Interesting article on the man behind the curtain so to speak. Some history I hadn’t read before.
# Baseball’s brightest minds revere a reclusive engineer. No one else knows who he is
Full article at Link
Nyman was among the first to debunk notions that velocity was a genetic gift and to recognize it could be trained. He was years ahead in applying physics and technology to the way coaches instruct players. Yet emails to Nyman last summer went unreturned. One phone number listed online was disconnected…
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When you see a pitcher training with a weighted ball, “you can thank Paul Nyman,” said Ron Wolforth, the founder of Texas Baseball Ranch. When today’s coaches use programs like KinaTrax to analyze mechanics, or when someone uses a term like “scapular loading” and describes pitching as a whiplike action, they are building on ideas Nyman first popularized long ago.
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There were parallels to be found in the work of Nikolai Bernstein, who studied movement coordination in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s. One of his chief ideas was the Degrees of Freedom Problem. Bernstein, a Russian neurophysiologist, had studied the swings of blacksmiths and concluded the experts had more variation than others in their movements, not less. He then postulated the human body has a multitude of ways to accomplish a particular action.
At the time, no one was applying this to baseball. The more Nyman read, the more video he watched, the more research he conducted and the more daunting his revelations became. He was calling for a radical redefinition of training methods and pitching mechanics.
Nyman’s highly technical research relied on physics, 3-D skeletal models and movement patterns that had previously only been studied in javelin throwers. He described his expertise not as hitting and pitching but rather “swinging” and “throwing.” In a day where the hardest-throwing pitchers were thought to have simply been gifted with otherworldly talent, Nyman posited that, much like those blacksmiths, these pitchers were instead the best at organizing their bodies to help achieve a desired outcome. Their more fluid movement patterns could be studied. Arms could be strengthened. The results could be replicated.
But Nyman was not a major-league coach. He had no playing experience. So why would anyone listen to … him?
