User:Jveldeb

Jaime Cevallos (1976 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a professional baseball swing instructor. Nicknamed the “Swing Mechanic”, Cevallos works independently with amateur and professional baseball players, using video analysis and “position training” to improve their hitting performance, a method he has coined “Positional Hitting.” His two most notable students are Ben Zobrist and Drew Sutton.

Career Success
In 303 plate appearances, before working with Cevallos, Zobrist had 3 home runs and a .259 slugging percentage. In the 309 plate appearances after, Zobrist hit 17 home runs with a .520 slugging percentage. “The numbers before I worked with Jaime compared to after speak for themselves,” said Zobrist. In 2009, Zobrist won the team MVP award for the Rays, finishing the season with a .297 batting average and 27 home runs.

Before working with Cevallos in 2007, Drew Sutton, playing professional baseball for the Corpus Christi Hooks, had 9 home runs and a .267 batting average. After working with Cevallos in 2008, Sutton improved his numbers to 20 home runs and a .317 batting average, earning team MVP honors. “(Cevallos) has made a huge difference,” said Sutton after the season.

During the 2008 World Series, Cevallos analyzed the swing of Philadelphia Phillies’ Ryan Howard who had 9 strikeouts in 21 at-bats in the series. Cevallos explained that Howard does not give himself a long enough “area of impact,” the distance that the bat is square to the ball when travelling through the impact zone. Cevallos said that because of his swing mechanics, Howard is forced to make the decision to swing too early and therefore often swings at bad pitches.

Cevallos designed a hitting training aid, called the MP30 Training Bat, which helps players learn to achieve the “Slot” position through the swing, a position whereby the back elbow drops to the player’s side to begin the swing. The “Slot” position, according to Cevallos, is one of the key positions of the baseball swing.

Philosophy
Cevallos believes that baseball players should spend the off season improving their swing positions. Using videos analysis, Cevallos teaches the correlation between certain key positions a player achieves through both the swing and that player’s hitting performance.

Cevallos believes that the best hitters in baseball’s history will stem from Positional Hitting. “The numbers we saw from the Steroid Era will pale in comparison to what’s to come.” said Cevallos.

Personal
As a child, Cevallos suffered from hearing imparities and as a result became fascinated with the physical movements and mechanics associated with sports. Cevallos played Division I baseball at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmetsburg, MD. He ended his first collegiate season with a .196 batting average. Upset about his hitting performance, Cevallos began to study the positions of professional baseball player’s by collecting pictures of players in mid-swing from Sports Illustrated articles.

Cevallos, noticing a difference between his swing and those of professionals made positional changes to his swing during the offseason. In 1997, his sophomore year at Mount Saints Mary’s, he experienced a significant turnaround, increasing his batting average to .364 (4th in the Northeast Conference) with 4 home runs. He had never hit a home run in his life prior to that year. For the next ten years, Cevallos continued to study and refine the Positional Hitting method.

Cevallos works with Major League Baseball players and believes that his Positional Hitting approach will lead to the next Major League Baseball player achieving a .400 batting average and the first hit 80 home runs in one season.

Cevallos resides in Grapevine, Texas where he designs baseball-training aids and provides hitting instructions for amateurs and professionals.