The title of renowned bowling coach Mark Baker’s latest video series is as bold as its contents are revelatory, and states plainly the observation underlying its purpose: “The Game’s Changed.”

While probably anyone reading this story surmises that the two-handed style is the phenomenon to which the title of Baker’s latest video release alludes, the increasingly widespread and consequential style also, Baker explains, presented a problem for instructors such as himself.

Coaching-wise, Baker explains, “I didn’t see anything for the two-handers. I didn’t see anything that was specifically for the twin-handed community. So, I decided that I would just do that.”

In the meantime, Baker’s project, available at MarkBakerBowling.com, routinely challenges commonly held misperceptions about the two-handed game, disproving numerous assumptions about differences between two-handers and one-handers while also, in meticulously analytical fashion that producer Kurtis Von Krueger says was entirely unscripted, blowing apart, among other notions, the idea that somehow Jason Belmonte and Anthony Simonsen’s games are dramatically different from one another. 

Baker’s point is not some kind of ego project. As he says, “How many bowlers can I help? My job isn’t to be the best coach. I want no part of that conversation. My job is, how can I help the most people? At the end of my coaching career, if I’ve helped more people than any other coach, then I’ve had a successful career.”

Baker’s way of helping the most people was to divide “The Game’s Changed” into three departments — a one-handed tutorial, a two-handed tutorial, and a free component devoted specifically to seniors for which Baker brought in best friend and three-time U.S. Open champion Dave Husted.

Also involved in the project were Danielle McEwan and Kris Prather, the latter of whom helped serve up one of Baker’s most notable revelations in the series as the coach illustrates that Prather and Husted’s games, despite originating from entirely different eras in the sport and coming from entirely different generations, are virtually identical. 

Such original analysis tends to be the kind of material that sets Baker apart as a coach, and for him, that is the point. 

“When I do these projects, because they’re so hard and so time-consuming, there’s a lot at stake — basically, my reputation as a coach. When you put something out there that’s terrible, that’s not going to help your coaching business on a daily basis,” Baker says. “The reason I do these is because they make me a better coach. I learn as much from it as I’m trying to get across.”

In addition to the five pros featured on the video series, a little help from behind the scenes paid big dividends, Barker says. That help came in the form of project manager Anthony Santos.

“He put in as many hours or more than I did,” Baker explained.

With helping hands in place both in front of and behind the camera, it is with his analysis of the two-handed game that Baker really finds himself within his element in the series. There are reasons why he may, in fact, be the best coach to launch what might be the industry’s most comprehensive two-handed bowling instructional offering to date. 

Back when the two-handed game was so new that Osku Palermaa’s appearance on the 2004 U.S. Open telecast felt to many about as shocking as the sighting of a UFO, a certain Wesley Low surfaced on Baker’s radar when the player — then an unknown kid weighing in at about 60 pounds soaking wet who would go on to renown as one of the youngest regional champions in PBA history — bowled using a two-handed style even Baker hardly had seen to that point. While other coaches were, at the time, more given to “correcting” the style or lifting their noses at it, Baker dug in with all the curiosity and open-mindedness he exhibits throughout “The Game’s Changed.” 

“I’m one of the old guys; I’m 63 years old, so I am one of the guys who is not supposed to like [the two-handed game]. But, I started coaching Wesley Low 20 years ago, and it didn’t bother me then,” Baker says. “This kid shows up at 10 years old, and they’re all telling him he’s doing it wrong. I watched him, and after about 20 minutes I went, ‘I wouldn’t change anything!’ I don’t know how much bigger this kid’s gonna get; he was about 4 feet tall, about 60 pounds, and he’s all frustrated. His dad goes, ‘Well, what do you think?’ When I told him I wouldn’t change anything, he went, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Do you see what his ball is doing down there? You can’t teach that. Sooner or later, he’s gonna grow, and when he gets to throwing 15-pound balls, and his speed goes up, he’s gonna strike a lot.’ I had no idea he was gonna turn into Wesley Low.”

Baker may have had the humility to recognize that he couldn’t teach what Wesley Low’s ball was doing on the lanes that day, but he also possesses the expertise to teach plenty throughout “The Game’s Changed.” Here are five key takeaways from the lauded coach’s latest video-based instructional offering… 

1.    Timing is Everything
For Baker, consistency is achieved through excellence in three key areas — balance, timing, and accuracy. It is in the realm of timing that Baker scores one of his most resonant points throughout the video series, demonstrating the ways in which two-handers in particular achieve it.

As he explains, “With two-handers, the first thing you have to address is the height of their backswing. You’ve got two hands on the ball. How far your ball can go back is limited by the length of your body. Because of that, timing is crucial.”

Baker contends that 95 percent of the two-handed bowlers with whom he meets for the first time struggle with early timing. Parents, says Baker, will complain that their child has a high rev-rate “‘but he throws it slow and he can’t hit his target.’ That might be verbatim what parents will say when their son or daughter comes in [for a lesson] throwing it two-handed.”

Baker attributes this complaint to the use of the wrong power source — their right shoulder (for right-handers) rather than their right leg.

“Once their third step allowed their left arm to get longer, staying taller got their swings to get back later. Then their body got ahead of their swing,” Baker explains.

Timing is one of those aspects of fundamentals that “kind of gets put away,” Baker says, in part because of the extent to which the high-tech equipment and intense rev rates featured in today’s game can seem to make up for the lack of them. But, as Baker and plenty of his coaching peers know, the fundamentals “are boring to work on, but they’re the fastest way to get somebody better.”

Few aspects of the fundamentals are as key to that improvement as timing, in Baker’s view. 

2. The Beauty of the Third Step
In a five-step delivery, Baker says, “The second step isn’t as important as we made it out to be.” It is this moment in a bowler’s approach that receives quite a bit of scrutiny throughout “The Game’s Changed.” 

“Believe me, I was a crossover guy. We all taught the crossover step,” the four-time PBA Tour champion says of the second step in a five-step delivery. “And then, as I started thinking about how you walk down the street — if the light turns green and you’re going to walk a cross the street, you’re not putting in a giant crossover step in your second step if you want to make it to the other side without getting hit by a car.”

Baker adds that, “If your crossover step is big and you drop your hips in your second step, the ball, in essence, becomes dead, so then you have to pull it up. Once you pull it up, you’ve got to pull it down. If that’s your style, then you have to have a lot of revs.”

Baker says his work on the third step of a five-stepping amateur has, by and large, proven to be dramatically beneficial.

“Every two-hander that would come in — players I had never seen before and never coached — who were struggling with accuracy, the first thing I would do is measure their first three steps, and then I would just keep moving it around to [either Belmonte or Simonsen’s first three steps] and they’d be like, ‘I’ve never hit my target this much!’ That’s when I started going, ‘Wait a minute. There’s something here. In 30 minutes, I’ve taken somebody who’s averaging 160 and all of a sudden they’re hitting the pocket on almost every ball, and all I’ve changed was their push away and their third step.’”

Perhaps Baker’s most illuminating look at the significance of the third step in “The Game’s Changed” occurs when his analysis of that moment in the games of Belmonte and Simonsen dispels the notion that their games are poles apart.

Baker says at one point that that idea never sounded right to him; now, picking apart their games for the video, the virtually identical third step in each of their games is proof.

“Even though Anthony does tilt quite a bit earlier, they both drop their hips at the exact same place in their swings,” Baker explains. “When their ball gets to the top of their swing, right where they start their slide, their hips drop at the exact same time.”

They also each take a step left in their third step, which helps clear a path for their two-handed swings to clear their hips on the way toward the release. 

“They go about it differently, but their timing spots are the same, their steps are the same, their heads don’t move the last three steps,” Baker observes.

Baker marvels at Belmo and Simo’s respective records in majors, noting that, “Two-handed bowling is supposed to be all about power and revs but majors are all about hitting your target. Majors are hard; scores are low. So, for these two guys to have their records in majors — the guy with the most majors, and the guy with the most majors at the youngest age — there had to be some similarities between them. I just had to find them.”

Their nearly identical third steps provided one key way in which he did so. 

3. Simo’s Magical ‘Flat Spot’ and ‘Moving the Air Forward’
One specific aspect of Simonsen’s game that draws Baker’s astonishment is what he calls “the flat spot” in Simo’s two-handed swing. 

Baker explains that, in the swing, the motion the ball makes from the bowler’s heel to the bowler’s toe defines the “flat spot.” Simo, in Baker’s analysis, “has the longest flat spot probably in the history of our sport. What does that allow him to do? Have the greatest number of ways of releasing the ball. What is Anthony Simonsen known for? Having the greatest variety of releases. For him to just decide on a TV show that he’s going to throw a backup ball and hit the pocket every shot, that’s not normal,” Baker chuckles. 

Which speaks to one of the points Baker drives home throughout “The Game’s Changed” — the concept of “moving the air forward.”

“There are three ways to move the air. You can move the air down, you can move the air forward, or you can move the air up. Only one is efficient,” Baker says. “The pins are in front of you. They’re forward. I’m trying to get all your momentum to go the same place the pins are.”

Which is where the idea of creating a flat spot comes in. 

“If you move the air up or you move the air down, by definition there can be no flat spot,” Baker observes. “Anthony Simonsen has taken the flat spot to a new level.”

Moving the air forward, Baker adds, “gets your hips level. If your hips stay level, and you move the air forward, guess what? You stay pretty balanced” — another one of those three paths to consistency. 

4. Generation Gap
For all the buzz in bowling about how much the sport has evolved over the years — from the rise of two-handed bowling and accelerating enhancements in bowling-ball and coaching technology, among other developments — arguably the most fascinating moment in “The Game’s Changed” occurs when Baker proves that the games of Kris Prather and Dave Husted are, in so many ways it’s astonishing, virtually identical.

Making this observation revelatory is the gap in generations and eras these two great players exemplify.

Prather, born on New Year’s Day in 1992, is 32 years old. Husted literally is twice Prather’s age, having turned 64 years old on April 12. No one reading this story needs to be told of the stark contrasts in the eras from which these competitors emerged, with Husted’s beginnings on the PBA Tour occurring about a decade before the release of the first reactive ball in the Xcalibur (1991) and Prather’s career blossoming amid a time of unrivaled rev rate and newfangled styles like two-handed bowling that were utterly foreign to players of Husted’s generation. That their games are as similar as Baker proves them to be indicates that some fundamentals are timeless enough to withstand seemingly any amount of change over the decades.

Respectively, Prather and Husted possess six and 12 PBA Tour titles. Thirty percent of Prather’s titles are majors, including the 2020 PBA Tournament of Champions and the 2022 PBA World Championship, while Husted’s three U.S. Open titles came in addition to his 1985 Touring Players Championship win. 

As Baker points out, “You don’t win three U.S. Open titles if you don’t know how to bowl.” Indeed, only Pete Weber, with five, won more U.S. Opens than Husted. 

While those stats speak to Prather and Husted’s greatness, it’s in the mechanics of their respective physical games that Baker mines the real rudiments of that greatness. 

“I never had any idea how close these two looked until I saw the videos,” Baker says. “I’d never studied Dave’s game. I roomed with the guy for 10 years. I just knew Dave was better than me. I just knew Dave didn’t have to work at it as hard as I did. I just knew that he was smooth, and the harder the lanes got the better he bowled. But this was the first time I studied Dave’s game.”

And when he did, he found, in his words, that, “Basically, Kris Prather is trying to become the next Dave Husted. They’re never out of balance. They’re both in complete balance through all five steps of their approach. Both of them hit the timing spot perfectly. They have beautiful balance, great timing, excellent footwork, their heads don’t move and they can hit a target.”

The way Baker puts their mirroring games is this: “They’re using their bodies correctly, and they happen to be bowling while doing it.”

Just as that fellow about to cross the street when the light turns green uses his body correctly in order to do so safely and efficiently. 

5. A Truly Golden Arm Swing
Slow-motion video of Husted’s approach throughout “The Game’s Changed” reveals an arm swing every bit as golden as the greatest the game ever has seen, up there with the likes of the late Dave Davis. Viewers are in for a treat as they watch Husted’s arm truly drop into the swing seemingly with zero muscle and zero grip pressure. It is, for fans and students of the sport alike, a thing of rare beauty. 

Baker, having roomed with Husted and competed alongside the man on the PBA Tour for many years, offers some inside knowledge as how Husted accomplished an armswing that is, and should be, the envy of bowlers worldwide.

“Dave always had a unique way of drilling balls. Dave did hit the bevel knife, but he always had the sharpest finger holes on tour. So, you say he has no grip pressure. Well, let’s put it this way: Nobody ever stole Dave’s bowling balls,” Baker laughs. “It’s like, ‘Woah! Woah, what is that? You forget top bevel them!’ And Dave goes, ‘No, I didn’t.’ And Dave never tore his hand. Dave has no calluses. So, this lack of grip pressure and this free swing — whether that was something his dad told him, or John Jowdy, who knows? — but Dave’s always had one of the freest swings and the cleanest swings ever.”  

These five takeaways merely scratch the surface of what “The Gamer’s Changed” offers the curious fan or student, many of whom could do far worse than to take a spin through it and see for themselves.