A Pitching Development Method That Actually Changed the Game

Most pitching coaches will tell you the same thing over and over again: find what works for your arm and stick with it. That advice is fine until you watch someone try it for six weeks and get worse. I ran into this exact problem back when I was working with a minor league arm who had decent velocity but no movement on his breaking stuff. We tried everything under the sun until someone mentioned a framework that had been circulating among certain development circles for a while. Nobody could point to a textbook on it. It was mostly word of mouth and a handful of YouTube breakdowns from coaches who claimed results. What people are now calling The Pitcher Making History Green Mccoys Creation Propelling Baseball Forward isn't a single drill or a gadget. It's a systemic approach to pitcher development that blends biomechanical alignment with pitch sequencing theory in a way that feels almost obvious in hindsight but was nowhere to be found in traditional coaching curricula. The green in the name is just marketing language, but the principles behind it are real enough that you can spot their influence in a lot of modern bullpen sessions now.

The Pitcher Making History Green Mccoys Creation Propelling Baseball Forward

At its core, the method focuses on three things that most youth and even some college programs neglect entirely. First is ground force management. Second is scapular control during the arm swing. Third is the relationship between hip-shoulder separation and late break potential. These aren't new ideas individually, but combining them into a repeatable workflow is what made it stand out when it started gaining traction around 2019. Here is how you actually work with it. You start by filming the pitcher from three angles simultaneously: side view, rear view at 45 degrees, and front view. You aren't looking for flashy stuff. You're looking for leaks. Does the lead leg buckle? Does the front shoulder fly open before foot strike? Is there lateral tilt in the pelvis that shouldn't be there? Most coaches miss the pelvic tilt because they're focused on the arm. That's usually where the problem starts anyway. Once you identify the leak, you build a corrective drill that isolates it without changing the rest of the delivery. For the ground force issue, I used a simple resistance band anchored low to the ground with the pitcher doing unilateral mini-squats while holding a medicine ball at chest level. Two sets of eight per leg, three days a week. Not fancy. Just enough to rewire the pattern. For scapular control, I had pitchers do wall slides with a towel squeezed between their shoulder blades while throwing light flat-ground tosses. The towel staying in place was the checkpoint.

Breaking the hip-shoulder separation piece is harder because it requires timing, not just strength. I found that cadence drills worked best. The pitcher goes through the delivery at 60 percent effort while a coach calls out each phase: stride, gather, arm wrap, release. Over weeks, you increase speed and eventually remove the calls. It sounds slow and tedious. It is. But it builds the neural pathway faster than just throwing harder repeatedly, which is what most pitchers default to when they're stuck. I remember one pitcher in particular who came to us after two years of trying to fix his slider by just "throwing harder." His spin rate was sitting around 2100 rpm and his vertical break was negative two inches, which is flat. We identified that his front knee was collapsing inward on delivery, robbing him of torque. We ran the band work for four weeks, added the scap drill, and then layered in the cadence work. By week seven, his spin rate climbed to 2480 and he was generating positive break. He didn't add five miles per hour to his fastball. He just stopped leaking energy that was already there.

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Green McCoy Pitchers (Front) and Unknown Pitcher Maker (Back)
Green McCoy Pitchers (Front) and Unknown Pitcher Maker (Back)

Common Pitfalls and Where the Method Falls Short

This isn't a magic bullet. It doesn't work for everyone. If a pitcher has a structural issue like a labral tear or significant rotational asymmetry from a past injury, no amount of ground force work is going to fix it. You need medical intervention first. I've seen multiple cases where coaches tried to patch through pain with these drills and made things worse. Get an orthopedic evaluation if there's any suspicion of underlying damage before you start drilling anything. Another limitation is time. This method typically takes eight to twelve weeks to show measurable results in game situations. Most teams don't have that kind of runway during a season. It works best in the off-season or spring training. If you're trying to implement it mid-year with a pitching staff that's already playing games, you'll frustrate your pitchers and probably lose the clubhouse. The tracking technology requirement is also a barrier. You need access to Kinexon, Rapsodo, or at minimum a high-frame-rate camera with angle consistency. Without that data, you're guessing at where the leaks are. I've seen too many programs try this with just a phone video and then blame the method when nothing changed. The method works. Your execution of the assessment is what varies.

What Makes It Different From Standard Development

Traditional coaching tends to fix symptoms. A pitcher throws a ball into the gap, you tell him to "keep his elbow up." The ball still gets hit. The Green Mccoys approach asks why the elbow position is wrong in the first place. It traces the problem upstream to the kinetic chain. That's why it feels counter-intuitive at first. You're spending weeks on things that don't look like pitching at all. Band work. Wall slides. Cadence calls. It's boring. That's the point. The pitch sequencing component is also something standard development rarely addresses systematically. Most coaches teach pitch selection reactively. This method builds a matrix based on the pitcher's actual arm slot, release point, and movement profile. You're not picking pitches based on what the book says works. You're picking pitches based on what your data shows works for your specific mechanics. It takes more preparation upfront but pays off quickly once you're in a game. I'll be honest about one more thing. There are a lot of copycat programs now using similar language without the underlying framework. If someone is selling you a course called something close to this for $200 and it's just a PDF and a few videos, walk away. The real work is in the assessment and the individualized drill selection. That part can't be packaged and sold easily. Any program that claims it can is probably just rebranding existing advice.

If you want to try this, start with the assessment phase. Film three full deliveries from all three angles. Look for the pelvic tilt and the lead leg collapse. Those two tell you more than you'd expect. Then pick one corrective drill and run it for four weeks before adding another. Don't overhaul everything at once. Your pitcher's arm will thank you later.

Green Mccoy Pitcher - Etsy
Green Mccoy Pitcher - Etsy