Tag: baseball bat

Jameis Winston tries out bizarre baseball bat training drill

New Orleans Saints backup quarterback Jameis Winston put on a football helmet and picked up a baseball bat for a strange NFL training drill.

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Well, there’s something you don’t see everyday. Jameis Winston is a backup quarterback for the New Orleans Saints this year, competing with Taysom Hill for rights to hold a clipboard and maybe a bag of sunflower seeds on the sideline while Drew Brees conducts one of the NFL’s best offenses.

And Winston knows that he has to improve over his final performance with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in which he lobbed nearly as many interceptions (30) as touchdown passes (33). At best, his 2019 season could be described as “high-variance.”

So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Winston trying out new training methods this offseason. But the sight of him wearing his new Saints helmet and wielding a baseball bat came, well, out of left field.

Fortunately, one of Winston’s trainers took time to explain the idea behind this strange drill. John Beck is a former NFL quarterback who now works for 3DQB, a company run by passing guru Tom House that works closely with dozens of professional quarterbacks, including Brees and Tom Brady.

Beck spoke with NewOrleans.Football’s Nick Underhill, saying: “Training the similarities in the baseball swing can be applied to the movements of quarterbacking.” Beck noted that a well-practiced swing of the bat conditions the muscles in Winston’s body to perform when he’s slinging a football, even if the specifics are a little different.

If Winston were able to work out at the Saints practice facility, he’d probably be training more traditionally with highly-specialized equipment suited to what’s asked of him. But with many gyms still closed and the Saints having canceled the bulk of their offseason, Winston and his private coaches are forced to get creative to keep him in peak condition.

Hopefully it works. The critical flaws with Winston haven’t been an ugly windup or late release — he’s simply made too many poor decisions in the heat of the moment, resulting in a glut of turnovers. And there’s no number of swings at the plate that will cure that. It’s something Beck acknowledged in his interview with Underhill, adding that he thinks Winston has a lot to gain by watching Brees, one of the game’s finest decision-makers, go to work every day.

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