Q&A with Scott Emerson from Oakland Athletics

Very happy to be able to present this post with a format that I am finding quite easy to read and relevant. A big thank you to Scott Emerson for being the first to do it! How it works? Very simple: We asked each other 5 questions and here are our answers! Enjoy!

David's questions to Scott:

1) What is your best memory as a pitching coach... And what is your worst?

Best memory has always been watching guys make their major league debut. The worst memories are when you have to release a player.

2) If you compare professional baseball between your first year as pitching coach with the A's and the last, what has changed the most for you about the players?

Every year players get bigger and stronger.

3) With your experience and expertise, would you say that to be successful as a MLB pitcher you need: natural talent or good technique acquired over the years?

I think all players need to know who they are and stay within their capabilities , continue to work on their strength's. I have seen pitchers with very good technique struggle to get outs and I have seen pitchers with poor technique dominate baseball games.

4) What is the place you leave to the "natural skills of the body" in the technical adjustment of your pitchers?

Well I think the goal for technical adjustments is to get players to gain "physical awareness or repeatability for practical performance."

5) We know that data is omnipresent in MLB. What is for you the main advantage of data but also its main disadvantage?

We have so much data , the first thing we have to do is define what data we like . We all value data differently . A disadvantage to having so much data is , everyone wants to improve and sometimes we're trying to do things we are not capable of doing . We're often searching to strengthen a weakness because the data says so . You have to make sure when you working on strengthening a weakness you don't lose your strengths

Scott's questions to David:

Please define Motor Preferences ?

Motor preferences are the gestures you make or the postures you take, in an innate and natural way, without requiring you to think about it and without the body needing to expend too much energy. These preferences are ingrained in us from birth.

Motor preferences are individual and unique to each person. They have been scientifically studied for several decades..

There is so much information in the baseball world today my question for you is with all the studies about the Pitching delivery why do we have so many different opinions?

Perhaps because the studies sometimes misstate the framework of what they want to prove and want to turn specific indicators into generalities?

I recently read a study comparing the X-factor of college and MLB pitchers. The conclusion was: MLB pitchers throw harder because they have a larger X-factor than college pitchers. In absolute terms... Why not! But what about the selective process of recruitment? Were the players recruited on the same biomechanical and physical criteria? Is their physical preparation identical? Is their training volume the same? What is the impact of muscular maturity? You see the study asks more questions than it answers. Moreover, studies are often oriented to try to prove something, so their objectivity can be questioned. In the end, the results are varied because human beings are all different

Studies are good... But they should above all lead people to reflect and to make their own analysis rather than trying to draw assertions and generalities from them...

How will getting an assessment from a Motor Preference Expert help me ?

Simply to make sure that your physical and mental preparation and your technical moves are in line with your natural motor skills and personality!

The mistake we often make in sports is to think that to be stronger, we have to compensate for what the coach or ourselves think is a weakness or a functional asymmetry. But in fact (as long as it does not become a pathology) the asymmetry is natural. And if it exists it is for a good reason. So instead of trying to correct this famous weakness, it is better to try to find the antagonistic skill! And build on it.

As far as personality is concerned, again, we are all different. We focus, motivate ourselves... In a different way. We learn in a different way...

Extraordinarily, we can identify all this through motor preferences.

So to know them is to know ourselves better and to be able to act according to them.

So I need to increase shoulder and hip separation to gain velocity ?

So, I'm not going to make only friends...But not necessarily! The mistake made in this approach is to bring the functional system of the human body closer to that of Newton's laws! In other words: the body is a catapult and the more separation there is, the greater the final velocity will be.

But, the body is not a machine, it is a living thing that has its own intelligence. So taking into account several parameters, it will do the movement that seems best suited to it to perform, not to hurt itself and have enough energy to start again (if necessary).

A player who does not have a large x-factor can generate power with his own coordination! Motor Preferences can identify his own individual way of doing it.

What made you want to be a Motor Preference Expert ?

Baseball & my youngest son

Baseball because I've coached for over 25 years and I've observed that very successful players don't have the same movement at all. I found this destabilizing because it challenged the famous fundamentals I had learned at the beginning of my career.

With experience, I have more often tried to adapt the gesture that seemed to me the most relevant for the player, based on the improvement of his results. But this often took a lot of time because it was done in a test/fail/success mode...

Five years ago, I saw a program that talked about motor preferences in high level soccer in France. It intrigued me... Then a few months later, I watched a webinar on youtube by #Volodalen about Primary Reflexes and their consequences in athletes.

The subject interested me because it was related to motor preferences. But on top of that, I discovered that it could help my young son who is autistic.

That's when I decided to train with Volodalen and today with Motor Preferences Experts, LLC , I can bring Motor Preferences to the US.