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General  | General | 7/2/2021

Wolforth Thrower Mentorship: Article 12

Jerry Ford
Ron Wolforth
Photo: Johnny Tergo/Truth Baseball
Ron Wolforth probably knows more about the throwing arm and arm care than anyone we know. Many of you may have heard about the famous Texas Baseball Ranch that Ron has been running for many years. We have built a great relationship with Ron and his wife Jill over the years.

It all started a few years back when Ron sent his son Garrett to a Perfect Game event. His son was a catcher/infielder and set some all-time PG records for pop times (1.75) and velocity (89 mph) at the time. He also threw mid-90s across the infield. He is now playing professionally. Being an average-sized kid, this really drew our interest. Once we realized who his father was, it became clear.



Since then we have followed the Texas Baseball Ranch closely. Ron is a very humble man, which is a reason so many speak highly of him. We have never run across a single person that shows any disrespect for him or the Ranch. So we decided to ask him to help our millions of followers.

Over the years he has helped thousands of pitchers, including many that became Major League All-Stars. Yes, he teaches velocity gains, better control and command, and everything a pitchers needs to be successful. However, unlike many others, he is an absolute stickler when it comes to doing it safely. His interest doesn't just involve velocity gains and other improvements, all of which are very important. He wants his students to understand arm care and how to throw and stay healthy. He does this without a cookie cutter program. He understands that all players are different individuals.

Perfect Game's interest in prospects, arm care and keeping young kids healthy is the major reason we have decided to work with Ron Wolforth.

Below is the 12th of an ongoing column he will be doing on our Perfect Game website. This information will be gold for any player interested in improving their throwing ability and staying healthy. Make sure you read every column he contributes and feel free to comment on them.

If you want to attend one of his camps and improve your throwing ability, here is the link to the website:
https://www.texasbaseballranch.com/

Jerry Ford
President
Perfect Game

. . .

Article 1: Where the Sidewalk Terminates
Article 2: The Exact Location of Your Arm Pain is Incredibly Valuable Information
Article 3: No Pain, No Problem...Right? Not Quite So Fast.
Article 4: The Secret to Accelerated Skill Development: Hyper-Personalization
Article 5: The Case Against Weighted Balls?
Article 6: The Truth About Pitch Counts, Workloads, and Overuse
Article 7: Velocity Appraisal: How 'Hard' Is 'Hard Enough'?
Article 8: Command Appraisal: How 'Accurate' Is 'Accurate Enough'?
Article 9: Swing & Miss Appraisal: How 'Nasty' Is 'Nasty Enough'?
Article 10: 5 Common Mistakes Baseball Players Make In Their Training
Article 11: The Truth About Curveballs, Sliders, and Cutters

 Have you ever wondered just exactly what the similarities are between the best pitchers on a championship team and the worst pitchers on a cellar dweller?
 
I realize for many of you that may be a strange question. Why would we even ask such a question?
 
This basic question is so rarely asked by the typical baseball person…but we at the Texas Baseball Ranch® believe unequivocally that this is one question that should be asked often. Such a question is often highly enlightening and incredibly instructive.
 
NCAA Hall of Fame Coach Gary Ward, a long-time dear friend of ours, is fond of saying, “Want a better answer? Then improve upon the questions you ask!”
 
Stating the obvious and eliminating items the best pitchers and worst pitchers share in common can lead us to important clues on the critical areas in which they are very different. That difference often is the secret sauce to achievement and productivity.
 
All too often we look only for the differences and eventually, because of a lack of intellectual curiosity, we return to safe and time-honored conclusions suggesting that the only differences between the two polar opposite groups are talent and/or experience.
 
Talent and experience are real and are no small influences, but they absolutely do not accurately express the totality of influence upon success and achievement.
 
Many more talented and experienced individuals have been beaten by those with far less talent and less experience. This scenario has been repeated thousands of times throughout history.
 
So then, what is one thing the best and the worst have in common?
 
They both practice. They both throw bullpens.
 
I have maintained for nearly 30 years now that the simple act of practice itself is rarely remarkable. Everyone ‘practices’. Everyone ‘throws bull pens, sides or boxes’. So then, if the simple act of practice is so valuable, why aren’t all the pitchers who practice ‘great performers’?
 
Let’s investigate this question.
 
The science of motor skill development is very clear in this regard. 
 
•   How much time you dedicate to practice is a much more significant indicator of successful performance than is the fact you simply practiced your skill. So, there is that variable…time investment.
 
•   But it is ‘how’ one practices that is really the influencer of growth, skill development and eventually success at game time.
 
The question we should be asking ourselves is not just:
 
Is our pitcher practicing?
 
Or even how much does our pitcher practice?
 
But instead, we must ask how deep and deliberate is our pitcher’s current practice?
 
To help us with that question I’m going to turn to one of my most influential mentors, K. Anders Ericsson.
 
The late K. Anders Ericsson was a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is internationally recognized as a researcher in the psychological nature of expertise and human performance.
 
His incredible books:
 
•   ‘Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise’.
 
•   ‘The Road To Excellence; The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games’.

•   ‘Development of Professional Expertise: Toward Measurement of Expert Performance and Design of Optimal Learning Environments’.
 
These 3 are seemingly always on my desk and are constantly referenced in our work at the Texas Baseball Ranch.
 
Ericsson believed the 7 gold standards of deliberate practice are as follows:
 
1. Have Specific Goals in EACH of Your Practices. 
 
Create step-by-step objectives focused on improving specific aspects of the pitcher’s target performance. For example: Arm health, recovery, velocity, command, spin/shape/deception. Step-by-step means setting particular targets for each day, week, month and year, over many years.
 
2. Support Your Work With Expert Coaching/Mentoring
 
To achieve elite level performance, athletes almost always need expert coaches, mentors and/or advisors at critical junctures in their career to provide a winning combination of implicit and explicit knowledge.
 
3. Consistent Enlightenment From Feedback - Preferably Immediate Feedback.
 
A primary tenet of growth, skill development and/or simply learning to perform better is to get direct, immediate, relevant feedback. Specifically, in this case, getting the information you need to adjust your behavior, adjust your movement, correct mistakes, and move on to the next stage of growth.
 
Learning from feedback is absolutely invaluable. It’s the best way of managing your performance during or after the event and continuing to grow. We say at the Texas Baseball Ranch that the breakfast of champions is not Wheaties but instead direct, immediate and relevant feedback.
 
4. Dedicate At Least A Portion of Each Practice To Working Slightly Outside Of Your Comfort Zone. 
 
Making continued improvements requires systematically challenging yourself to go one step further than your current capabilities. As soon as you are approaching a semblance of mastery of a specific skill, it’s time to demand more of yourself and challenge yourself further. This is often more challenging than some might think.
 
Practicing outside of your comfort zone almost always, by definition, creates some anxiety and frustration. The good news is that married with persistence and perseverance, deep deliberate practice also regularly results with great satisfaction as you do reach the next levels of performance. You can then move on to new and even more uncomfortable challenges.

5. Building an Exceptionally Sound Foundation in Which Mastery Can Be Expanded.

It’s far easier to acquire new skills if you’ve first created a sound substructure for learning and development. From this foundation you can develop superb skills step-by-step. Never forget, ‘Extraordinary’ is simply doing the ordinary, exceptionally well. Dedicate yourself to being uncommonly good at the foundational stuff.
 
6. Being Focused and Present.
 
Achieving elite level performance demands involvement and ownership, not simply listening passively to other’s advice. Deliberate practice requires high levels of intention, awareness and a willingness to put in hours of effort. No one achieves deliberate practice my accident. The secret is in the name. Deep, deliberate practice is only created on purpose.
 
7. Develop Well Defined Mental Representations.
 
One important characteristic of top performers is their ability to visualize and connect images in their minds with their ideal performance. This is what Ericsson referred to as 'Mental Representations’. When athletes have a clear mental picture of the specifics of their skills, they can far better monitor their performance in real time, make decisions under duress, and adjust and adapt as the situation unfolds.
 
Don Mattingly once was quoted as saying, “The only difference between me and hundreds of other players is that I have a very clear picture in my mind of what I want and spend most of my day coloring it!”
 
As you read down through Ericsson’s 7 gold standards of deliberate practice, I’m fairly certain that your reaction is similar to mine in thinking that the traditional practice in America is far from deep, deliberate practice.
 
As I tell my clients all the time, “Awareness itself is curative. Awareness of the problem is the start. Now is the time to start making changes toward a more effective use of our time, effort, energy and resources.” 
 
I look forward to continuing our discussion.
 
Ron Wolforth
CEO- The Texas Baseball Ranch
 
PS. Next time my topic will be “The Truth About Long Toss”.

Coach Wolforth has written six books on pitching including the Amazon Best Seller, Pitching with Confidence.  Since 2003, 122 of the players Wolforth has trained have been drafted and 467 have broken the 90 mph barrier.  He has consulted with 13 MLB teams, dozens of NCAA programs and has been referred to as “America’s Go-to-Guy on Pitching” and “The Pitching Coaches Pitching Coach”.  Coach Wolforth lives in Montgomery, TX with his wife, Jill.  They are intimately familiar with youth select, travel baseball and PG events as their son Garrett (now a catcher in the Cincinnati Reds organization) went through the process.  Garrett still holds the PG Underclass All-American Games record for catcher velocity at 89mph which he set in 2014 at the age of 16.

 If you would like a free copy of Pitching with Confidence, go to freepitchingbook.com.
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General | Blog | 2/20/2026

Wolforth Throwing Mentorship: Article 63
Ron Wolforth
Article Image
Wolforth Throwing Mentorship: Article 62, Part 1 | Part 2 Demystifying the Curveball, Pitch Counts, and Weighted Balls - Part 3  We've made it to Part 3…the final installment of our series on baseball's most misunderstood and debated topics.   In Part 1, we tackled the curveball. The takeaway: the pitch itself isn't what’s dangerous. Decades of awful and ineffective coaching cues, ”snap your wrist," "turn the doorknob”…exacerbated and even in many causes caused some of the problems. Teach it correctly, when the athlete is ready, and it's no riskier than a fastball.  In Part 2, we examined pitch counts. The takeaway: they're a useful tool, but a limited one. Treating a single number as a universal measure of safety ignores everything...
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College | Rankings | 2/23/2026

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Vincent Cervino
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Softball | Softball Tournament | 2/20/2026

18U PG Winter Elite Showcase Indoor

Dave Durbala
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SPRINGFIELD, IL - 2026 Perfect Game Softball Winter Elite Showcase, February 6 - 8, 2026.  Twenty teams rolled into Springfield to showcase their talents in this 18u, four-game guarantee, pool-into-bracket play,  at the newly opened 170,000-square-foot domed facility at Scheels Sports Park at Legacy Pointe. In the Silver Bracket, it was the 09 Midwest Sluggers taking home the championship over the CR Blue Devils 18u National. In the Gold Bracket, a championship game that featured the tournament's top two pitchers, it was the Iowa Dynamite 18u with the win over GTS 15u Elite-Herrick, by a score of  2-1. The tournament, with a mix of committed players, and those young ladies striving for the next level,  was loaded with talent.  Below are some of the players that excelled on the field and made their way onto the tournament’s Top Performers list. Earning...
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Softball | Softball Tournament | 2/19/2026

14U PG Winter Elite Showcase Indoor

Erica Beach
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PG Winter Elite Showcase Indoor 14U January 17-18, 2026 Springfield, IL   SPRINGFIELD, IL- It may be cold outside, but there was some hot competition going on at the PG Winter Elite Showcase Indoor tournament. Six team converged on the Scheels Sports Park at Legacy Pointe and the Texas Glory IL 29 walked away with the hardware after a close 7-6 ballgame. Below we highlight some of the impressive athletes who competed on the weekend.     Lila Rafferty (2029, Leroy, IL) of the Texas Glory IL 29 was an unstoppable force at the plate over the weekend. She showed great tenacity in the box, proving to be one of the most consistent hitters in the tournament. She finished her weekend batting an incredible .750, tallying nine hits and scoring five times. She flashed her speed on multiple occasions, stealing two bases and legging out two doubles and two triples. She came in clutch,...
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High School | General | 2/19/2026

Pacific Northwest All Region & Top Tools

David Rawnsley
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NORTHWEST REGION (WA, OR, ID, WY, AK, MT, HI)    The biggest change in the Northwest Region for 2026 is the addition of Hawaii, which has always been overlooked due to being lumped with California in the former Pacific Region.  This also coincides with an increased Perfect Game presence in the islands in the form of additional events and scouting.  And Hawaii certainly contributed in it’s first year, placing four players on the All-Region team, including slugging 2026 outfielder Judah Ota. The powerhouse Puyallup HS team is the only Northwest Region team to be represented in the PG Pre-Season Top 50 National HS Rankings, beginning the year ranked 26th.  C – Teagan Scott (Sr., South Salem HS, Ore.) Scott has been on the prospect map since he played in the 2023 PG 14U Select Festival and is signed with Oregon State.  A right-handed hitter with lots...
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Showcase | Story | 2/20/2026

PG ID Camps Help Build Baseball Resume

Jim Salisbury
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PG ID Camps Help Youngsters Build a Baseball Resume There was still snow on the ground in a lot of places last weekend, but that didn’t stop more than 200 young players from going indoors to participate in the first round of Perfect Game Select Fest ID Camps for the 2026 season. John McAdams, PG’s national crosschecker and Northeast scouting director, ran the event in Farmingdale, New Jersey, and was impressed with his group’s energy and desire to improve at the game. “We’re giving young players the opportunity to build their baseball resumes and chart their growth and progress over a span of years,” he said. In addition to New Jersey, Select Fest ID Camps were held in Lake St. Louis, Missouri; Rossford, Ohio; Marietta, Georgia; and Kent, Washington. The ID camps debuted in 2025. Twenty-two of them were held around the country with nearly 700 young...
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Draft | Story | 2/19/2026

Then vs. Now: '26 Class Look Back

Tyler Henninger
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One constant across our scouting staff is the volume of in-person looks we get at prospects during their high school years. With assignments at national tournaments and showcases throughout the calendar, we’ve built a deep library of reports and video on many of today’s top college prospects dating back to their prep days. This week, we took a step back to revisit what those players looked like as high school prospects. Which tools stood out? What was missing from the profile at the time? And what, if anything, did we overlook that ultimately helped shape the player they’ve become? Below, we break down 10 players in a “Then and Now” reflection. Justin Lebron (23 FL) finishes off the tournament getting in on the hit parade with a single to the pullside. #PGShowdown #Bama commit pic.twitter.com/C4Irym2ZTR — Perfect Game Scout (@PG_Scouting) March 4, 2023...
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High School | General | 2/18/2026

High School Notebook: Feb. 18

Cam McElwaney
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Grady Emerson (‘26 TX) laces this ball to right for a walk off single. Clean lefty stroke. Looks the part both sides of the ball. Checks all the boxes. Will be scouted heavily this Spring. #PGHS #HookEm commit. #PGDraft pic.twitter.com/wXvdHdgqME — Perfect Game Texas (@Texas_PG) February 6, 2026 Grady Emerson (2026, Argyle, Texas) had a strong showing throughout the opening week of high school baseball out here in Texas. Works good at-bats and is always a tough out in general. Makes all the plays at short and just has the look of a future big leaguer. He does all the little things right. Bat to ball will play at a high level and there is still a lot more power to project on here. There is a reason why Emerson is one of, if not the most highly coveted high school prospect in the 2026 class and it’s easy to see why. Currently committed to Texas, but has the potential to...
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High School | Rankings | 2/18/2026

Midwest Region Top Teams

Tyler Russo
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Softball | Softball Tournament | 2/18/2026

PG Softball Winter One Day Tournament

Dave Durbala
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BURLINGTON, IA - Perfect Game Softball Winter One Day Tournament, February 15, 2026. Twelve teams, split between the 16u and 18u divisions, participated in this event.  With two pool games, and then a move into single elimination bracket play,  some players used this tournament as  their last warm-up before kicking off their high school seasons, while others were tuning up for the busy Spring and Summer travel season. In the 16u division, it was the Iowa Aries 16u Ce Fire Red taking the championship, with Southeast Iowa Allstars 18u Gold Miller earning the crown in the 18u division. Below are write-ups from observations made during the day, as due to a software glitch, there were no stats available to complete a Top Performers list. 16U Division  Earning the MV-Pitcher Award, as selected by her coaches, was Aurora Widlund (2029 Altoona, IA) of tournament champion Iowa...
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