's and only 1 BB. They had the radar hooked up for all to see and it was a Stalker. He hit 86 Stalker about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time--but never exceeded it--and maintained that speed consistently. The other pitches were 85 and 84. So if we take that to cruise 85 stalker he's cruising 87 on a Jugs. One college coach emailed me and said although a few LHP threw harder at the camp he felt my son had plus command of three pitches and was overall the best LHP he saw at the event. I have no idea what percentile he is in but good enough that a Seattle Mariner scout invited him to the Mariner Cup at Safeco Field last month.. from my understanding an event that included some of the best of the west. He also did great there, three scoreless innings with 5 k's and 1 BB. (My only regret is that he can't go back and change that disappointing PG score..they gave him a 6.5!)

By the way.. what do you or PG think the average cruising speed of a LHP to be in MLB (on a Stalker)?

88 mph

Thanks.

Bum,
That's consistent with what I was guessing, and it sounds more like he was cruising at 84-86 on the stalker rather than working closer to his max velocity.

I agree with PG on the average cruising speed for a MLB pitcher on a Stalker. Lefties might be a tad less, but I'm not going to disagree with someone who's seen a lot more of them than I have.

My guess is that if your son attends another event and works 84 to 86 on a stalker and pitches effectively he'd get from 8 to 8.5 or even higher as a PG rating. Unless he's looking at the draft I don't know why it would matter at this point though.

No, like you said it doesn't matter. Just a point of pride is all. It is not PG's analysis that was wrong either.. we drove 1000+miles the day before to get to the event and he was definitely pooped! Actually, I have been a big proponent of PG regardless and have told many, many local kids about it some who have gone and gotten better scores even though they throw substantialy slower. I hope to get my younger boy to one their events, too when its time.