Pro players who subscribe to BaseballVMI get the benefit of heads-up knowledge of not only the venue conditions for today's game, but also a comparison to the amount of movement you have recently been playing. You get a "personal visual memory index" (PVMI) with information about the pitcher, his tendency and effectiveness against you, given the air resistance he will have available to him. The PVMI will be the same as the team VMI until you miss a game for rest or injury, then your PVMI will deviate from the rest of the team.
There is no experience like game experience! Hitting from a cage can and most likely will change your effectiveness, but we provide a consistent reflection of your game exposure, where your focus is at its best. For this reason, our PVMI is something you can count on to give you a true reflection of today's game.
Coming from spring training, you will begin play in the colder northern weather conditions as well as within your home stadium weather or dome conditions. These conditions change daily and they absolutely change how much movement the pitcher has available. Although you can put the barrel on an off-speed pitch such as a curve, the fastball is the tough one to deal with in variable conditions. When you log in to your PVMI, you will see a venue tip along with a graph of how effective you've been recently. You will also see your current AVG, SLG, OBS, OPS.
Preparing to go into a unique stadium venue such as San Francisco or Colorado? The PVMI will help tremendously to be mentally prepared.
Throughout the history of baseball, coaches have often stressed the importance of a player not using excuses for poor performance. Phrases such as "You can't do anything about it, so get out there and hit the ball" have been frequent in the past. Such strategies by coaches are necessary when leading a team on a daily basis, because it is true, one can do little or nothing on game day about the air resistance. However, in our modern day, many things can be done in preparation for additional ball movement in games to come.
Advanced knowledge regarding when a particular pitch will be most effective against a particular team is invaluable. Since the Visual Memory is tracked daily and displayed a day in advance of the game, the indices can be utilized to provide insight into the opponents' hitting eye and his probable weakness.
Air density can easily be calculated and shared across the world. An astute player can easily check on air density factors and therefore ball movement afforded in recent games. Knowing ones opponent and what may be foreign to him, or a particular weakness in the opponent, has always been a creative strategy in sports. This knowledge can lead to good decision making in terms of whether to throw a four-seam fastball, two-seam fastball, curve, slider, sinker, etc. Knowledge of speed combined with air resistance can give a pitcher, catcher or hitter insight into when and if a pitcher should change speeds by the slightest amount. There are several air density gauges which can now be purchased on the market. Contact Air Resistance Technologies, Inc. at (970) 576-5240
Several pro teams in the world have puposely changed the air density for game time by building domes which can then control the weather and temperature. However, the domes control only the temperature ingredient in air density which can be as significant as 40% of the total air density. The larger factor in air density between sea level and 7,000 feet or so in elevation is the altitude air pressure (barometric pressure) which cannot be changed except within a pressurizable container. See www.airchamberfacilities.com .
An astute team owner could plan ahead to expose his team to better ball movement daily, by providing a pressurize-able batting cage for both pitchers and hitters. A patent was submitted on such a facility by the owners of Air Chamber Facilities, Inc. in 2002. Contact ACFI at contact@airchamberfacilities.com (970) 576-5240
Interestingly, many times a championship team under construction will find all the talent ingredients, but it is not until the following year they will actually win it all. Why does a team get close one year; then bring it home the following year?
Peyton Manning has been to many post season tournaments where he came up slightly short. John Elway did the same. There are many examples of this scenario. In 2014, the Kansas City Royals were defeated in the World Series by the San Francisco Giants, only to follow up and win the 2015 World Series. Was the 2014 failure only a missing ingredient in talent? Was it simply the competition?
Why does a team so often get close to a championship, but fail to bring it home? Of course, there are also times when; after coming close, a team cannot follow up the next season with anything close to a championship and falls completely apart. What is the psychology of a team championship? And, why do teams such as the 2013 Denver Broncos, the 2007 Colorado Rockies, or the 2015 Carolina Panthers go on an amazing run, but come up short in the championship game?
After 50 NFL Superbowl Champions have been crowned, what are we able to learn from them? We have also crowned many MLB World Series Champions and a host of NBA Champions and have studied the other major sports, as well. What do they have in common, besides awesome talent?
For my money, I'm going to go with the focus factor. Focus on the details of the mechanics and focus during a competition. A heartbreaking loss can get the attention of the entire talented team, who then tend to become extremely focused throughout the ensuing season. The focus of Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, John Elway, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning among many others, has been magnificently displayed on the world stage. Focus is the most significant of all traits among the talented individual would be champions. Peyton Manning is famous for going through the tiniest details over and over with his receivers and runners to achieve perfection. Most students of National Collegiate and Professional Team sports are well aware of the attention to detail factor. Most would agree that it is essential. So, if it is well-known, why do certain teams and the ownership, management and coaching wallow in the quagmire of many losing seasons, even while the formation of league parity for recent decades has been unquestionably successful in terms of modern talent?
Why can't teams simply focus on performance and detail and you know, get it right? Gathering sufficient talent through recruiting, the draft, trades, contracts, etc. is a chief time-eating machine for management, so there is hardly any time left for attention to detail. Much of the time spent by the coaching staff is also spent gathering, training, teaching, game planning and inserting the talent into the game, so detail, although known to be crucial, must be left to the individual. Therefore, the individual player/team leader who leads a team toward detail is considered by all to be a crucial team member. However, in baseball, it cannot be left to the individual talent and player leadership, because baseball is such an individual sport within a team environment. When a hitter is at the plate, he is on an island. He must have detailed focus all alone. Every individual hitter in baseball must have that special focus and attention to detail, in order to hit the ball within one millimeter of center to win consistently and become world champions, and because the pitcher has the well-known advantage. Missing opportunities for hits kills production and causes losses.
There is a detail which, at first thought is minor. However, in baseball every play begins with a pitch to the plate with an opportunity for the hitter. There is additional movement that is only caused by the extra push provided by the air during the final 3 to 5 feet of every one of about 150 pitches to a team of hitters in a game. Hence, the "Neeley Scale" air density gauge which allows accuracy to a fraction of an inch. The push by the air is much greater than recognized by professional players and management at first blush. Since a pitcher's fastball can vary by as much as 4 inches from coast-to-coast in MLB, then this detail is not as small as some may try to make it out to be. The additional detail is that, if a hitter is not familiar with when, how much, and why the extra push will exist for the pitcher he is facing, he will struggle until he becomes familiar. Therefore not only has the "Neeley Scale" gauged the difference in the weight of the air, but the Visual Memory Index has gauged when, how much, and why the individual player will be unfamiliar with the amount of movement on the final 3 to 5 feet of the pitch. While gauging the amount of additional movement and the familiarity with the when and why is seemingly a tiny detail, it is necessary for hitters to adjust quickly, especially since the entire team is adjusting at the same time, normally while they are playing away from home. This causes additional losses which are unaccounted for in terms of talent alone and ultimately causes 20 teams to miss out on the post season competition and 28 out of 30 teams to miss the World Series, along with the extra money it brings to the participating teams.
Our sister website at www.airchamberfacilities.com describes a designed and engineered facility which can duplicate the exact amount of movement for hitters and pitchers to familiarize themselves with typical adjustments in additional detail. This facility is essentially a batting cage with fully controlled air resistance capability. Some would say that pop-ups, ground ball outs, fly ball outs and pitcher control issues are just part of the game. While that kind of thinking is essentially true, if left without any additional thought, the management is only accepting traditional failure and not realizing that percentages of this type can be changed by focus on detail. The real truth is that the human mind is amazing and can adjust quite well to anything we can produce and focus on. If a player is given both a gauge of movement and exposure to the same movement he'll soon see in a game, he will improve upon his traditional percentages over the course of a season.
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