Each month at The Baseball Collegian, we will highlight insights from Brooks Hall that can be found on his Soul Throwers Instagram page.

Actually Learn How to Play
Understand something: Not everybody is going to have the most elite stuff, or ever develop the most elite stuff.

But if you can understand what pitch to throw, and why you’re throwing it and how to read swings, and how to read the count, and how to read the situation, and get better at actually playing the game of baseball, you can give yourself a better opportunity to actually play.

But that’s something that’s not really taught that much.

It’s all taught to do this drill, and do that drill, and then if you throw harder, get a better slider, have more sweep and learn a kick-change, you’ll just be able to out-stuff everybody.

The majority of people are not going to ever out-stuff anybody. You’re going to actually have to change speeds, and learn what pitch to throw, and why to throw it, and become better in that way.

It’s way easier to do that if you know what you’re trying to do.

We Have to Learn to Play
In the past couple weeks, we’ve had a lot of kids P.R. But guess what, it doesn’t even matter.

It’s all about if you can stand on the mound and be yourself and get people out. And can you actually play the game like you do in the backyard.

If you had a nephew who was six, and you were playing wiffleball with him, you’d throw knuckleballs and sliders and everything and just compete. You’d try to throw back-door breaking balls.

But when you go in the game and can’t be yourself, it doesn’t matter what your training P.R.’s are. It’s so irrelevant.

All that really matters is can we go in that game, be our self, and understand we’re just playing a baseball game.

We have to compete. All you’re trying to do is win. That’s it.

Brooks Hall was drafted in 2009 in the fourth round out of high school, and has spent 13 years pitching professionally with the Brewers, Diamondbacks, Mets, as well as in the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Australia and Taiwan and currently in the Mexican League.

He has joined with Seth Blair, a nine-year pro pitcher and first-rounder from Arizona State, to teach pitching remotely through their training program, Soul Throwers.

“We take our own approach when it comes to finding the path for you. We start with a full body assessment and then determine your body’s capacity. We find ways to go back to the basics and find a way to turn the brain off and just play. We have more of a holistic approach compared to the industry. Our favorite thing is to throw gas and win on the mound and mold players to do the same thing.

“We’ve helped hundreds of players gain velocity, get rid of anxiety, create confidence they never thought they would have, look at baseball in a different lens, and much much more. We are trying to help people gain perspective on what they are trying to accomplish. We are just helping shape real humans that want to keep playing baseball.”
– SoulThrowers.com