“Good writing does not succeed or fail on the strength of its ability to persuade. It succeeds on its ability to engage you, make you think, and give you a glimpse into someone else’s head – even if you decide that’s a place you don’t want to be.”

– Malcolm Gladwell, from What The Dog Saw 

First Principles Thinking: Building Better Hitters.

A three-part series detailing my thoughts on how I separate substance from style within the swing, inspired by Elon Musk’s thinking from first principles.  

Oct
16

First Principles Thinking: What Elon Musk and Mike Leach can teach us when it comes to building better hitters

In the back room of a drab Moscow restaurant, Elon Musk had finally had enough. The year was 2002. Musk was in Russia looking at the price for what he thought was two Depnr rockets. The decommissioned missiles were the start of what he hoped would become a world changing

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Oct
20

First Principles Part Two: Creating Leverage

If overcoming inertia is how a hitter moves sideways, creating leverage is where a hitter works from when both feet come back to the ground. Snapshots in time aren’t great ways to evaluate the totality of a movement. But the geometry of where guys work from at landing gives us

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Oct
27

First Principles Part Three: Evaluating Rotation

How guys rotate is the most complicated, but most important part of the puzzle. Of all the style involved in the swing, rotation is the one thing that unites us all. It doesn’t have to look a certain way, but certain things do need to happen. Great hitters are great

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Connecting what has not been before

What seems unrelated might be more related than you think, if captured through the right lens.

Oct
01

How the 1954 Mad Bomber case illuminated a critical mistake that almost cost this NFL team their first overall pick

Back in 1956, the New York Police Department was desperate. Over the past two years, the city had become victim to 10 different bombing attacks. The events were recognized not as isolated incidents, but a series of interrelated crimes traced back to one elusive man. The man responsible became known

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Sep
12

Travel Baseball & The Triangle Offense: How My First Summer Coaching Resembled Phil Jackson’s Greatest Challenge

The fourth quarter of the 1991 NBA Finals was about to begin. Magic Johnson’s Los Angeles Lakers and Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls were deadlocked at 80 in a decisive game five. Jordan, over the first seven years of his career, had established himself as one of the most dynamic scorers

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May
09

How these two prospects showed us “stats are really for losers” – but in two distinctly different ways

The 1999 MLB amateur draft was approaching. Tampa Bay – coming off their first ever season in franchise history – owned the first overall pick. They had their eyes on two particular prospects. Both were high school prospects hailing from the Southeast part of the country; one a right handed

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