Rohan Handa hardly knew where to begin. “I had so much to work on that it was just endless,” Handa said last week, speaking at the Giants Papago Park facility. “Mechanics, strength, mobility — that’s a lot of things to put in one piece.” When COVID shut down the college season, the Yale-educated Handa seemed headed for a future in cybersecurity, not baseball. The left-handed reliever with a fastball that sat in the mid-80s was NOT one of those college players who watched the 2020 draft with hope. He knew he didn’t belong with those guys.
And it wasn’t dreams of getting drafted that motivated Handa to seek out help. “Honestly, I wasn’t thinking about professional baseball. I was just thinking about getting better. That’s all. Professional baseball was kind of a long way away, and I wasn’t sure how much I would grow within that one year.” With COVID shutting down baseball leagues all over the country and a desire for self-improvement, Handa decided to spend the summer of 2020 at Tread Athletics in his hometown of Charlotte, NC, and work on re-building himself from the ground up. Tread Athletics, like Driveline, is famous for their ability to build up velocity in pitchers, using individually designed training regimens. They work on the way the body moves, build up strength, use weighted plyo care balls to improve mechanics, all designed to build the machine up. “Before I even got on the mound, it was all about your mobility. So, I was pretty bad mobility-wise…So starting with the lower half, get those hamstrings, get those calves, really get everything in the lower half working faster.” From there, they moved up to the upper body and the arm action, working to get his movements cleaner, more efficient. “It’s a very detailed process that I had to go through from March [2020] up to the draft [in 2021]. I’m still working on that stuff now.”
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to There R Giants to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.