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Lesson Buyer Beware
by Dave
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
As if life were not complicated enough, we Americans are charged with significant responsibility via the simple phrase, "ignorance of the law is no excuse." We are obligated to know all the laws applicable to these United States when those laws and everything which explains, defines, and clarifies them would fill a very, very large library with so many pages that it would be impossible to read them all in a single lifetime! That body of law is constantly increasing at almost an exponential rate. There are attorneys who spend their entire professional lives working on tiny portions of the overall body of law. And these individuals find that they learn something new about their area of specialty on practically a daily basis. Even these studied, experienced professionals make monumental mistakes. When it comes to using a professional attorney, the client must endeavor to understand the law and to "supervise" the hired professional lest his or her mistake cost the client in ways that cannot ever be rectified. So it is with lawyers, so it is with all experts.
Ignorance is unacceptable when it comes to the law. It is also at least inadvisable in every other aspect of our lives including sport. We must constantly keep abreast of the entire body of knowledge pertaining to our own pursuits. We must therefore endeavor to gather and assimilate as much knowledge as possible. I can't speak for you but I know I learn something new about softball on a daily basis.
There are so many sources regarding mechanical and other issues that I know I could never have enough time to read, understand and evaluate them all. I struggle with this. I'm one of those who wants to hear the right answers and to understand the complete logic string which underlies them. I do an imperfect job but I do try.
When I am dealing with a subject about which I know too little, I almost always defer to experts. They not only know their subject far better than I can learn it in a short time, they also are able to explain it much better. So, when my kids wanted to play softball and then to pitch, I knew I was out of my league. I had to defer to an expert. Actually, I have deferred to several experts to teach my kids about pitching.
I am not the type of person who normally can be a passive buyer of these kinds of services. Many are passive about their daughters' pitching lessons. I see them all the time. They are the ones who sit in their car while taking phone calls or engage in unrelated discussions during their kids' pitching lessons. They don't know a lot and because they are busy in other aspects of their lives, they do not have the time to delve into things. I understand and respect that. Loads of people just do not have the time to go further. But I am not able to take that same approach. I have to understand what is being taught. And I question almost everything. Sometimes, I get unexpected surprises from sources previously unknown to me.
I am going to get into pitching from a mechanical perspective today. But before I do, I want to at least mention something about batting which contains a parallel lesson. From the time I first got involved with fastpitch softball, I heard about something called the "west coast swing." The very term insulted me. I heard it as "this is the way the softball hitters in California do it and, since CA has the best softball, they must be right." I started t0o try to understand what the west coast swing was and what its underpinnings were. After a while, it became clear to me that those who talked about this swing were really talking about a style which was often referred to as "rotational." I dug further and was fairly easily able to trace it back to essentially the Ted Williams school. It became clear to me that the question was not one of fact but rather of opinion. I read Charley Lau and others who had written books and articles on the mechanics of hitting. Before long, it became clear to me that many of the claims of "west coast" swing instructors just were not true. I won't go into the details right now but basically, I came to understand that the swing was not a new style, was not endemic to the west coast, and was not necessarily superior to other types of swings. It also became clear to me that loads of people made trade specifically by touting the "west coast swing" and they were loathe to admit any fallacies which were promulgated by them or their kindred. In fact, they were willing to argue every single point whether they believed their position or not. Some of these experts were quite wrong but they stuck to their guns.
More recently, what I have observed is a much lower frequency of folks referring to the "west coast swing." I have also heard many of the professionals who teach swinging start to move away from a purely rotational mechanical style. Many have stopped referring to "rotational hitting." Most no longer argue all of the points they once touted.
As I said, this piece is about pitching. There are several aspects of fundamental pitching mechanics which have given me trouble over the years. One of these is the stride. Another is hip closure at release and thereafter. There are a number of conflicting pieces of advice and "expert testimony" on these issues which I had consumed over the years and now I am trying to sort it all out.
I could not fail to hear Michele Smith talk about pitchers and the degree of angle of their hips. She always speaks about a 45 degree angle. This advice was in direct conflict with what most of the pitching experts I have seen were telling me. Yet, I am somewhat convinced that I merely misunderstood someone or everyone. So let me see if I can explain the issue and why it caused me so much consternation.
When a windmiller pitches, she stands with two feet on the pitcher's plate - her shoulders and hips are necessarily square to homeplate. We call this "closed." As she goes into her windmill and the arm is over the head, she has her hips and shoulders square to third base (first base for a lefty). We call this "open." So the pitcher opens the door and then pitches. What follows ivolves the subject of closing all the way or partially.
I have often disputed Michele Smith's charterization of a pitcher maintaining the good 45 degree angle with her hips as she released the ball. It seems counter intuitive to me because if you try to duplicate it, what you end up with is a motion in which the pitcher must hold herself back - prevent her hips from closing after releasing the ball. It is sort of a linear pitching approach, if you will, b ecause she is sort of slamming her back side leg and hip into the front side after ball release. This puts stress on the front leg, particularly the knee and also seems to hold back natural force from body momentum. But I think I slightly misunderstand Michele.
Recently, a reader of this blog, a friend of mine over the past several years, asked me about the timing of the various parts of the pitching motion. I have struggled with his questions and comments for quite a while and still have not answered him. I suppose it is difficult to put it all together. And hip closure really complicates things.
One of my daughters is more "hippy" than the other. Their pitching coaches have always advocated hip closure in order to promote speed as well as ball rotation on certain pitches and as a way of better controlling the location of pitches. When I questioned one the instructors, he told me that the pitchers who advocate hip openness are generally six foot tall girls with long arms who throw 65-70 without really trying. He went on to say that everybody else needs to close their hip in order to generate the speed needed to compete with these ladies.
That was a simple enough explanation and I bought it since it seemed somewhat logical to me. I saw many girls pitch with open hips and they did generally seem to be taller kids with tremendous speed. Then I saw the Japanese great Ueno and noted that she closes her hips. She throws faster than most - she may actually be the fastest pitcher in softball, I'm not sure. And Ueno is rather diminutive when compared to most Olympic pitchers. She's something like 5-6, 5-7. That cleared things up for me since my kids' coach was validated. Still, I was left with some unresolved issues because of something which happened repeatedly over several years.
Have you ever experienced anything like the following? Your kid is pitching practice when she swings her arm around and strikes her leg with the ball as she comes to the release point. Now that's an interesting occurrence. First of all, the pain must be absolutely excruciating as it drives her body to the ground. Tears follow shortly thereafter. But the pitch itself is something I wish I could bottle because some of the most fantastic curves I have ever seen in my life usually result. I mean, we're talking about a curve which has double the sideways action of anything I have seen world class pitchers throw! If you could harness that pitch - obviously without the pain - you could put out just about any fire in any game at any time. What's possibly worse than the pain, however, are the bruises that result. If this kind of thing happened anytime close to a regular doctor checkup, I'm sure I would find myself locked up and my kids in protective custody. Nobody would believe such a bruise would be self-inflicted. It looks as if it was caused by an adult striking a child with a bat while using all their strength!
In any event, I think this striking of the leg with the pitch is caused by excessively early hip closure. Girls have their curves and it is probably impossible to both close the hip and have a decent arm circle. If you try to do both, what you get is agony and ugly bruising. So there's got to be a better way.
The arm needs to stay in a nearly perfect circle. If it isn't on that track, frist of all, you lose power. Secondly, and more importantly, if the arm is not on a nearly perfect circle, you put too much stress on the shoulder. if you do something in your motion which takes the arm off track, you may cause shoulder injury, perhaps significant injury. This injury potential is really the subject of this piece and how I learned of that conclusion - it isn't my own - will be explained toward the end.
So, if a pitcher cannot pitch the ball around her hip, if she must be open to some degree, then Michele Smith has to be right. On the other hand, if you test this out, you will find that in order to keep the hips open, you have to hold yourself back and that will reduce power, and so she has to be at least partially wrong. The answer is the hips must be open at ball release and nothing should be done to hold back the ball side after release, which means that many or most pitchers should be closed when their bodies come to rest after the pitch.
In fact, it is worth noting that pitchers cannot gain any additional force by forcing their hips closed at the end since that must happen after ball release and it is impossible to get any additional speed on the ball at this point. Once the ball leaves the hand, it is going as fast as it ever will. More to the point, once the back leg pushes off the plate, it has no impetus from which to add any additional force. After push off, the pivot leg has used up its potential to generate force. Thereafter, anything it does to the pitch is caused by its enertia, its forward momentum. Allowing that momentum to continue is what caused the hips to close. Closing the hips doesn't add force but, I believe, preventing the hips from closing causes speed to be diminished since it requires force in an opposite direction. You shouldn't cause your hips to close. It should just happen as the result of an otherwise correct motion with good arm speed.
To sum up, a pitcher needs to keep her arm in a nearly perfect circle from the time she starts upwards until she releases the ball. In order to accomplish this nearly perfect circle, the pitcher must have her hips open in order to get the arm through to release. Hip closure cannot add force, it follows proper mechanics. Ueno closes her hips because her motion causes this to happen. That is, I believe, that. Michele Smith is not wrong but you do not need to keep your hips open at 45 degrees after you have released the pitch. My daughter's coaches are wrong because they believe closing the hips causes force to be added. And, most of all, trying to affirmatively close the hips may knock the arm out of its nearly perfect circle which can cause injury. So, buyer beware.
The second issue I said I would discuss is the length of the forward stride before ball release. Here I have real issues since some of the coaches we have seen emphasize this while some are diametrically opposed to a long forward stride. To understand the issue, the first coach of my kids told them to stride out very hard with an aopparent objective of a landing spot about 5 feet away. This was more or less of a leap in which the back foot was dragged forward. And my kids were little at the time so 5 feet is about right. Now that they are bigger, over 5 feet tall, the stride comes to around 6 feet.
The coach opposed to this kind of a stride advocates a normal walking stride. For me, at about 5-9, and known for having short legs, a walking stride is about 2.5 - 3 feet. There's quite a large difference for anyone of any height and leg length between a normal walking stride and the pitcher's stride the other coach advocated. The pitching stride would be about double the walking stride.
What made me concerned about this issue of shortening the stride was I have seen all the top pitchers throw. I know the pitchers circle is 8 feet from the midpoint of the rubber. I watch these top pitchers routinely land near or on the line. Some come awfully close to exceeding it. When the coach who advocates the shorter stride asked one of these top pitchers about stride length, she agreed with him that it should be short. Yet when she pitches, she lands 8 feet from the rubber. She's just about 6 feet tall! Her walking stride couldn't be any more than 4 feet or so.
I was stuck on this issue of stride length for a couple of years. I didn't give it much thought because my kids continue to take fairly long strides. They haven't "corrected" themselves and shortened up. Now I am glad they haven't because I just read the definitive study on this.
On the link I am about to give you is a study of pitcher's mechanics. It was conducted at the 1996 Olympics. Its chief concern is injury. It seeks to explain pitching motions which cause the least amount of injury. The largest percentage of pitcher injuries in fastpitch softball are those to the shoulder. So the motion which puts the least amount of stress on the shoulder while generating the fastest pitch is the best. The link is here: http://www.softballclinics.com/olympic/olympics01.html
Please take the time to read this study because you really must educate yourself in its findings. You cannot simply rely upon the experts since they often disagree. And when it comes to injuries to your children, ignorance of the realities is absolutely no excuse. You are the buyer of pitching lessons. Let the buyer beware.Labels: lessons, pitching
Permanent Link: Lesson Buyer Beware
 
Somebody Always Gets Shorted
by Dave
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
I am happy that the high school federation decided to move the pitching distance back to 43. My state adopted it for this year, good move. I am also happy to learn that other youth bodies are likewise moving back to the same distance. It is insane to have pitchers in high school pitching from a different distance than they do in age group play. It is just too much to ask of kids this young. They throw for their high school team Monday through Saturday at 40 feet and then go play in front of, perhaps, college coaches on Sunday at 43. Windmilling is just too hard to have kids jumping back and forth in an effort to locate their pitches where they need to be. So the fact that most, if not all 16U and 18U youth play will be at the same 43 feet as most, if not all, high school play is undeniably a good thing. But, as usual, somebody gets shorted. And that somebody seems to be the 14 year old freshmen.
I have seen nothing about any sort of 14U play being pitched from 43 feet. Maybe some organization has adopted this distance and I missed it. But from what I have seen, ASA 14U is going to be pitched at 40 feet for the forseeable future. The same is true for USSSA, PONY, NSA, etc. I think this may be a mistake.
In some high schools, freshmen do sometimes pitch varsity. Of course, it is very likely that even if they do not, their JV or freshman games will be at 43. I know that the NFHS rule change was for varsity but I have not heard of any state which adopted the 43 feet for this year having a sifferent pitching distance for the junior circuits. There's good reason for that since JV and freshman pitchers are often brought up for a variety of reasons. Also, hitters likewise suffer when the pitchers are moved around.
It does not take a genius to figure out that 14 year-olds equate to freshmen. It does not take a genius to know that this is a tender young age at which the distance confusion is likely to take a significant toll. One could argue that perhaps freshmen should be excluded from varsity softball - indeed I know of one school which follows this policy - but from a practical reality point of view, many schools could not play competitively without their freshman varsity pitching ace. They do not want to see any sort of rule prohibiting 9th graders from participation in any sport, least of all softball.
The discussion does not end here since, 13 year-olds equate, generally, to 8th graders and middle school play is likely to continue at 40 feet. I would like to see that come to an end since the boys pitch at full distance from middle school on. But the other side of the argument is some middle schools use 7th, even 6th graders to pitch their games.
The bottom line is somebody is going to get shortchanged. I don't wish to continue the analysis infinitely. I do want to say that when I advocated for HS ball at 43, I had in mind a number of girls who I had watched struggle with their command at 40 feet after playing the winter showcases and other tournaments at 43. Then I watched them struggle yet again to acclimate back to 43. It was a bit too much. But I neglected to consider 14s doing likewise when, obviously, the struggle for them is yet more difficult. Somehow we must resolve this. And I do not believe that 14U ball should remain at 40 feet. If we leave it at 40, most talented pitchers will skip the 14U ranks and move directly to 16U. That would be very bad for 14U ball.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Somebody Always Gets Shorted
Command And Control
by Dave
Thursday, October 08, 2009
The private coach watched his high school-aged student pitch for a while and then asked the question which had been on his mind for some time. "Do you just aim for the middle of the strike zone and then throw?" The student looked confidently back at her coach and answered his simple question. "Yes, that's pretty much what I have always done." The coach drew his hand across and down his face to his chin, pondered the issue, tried to craft the right thing to tell his student, and spoke in measured tones. "That's the wrong approach. You need to start pitching to spots or you're going to get hit."
There are two basic kinds of wildness. One involves the ability to throw strikes a majority of the time. This is the kind of wildness which yields excessive amounts of walks. The second variety involves what is often called "wildness in the zone." This wildness doesn't usually yield many walks but it does lead to other problems in fastpitch softball.
In the first case, usually we are talking about pitchers in their early years. When girls start learning the windmill, there are so many moving parts that it is often difficult to throw a strike using proper mechanics. Girls can perform parts of the motion in isolation drills but when they try to pull it all together into one smooth movement, the ball goes all over the place.
Even if the kid is not frustrated by lack of control, the practice catcher, parents or coaches often are. The inexperienced father complains, "just get it over" or "just try to throw strikes." The beginning pitcher gets frustrated with the reaction her lack of control induces and she begins altering her delivery to satisfy her critics.
Unfortunately too many young pitchers try to "just get it over" by using improper mechanics like bending at the waist, throwing with a bent arm, or making other gross motor adjustments. This is the pathway to future problems that cannot be resolved.
I remember a conversation I had with a 10U all-star coach who "informed" me that the most important element of softball pitching was the ability to throw strikes. He didn't care so much if his pitchers threw via conventional underhand soft toss, modified fastpitch, or a true windmill. If they could not throw strikes, they could not pitch. I could not help thinking "OK, you could not be more wrong but I must work with you so I won't argue the point. Just let me keep my own kids away from you."
The overall control problem is most effectively resolved via frequent pitching practice sessions. Each kid will get her basic control in her own time. Girls must learn proper mechanics and practice them without any worry whatsoever about where the ball goes. You'd be an idiot to think such girls don't care whether they throw strikes or not. But it takes a lot of practice to get the thing right. And there is no timeline which fits every individual.
I've written a fair amount about what parents of aspiring pitchers should and should not do at this point. The keys are:
1) don't have her pitch in games until she is ready because that exposes her to coaches and others who will display frustration whenever she can't get it over;
2) don't get frustrated with her lack of control - get yourself a bucket of balls and have her practice where you have some sort of backstop so you don't spend your time chasing balls (cut down the amount of time between pitches when practicing);
3) encourage proper motion/mechanics - don't encourage throwing strikes;
4) have her throw often to gain the feel of it and to learn the proper release point; and
4) keep her away from people who encourage throwing strikes by modifying the motion.
The result will invariably be a degree of control which will improve over time. If you instead encourage her to modify her motion or allow others to do so, you can plan on having her ready to pitch games earlier. You can also plan on her giving up pitching earlier. Heck, maybe that's a good thing!
The second kind of wildness appears in girls who have mastered the mechanical basics, begun to reliably throw strikes, and are now pitching in games. She no longer walks very many hitters. If she is strong and throws hard, she probably has experienced a good degree of success. She is getting hitters out for a variety of reasons and she is no longer being hurt by her excessive walks.
Many people, especially those with baseball backgrounds, think of this wildness in the zone as "effective" wildness because 1) it is prevalent in hard throwing baseball pitchers and 2) at first it seems to be effective in softball as well. But as girls move up in levels, the hitters become far more skilled and hit pitches that are not thrown to spots.
When we examine the notion of "effective wildness," we are generally talking about a pitcher who throws hard or who has movement on the ball which he or she has not yet harnessed. These pitchers get young batters out because the hitters are not comfortable facing them. They get hit or see others get hit by hard pitches. They see what they think are going to be strikes and wind up swinging at pitches well out of the zone. Eventually, they will become less fearful in the box and hold their ground. They will learn to better predict where a mnovement pitch will cross the plate. They will learn to hit pitches no matter how hard they are thrown. They will learn to adjust their "mental strike zone" to the natural movement of the pitch, especially after watching a couple from a particular pitcher.
In baseball, we see the prevalence of the fastball. Baseball pitchers get generally more movement on their fastballs than softball pitchers for reasons I won't go into. They throw different varieties (2-seam, 4 seam, cut) of the fastball in order to alter that movement. The ball is very small relative to the softball. So hitters have more difficulty dealing with baseball fastballs regardless of where they are thrown. That's not to imply that effective baseball pitchers, especially at higher levels, don't throw to spots. But a hard throwing pitcher can be effective if he has good speed and movement but still cannot command where the ball is going. The term "effectively wild" is a common one in baseball.
In softball, we do not hear of top pitchers being "effectively" wild. That is because the ball is bigger, pitch movement is less, and hitters are trained to deal with speed. If a pitcher can throw strikes at will, has normal to good movement but cannot know with any degree of certainty whether this pitch is going to be on the middle 60-70% of the plate, on the outer two 15-20% locations, up, down or middlish, she is going to get hit. Certainly, on some days, she is going to get lucky and keep the ball out of the middle part of the zone. But she is going to be inconsistent and on certain days be hit very hard.
There is another reason aside from hitters' abilities that pitchers need command of their pitches. We see umpires' strike zones vary quite a bit. I believe the strike zone is broader in fastpitch than it is in baseball. Just the other day we had a plate umpire calling pitches for strikes when they were clearly a good foot up and out. We have experienced a few umps who make pitchers throw into a pipe but for the most part, the umpires we have seen, extend the zone in some direction. There are some who like the outside and low pitch, a few who like it up and out, some who like it up but not down, or down but not up, and some who like everything in but won't give you an outside "on the black" pitch no matter what.
Pitchers have to make adjustments just like everybody else on the field. But their most important adjustment is to the plate ump's strike zone. If the ump is giving you a particular location, it may not be necessary to hit it every time but if you cannot hit it at all, you are preventing yourself from taking an important advantage you would otherwise have. Many times I have watched pitchers who are good at hitting one particular spot pitch to an umpire who favors that spot. They have their best games in those circumstances. But in another game, they might have an ump who favors another location. If they cannot figure out what that location is and hit it, they have less stellar games.
To be successful at pitching, you must possess the ability to hit spots which batters cannot hit as well as those spots off the plate which an umpire is calling. The only way to gain that ability is to practice it.
Once a pitcher is throwing strikes (has control) with good mechanics, the next stages have to involve learning movement and change of speed pitches, and learning to hit spots (command). As this piece is about location, we'll leave the other stuff to another day.
The first elements to pitching command involve inside and outside pitches. The practice catcher sets up "on the black" and the pitcher throws to the corners where the glove is placed. I think of this as stage 2 - level 1 because it is not enough to just throw to the corners. In stage 2 - level 2, the effective pitcher will learn first to throw to the corners and then to throw off them. If the count is 1-0, she tries to throw a strike to even up the count but she still wants to be out of the center. If the count is 0-1 or 0-2, she wants to throw near the corner but off it.
There isn't a good reason to throw an 0-2 pitch which catches the plate. Instead, what you want to do is expand the zone by throwing something off the plate which may induce the batter to swing at a pitch she cannot hit well. So pitchers must practice throwing off the corners. Additionally, they must learn to throw off the plate in varying degrees. Stage 2 - level 3 involves learning to throw 2 inches, 4 inches, 6 inches, etc. off the plate. This is because umpires might sometimes be giving you everything 2 inches off the plate causing batters to swing at outside pitches not in the "book" strike zone. And, if the count is 0-2, why would you throw a pitch that is within the ump's zone? Instead, you move a couple inches off that to see if the batter will swing at something she has no hope of hitting!
To recap, pitchers learn their motion, practice tirelessly to throw within the strike zone, avoid any "advice" about adjusting delivery to "just get it over," then progress to learning to pitch on and off the corners, to varying degrees in order to induce batters to swing at bad pitches and perhaps get umps t0o call strikes on pitches off the plate. That is command. That is the location goal but it does not stop with inside and outside corners.
Up and down are nearly as important as in and out. That's because some hitters can deal with, for example, the inside and low but not the inside and up pitch. Also, some umps will give you either the high or low but most often not both. Up and down can sometimes be more difficult than in and out. The pitchers I have observed who can move the ball to the corners and off it, usually go up or down by accident. They can comand the thing horizontally but not vertically. So the next stage (stage 2 - level 4) is command up and down.
In case you are wondering if we are just talking about fastballs in this discussion - which should get you upset since most realize that the fastball is not a commonly used pitch in softball, the answer is no. For all your pitches, command in and out, up and down are important. Obviously a screwball is almost always going to be in. There are the up and down are critical. We see many hitters who are very effective against in and down but who cannot hit an in and up pitch if their lives depended on it. If a pitcher does not have up and down command on her screwball, she is going to run into troubles against these kinds of hitters.
While many pitchers' curveballs can be throw in or out, as we discussed some time ago, the degree of out is very important. A curve right on the outside of the plate is probably going to be hit very hard by good hitters. But if it starts on the last tiny slice of the plate and moves 6 inches off it, that is going to be effective. Yet the pitcher probably needs to possess the ability to throw the curve for a strike on 3-0 counts. Further, if she can get a strike called or induce the batter to swing and miss at a curve which is a mere inch or two off the plate, she should throw it further off on the next one. She needs to find the edge of the ump's zone and then be able to hit that or move it off that, depending on the count.
Similarly, pitchers need command of the change-up. A change-up which is above the belt and in the center of the plate can travel a great distance if the batter deals well with the timing aspect. If it cannot be throw for a strike, it is not an effective pitch since many teams train their hitters to lay off the change unless they are way down in the count. Pitchers must learn to throw the thing inside the zone, keep it low, and move it to the outside corner as well as just off it, etc. I think we see more pitchers who have trouble landing their changes for a strike than with any other pitch. And once they are able to throw it for a strike, that seems to be anough command for them. But learn a good change and then learn to command it in terms of down and out, and you have a really effective pitch, perhaps the most effective pitch in the game.
Dropballs are almost always down and rises are almost always up. But if you can learn degrees of up and down as well as in and out on these pitches, you are much better off in the long run. Many batters cannot hit a drop well or even make contact with a rise. But these hitters learn to make adjustments with where they stand in the batters box and to lay off any marginal pitches they can't hit. So if a drop or rise pitcher cannot put these pitches inside the zone, they aren't going to be effective. And if she can control the up or down but cannot throw to the corners and off them, she is limiting her effectiveness since some hitters will be able to deal with outside drops or inside rises and some umps will give her certain locations but not others.
When pitchers are learning command of pitches to locations, catchers are often involved. The catcher sets up in or out, up or down and the pitcher throws to the location of the glove. This is fine for learning 9in practice and fine if you have a talented catcher. But I have often heard pitchers and parents of pitchers complain that catchers are not setting targets appropriately. If the pitch is called outside, yes, she sets up outside. But her outside target is always in the same place. She does not move slightly off the plate when the count is 0-2. I once heard my own daughter complain about this. The pitcher must not cede command control to the catcher unless that catcher is completely in sync with the pitcher's way of thinking and pitching.
What I do with my own pitchers is, when we practice, I might hjave them work on command by initially setting up at the location they are pitching to. But after some reps of that, I tell them I am now going to set up right down the middle and I want them to pick a spot, not in the middle, to pitch to. For example, say we are working on the fastball. She throws ten fastballs just to warm up the pitch. Then I move and have her throw 5 to the outside corner, 5 off it, 5 on the inside corner, and 5 off it. Next I have her throw up and down. Then I might have her throw 1 inside and up, another out and down, etc. with me moving the glove to the location.
After that location by catcher's glove location, I set up right down the middle and tell her to throw a strike on the outside corner at whatever height. Then I tell her to throw one off the plate by an inch or two. Then maybe further off. We work location by glove location and then location despite glove location. In this way, I teach her to throw where she wants it regardless of whether she is throwing to the gifted catcher on her travel team or the make shift one for the school team (or vice versa).
What I'm telling you is, yes you must learn to throw strikes, then you must learn command. You must learn these things up and down, in and out. You must learn to throw to your locations rgeardless of where your catcher is set up and regardless of how talented she is or is not.
Now, obviously, we are talking about degrees of magnitude here. If my pitcher is throwing 60-65, has five pitches including a killer change, can throw to specific locations at will 100% of the time, she is prepping for top 25 D-1! All she needs to learn at this point is stance / swing analysis, and then how to break down a hitter!! But your reaction to the discussion should not be one of "if it's that complicated, my kid is probably not going to pitch for more than a year or two after this 10U season ends." Rather, I am trying to give you a sense of where to take things after she gets the basic mechanics down and after she is able to reliably throw strikes.
Maybe you are wondering when you should introduce location and command to your young pitcher. I suppose it is never too early to start the introduction but my sense is, if she can't throw a strike about half the time, you are probably wasting your time trying to get her to throw an outside strike at this point. Half is a decent rule of thumb. If she can throw strikes about half the time, put in some attempts to throw outside strikes in her pitching practices. If, for example, you are throwing 100 fastballs in your session, try getting her to throw 20 - 30 of them on the outside corner.
Break things up a bit. Maybe you usually throw 50 pitches in the first phase of this practice and then call balls and strikes for the remaining 50. In that case, I would have her throw 10-15 of the first fifty on the outside corner. Then, when you are calling balls and strikes in the second fifty, every 5th pitch, call one outside. And don't forget to call pitches as strikes if she hits the corner or is slightly off it. Don't set your mitt on the outside of the zone, tell her to hit it, and then call "ball" when she nails your unmoving glove.
As you progress with this for a few weeks/months, you may have her throw some warm-up pitches which do not involve location but after those, everything should be to location, in or out, on the plate or just off it. And once this is accomplished to an acceptable degree (use 50% again) begin having targets in the zone, 2 inches off it, 4 inches off it, etc. The furthest you need to be away from the plate is about the inside line of each batter's box or just past it.
Once you start to work off the plate by degrees, also start working the up and down aspect. I would say that initially, all you need is above and below the batter's theoretical waistline. Then that should progress in 2 to 4 inch intervals. And don't stop at the bottom and top of the strike zone. Include parts above and below the zone as you are doing with the in and out.
The riseball pitcher who can land her pitch just below the upper reaches of the zone and get a called strike one, then paint the edge of the line for two, and then throw one about eye level is going to get a lot of Ks. The dropball pitcher who can throw her pitch for a strike and then bounce one just off the plate is also going to get most batters out easily. Location frustrates hitters like nothing else. You have to hate facing the kid who throws to the weakest part of your swing and then, when you adjust, puts it back where your wheelhouse was before you made the adjustment.
You may never get to the point where your young pitcher is throwing pitches precisely one foot outside, just above the shoulder of the batter with 100% accuracy. Mopst likely you never will be even close to that level of precision. Still, the idea is to work on these things to improve command. The pitcher who works location will be better off than the one who doesn't. Even if a girl is not able to throw 5 of 10 of a given pitch to location, her command will be better and she will be a better pitcher.
The trick is to practice the right way. As the parent, guardian, or coach of an aspiring pitcher, you do her a diservice if you allow her to stop refining whenever she regularly finds the strike zone. You are only 20% of the way home when that happens. Don't allow your pitcher to confidently aim for the middle and then just see what happens. This isn't baseball.Labels: pitching, practice
Permanent Link: Command And Control
Pitching Foundation
by Dave
Thursday, September 10, 2009
 In order to build a house, you've got to start with a foundation. OK, so we're not trying to build a house. We're trying to build a windmill. Take a look at the picture. Now that's a windmill with a foundation! Sure, it is obviously quite an old windmill. The modern ones are built with a much more slim look. But the modern versions are built with very sturdy materials and cost quite a bit. Besides I'm not convinced these newer windmills will stand the test of time. And that's what we're after today, a windmill that will stand the test of time.
I could have called this piece pitching fundamentals but everybody shies away from anything called "fundamentals." Similarly, I could have titled it something "beginner." But some would jump over this and seek out something better or more relevant to their situation. We, as a society or culture, have an aversion to anything called fundamental. We want to jump ahead to the intermediate level of everything. We're looking for nuance, tips and tricks, shortcuts. That is not a formula for success with anything complex. Windmill pitching is complex.
Another reason why readers of this blog might look beyond anything fundamental or for beginners is they already pay a coach for lessons and the fundamentals are the coach's responsibility. I've got absolutely nothing against pitching coaches. To me, they are critical. I'm not prepared to make myself into the expert the way Mr. Tincher did. I doubt most of you are either.
Pitching coaches are great but let's not forget that they are selling a product. The pitch9ing coach is putting out the product he believes you are willing to buy. If the coach has you as a client and you are less interested in fundamentals than say the curve ball or making your daughter into a functional pitcher today, that is what he or she is going to sell you. If the pitching coach does not offer what his or her clients want, there will not be sufficient customers to continue the practice. So, while most pitching coaches do teach fundamentals, they need to move things forward to a level at which you are willing to pay for their expertise pretty quickly. I'm going to get into the fundamentals in a moment but before I do, I want to explain a little more deeply why pitching coaches often do not address them and why parents of pitchers are often not only none the wiser for it but often the actual cause.
The typical kid who first steps into pitching lessons is a rec pitcher, say about 8 to 11 years old. The parent of the pitcher wants their kid to be a functional pitcher, one who does not get pulled in the first inning for walking in 3 runs before getting an out. They want their daughter to "just throw strikes." They are less interested in the kid building a foundation that will last into high school than they are avoiding personal embarrassment this Saturday. They are less interested in a proper wrist snap or good body posture than they are having their kid throw those strikes. They are less interested in her starting with two feet on the rubber than they are with her getting outs. They are less interested in avoiding a crow hop or leap than they are in her speed. They are less interested in her having an effective change-up than they are with her learning to throw that curve or drop.
If you want to pitch past 10U, you've got to learn some basics and learn them well. I have seen too many pitchers who have a defective wrist snap, who bend over to deliver that strike, who walk into their pitches or don't even push off the rubber, elt alone drag away from it, who do not develop pitches in the right order or who rely too much on a particular pitch because they can throw it for a strike and are getting batters out. The result is often a pitcher who will get hit hard at the next level, up an age group or over to a higher level of travel. The result is often a pitcher will be frustrated in the future and perhaps give it up before her time is due.
To begin into the foundations that every pitcher ought to work on, I see a couple items which should be given more attention than perhaps most people are willing to give. When coaches build pitchers from the ground up, they usually begin with the release point and work backwards. The release point follows the wrist snap so that's where we'll start. Before the wrist snap is a good "perfect" circle. Before that is a leg drive and drag from the rubber, followed by good body posture. And before that is two, yes two, feet on the rubber or pitcher's plate.
Having a good wrist snap is absolutely critical. Some pitchers develop lazy wrists which results in a rollover or a straight-wrist release. They put a cut on the ball one way or the other. This often gets missed because they still throw the ball hard and because they get baby hooks or cuts on their pitches, batters miss the ball.
I remember seeing a couple 12 year old pitchers at different times who had cuts on their fastballs. They got batters out. But they didn't nearly get the speed they might have on their pitches and, in fact, they had less movement than they should have on their fastballs as they got older. Eventually they became mediocre pitchers or gave it up altogether. A "true" wrist snap is 12 to 6 on the clock. There is no such thing as perfection in any human endeavor. If there were, our eyes couldn't tell us anyway because they are not that keen. But a ball which rotates nearly perfectly is what we're after. If the catcher sees any sort of dot or wobble in the pitch, the wrist snap has not been as near to perfect as it should be.
When a pitcher throws a very good wrist snap, the ball rotates rapidly. This causes a couple things to happen. First off, a rapidly rotation ball is harder for a batter to vector. batters' eyes put together the meeting point of bat and ball in subliminal ways and apparent rotation factors into the hitter's subconscious mental equation. A rapidly rotating ball tells the eyes something about its expected speed. Batters have trouble with good, fast rotation.
Secondly, whereas the errant pitcher's cut will cause the ball to move early on, as she ages and gets faster, the movement will diminish. A good 12 to 6 wrist snap will put harder and harder break on the ball as a pitcher gets faster and faster. The baby hook will not get the job done. As pitchers get older and faster, their hooks need to be more pronounced, more clean, faster rotating than the slight cut. Pitchers who have cuts often get the batters out in rec. They also find success in 10U and 12U travel. But as batters get older and better, they learn to deal with real hooks. Baby hooks are like candy. Hard drops remain one of the hardest things to deal with.
Finally, having a clean snap aids in the development of other pitches. For example, if you want to develop a peel drop or good change-up, having a clean snapped fastball is the route. The peel drop is a great pitch because it looks like an ordinary batting practice fastball but breaks hard as it approaches the plate. It is very hard to judge whether it will be in the zone or not and it is very hard to adjust to and hit into play with anything but a simple grounder. When girls get to changes, they often either grip the ball completely different than the fastball and use the fastball motion, they do not snap at realease, or they use some different technique. Having a true, reliable, 12 to 6, hard wrist snap with which to change off of is the way to go. If a kid has a cut on her fastball, the change-up can be very hard to perfect.
To work on the wrist snap, you have to do a lot of boring repetition. But this work needs to be done. The pitcher stands about 15 feet from the catcher and merely snaps the ball to him or her. She can do this facing the catcher, sideways or both at different times. Emphasis should be on the isolated movement of the wrist, straight up. Of course, some girls struggle with merely snapping - they need to move their arm some. That does not represent any particular difficulty provided that the arm motion is slight and the emphasis is on the actual snap.
Wrist snaps should be done as often as a girl pitches. It should be the first of many warm-up drills. I like to use a pre-set count of snaps as our first step. If you are getting ready for a game, sometimes you are in a rush and you don't have time to do a lot of snaps. I have nothing to tell you about that. But in a normal prac tice session, you really should begin with 10-20 fronts and 10-20 sides. My kids have been pitching for a number of years and always do at least 10 of each. I would strongly suggest that beginner (0 to 2plus years) ought to do more. On some occassions with my kids, when they were starting out, they threw as many as 50-100 snaps to improve their mechanics. On occassions when they were too tired or sick, we did entire practice sessions of nothing but snaps. Once, when my kid had a broken non-pitching arm, we did well more than 100 snaops in order to keep her pitching arm in decent shape and to retain her mechanics. The beginning pitcher needs to do loads of wrists snaps over a long period to get this critical foundation set. Older pitchers who have bad snapping motions should be treated like beginners for purposes of fixing what is broken. As you probably know, fixing a busted foundation is tougher than fixing a leaky roof.
The next foundational piece to pitching involves the circle. I've explained why the longest poossible circle is the best before but for the purposes of anyone new, I'll do it again. If you take a string and twirl it in a circle like the axle of a wheel, one point will remain basically stationery while others will be in motion. The point on the string moving the furthest around the circle will be the end point. In one second elapsed time, the point on the string which is at the center of the circle will move zero distance, the center of the string will move some distance which we'll call "1/2 X," and the furthest point on the string will move double that distance which we'll call "X." The end of the string at the center of the circle moves at speed 0, the middle of the string moves at 1/2X per second and the end point at the outside of the circle mnoves at X per second. So, in other words, if you compare the string to a shoulder and arm, the shoulder is moving very little, the elbow is moving much faster but about half the speed of the hand which is moving the fastest. When you windmill a pitch, the ball is released while moving at the speed of the hand. The shorter one's arms are, the slower the pitch is released. The longer, the faster. So if a pitcher does not legthen her arm, if she short-arms it, she is slowing down the pitch. That is why the length of the circle is so important.
There are two main reasons why pitchers short-arm it. For one thing, if you windmill your arm in a circle, once with full extension and once with a shorter arm, the full extension feels out of control. The short arm is an attempt at control. So, if a girl needs to throw strikes to shut her parents up, to avoid sighing from the sidelines, to prevent the trip to the mound by the rec coach who says, "just throw it over the middle of the plate," she short arms it to control the darn ball. This must be avoided.
It is better to not pitch at all in games until you can control a long armed pitch than it is to pitch and develop this bad habit. I remember watching a kid who had little formal training. She was the right physical and mental specimen to be a pitcher long into her later years as a player. But she pitched with an incredibly bent arm. It almost seemed like she was pretending to windmill. She dropped out of pitching by 14. Her mechanics were terrible.
I have also seen kids who have been through formal training develop the same habit. The cause is invariably the desire to control the pitch, to just throw strikes, usually in rec ball or for the middle school team. Walks are a disaster and kids who walk lots of batters don't get to pitch. But kids who have bent arms pitch only in the very young years. After maybe two years, they are washed up.
The other reason kids develop the short-arm problem is because it feels faster to pitch with a bent arm, particularly early on. If you spin your arm around in a circle while trying to judge in which case it is moving faster, I'd be willing to bet that the shorter arm version feels faster. Perhaps it even is slightly faster. But again the geometry tells us that even if the short arm is moving slightly faster, the hand is not until it reaches nearly full extension. So kids who short-arm it because they feel faster, should be discouraged from doing so. once they master a longer extension and practice it, that will be faster.
Think of it this way, of the best pitchers you have ever seen, not at the lower levels, how many short-arm it and how many get good extension? I guarantee you that Cat Osterman, Monica Abbott, and some of the other big names get very good extension. The best kids I have ever watched at 12U through high school all get exceptional extension. I've never seen a short-armer succeed for very long.
The next subject involves body posture. The pitcher's back should be straight up, perpendicular to the ground, not hunched over. If you think of a tripod, the weight is balanced. If there is too much weight on one of the legs, the thing falls over. We want our weight to be balanced pretty well at the release point. If a girl is all hunched over, leaning over her front foot, she cannot get much on a pitch. Girls do this, again, because it feels as if they can gain control on the pitch. They do this just to get the darn ball over in the strike zone, in order to "just throw strikes."
When we are sitting in the dugout watching the opposing pitcher throw her 5 warm-ups before a game, the most frequent comment I have ever made or heard others make is "oh, she's a leaner." We know that this is a girl who is trying very hard to throw strikes, meaning she probably has not progressed all that far with her location. We are going to tell our hitters to go after anything in the zone because we expect they'll be able to hit it. Girls develop the leaning mistake because they have been coerced into throwing strikes at the cost of a proper motion.
Another possible reason some girls develop leaning tendencies is in order to get spins on some pitch they are trying to master. Some pitchers have decent posture on their fastballs but lean when they throw their change or drop. They are still often doing it to throw strikes. But sometimes they need to put that extra body language on the ball in order to get it to drop. In any event, it is a very bad habit. Not only does it prevent any sort of speed from being put on the ball, it can actually cause you to get less spin and it is a back problem looking for an opportunity to show its head.
Our next foundational piece is the leg drive. Usually, if you short-arm it or lean, you can't really get that good push off. But more importantly, some of the biggest problems I have seen with the push-off and leg drive are crow-hopping and leaping problems. Now, for years, umpires have not been calling crow-hops and leaps but they are starting to. We watched the same pitcher ply her trade for freshman through junior year pretty successfully. This year, in one game, she had double digit illegal pitches called against her in just a few innings. There have been complaints about crow-hoppers for years near me and over the past couple of years, I have seen umps call them against college and even Olympic pitchers. &n bsp; It is slowly getting around to travel ball.
The other day, we were playing a fall ball game and a new pitcher was brought in. I watched the kid for a batter or two and dsaid to one of the other coaches, "hey watch this girl, she's hopping like crazy." My comments were meant for just the other coach but the plate ump overheard me and was apparently thinking the same thing. He called out the other team's coach and discussed it with him. the coach went out and talked to his pitcher. This league is essentially an organized way of scrimmaging. We weren't looking for any illegal pitch calls and the ump was not about to make any. But he did feel obliged to point the problem out to the coach and have him work with the girl on it. Umps are getting very sensitive to hopping and leaping. If you or one of your pitchers are doing it, watch out. You're gonna get called.
I think girls develop crow hopping early on due to the way in which they are taught to pitch, with certain pause points in their motions until they get the whole thing ready to pull together. There are also some pitching drills which require one to crow hop and stop. Unfortunately, some girls never break out of the tendency to hop. If your kids are pitchers, you really need to understand what a crow hop is and break your kids of it as early as possible.
Another reason kids develop into crow hoppers is because they propel themselves closer to the batter at realease and thereby are able to put pitches past them more easily. Also, when kids practice their pitching in gymnasiums or at other facilities without being able to push off from a rubber and drag properly, they sometimes develop hops in order to maintain balance that would be easily accomplished on a real field. Whatever the reason a crow hop develops, it should be corrected before it becomes habit.
Leaping is more difficult. I'm not sure why it develops. The difference between a hop and a leap is on the hop, a new pushoff point (a new point of impetus) is found. With leaping, the pivot foot becomes airborn, it does not drag away. I have one kid who developed this and I really don't know why. But what we did to correct it was place a cloth on the ground underneath the pivot foot and make her drag that cloth all the way through to her finished pitch point. I'm not sure if that will help you fix a leap or not but again, umps are more likely to call leaops now than at anytime in the past couple of years. They are looking for them.
Finally, one foundation piece I really want to emphasize involves starting with two feet on the rubber. Little League, PONY, NFHS and perhaps others do not have a requirement that the pitcher start with both feet on the rubber. But ASA and college definitely do. Even if you are not intending to pitch in college, it is more than likely that one day you'll play some kind of ASA ball in which both feet is a requirement. Why not do it at the get-go. Most pitching
coaches will not emphasize this precisely because high schools, PONY, and LL don't. Parents of pitchers should force their kids to start with both feet on the rubber just to avoid future problems and because, if addressed early, it really is not all that hard.
To go one step further, there are two minor bad habits which should be addressed when teaching the pitcher to start with both feet on the rubber. The first of these is to take the sign while on the rubber. I have seen more pitchers take the sign before stepping on the rubber than I have seen take it while on it. But this is in the rules. Pitchers are required to take a sign or pretend to take a sign once they get on the rubber. Understand that I really don't give a rat's arse where a girl takes the actual sign. What I want is for a girl to step on the rubber, compose and balance herself before throwing the pitch. if she takes the sign in back of the rubber, grabs her grip, then steps onto the rubber to pitch, chances are pretty good that she is not going to really be balanced and centered and then she is also running the risk of an ancillary problem of walking into the pitch.
Walking into the pitch happens when a pitcher successively steps onto the rubber and then begins her wind-up without hesitating. This is definitely not fair to batters and is often called. Pitchers, by rule, are required to step onto the rubber, take the sign, bring their hands together for about a second, and then pitch.
If a pitcher steps calmly onto the rubber (with both feet in my view), pauses to take a sign or to pretend to take a sign, if she only then brings her hands together (presents the ball) and then, after about a second, delivers the pitch, she will never walk into her pitch and get her rhythm broken by an umpire requiring her to do so. If she has a hood wrist snap, she'll find more success than if she doesn't. If she has a straight arm in her windmill, she will pitch better. If she keeps her back straight up, she'll not only be better, she will also not develop back problems so easily. If she avoids hopping and leaping, she'll avoid confrontations with umps. If she pushes off well and practices sound fundamentals, life will be better for years to come.
You need a foundation to build a house. You need a foundation to build a windmill. It is easier to build the foundation before the structure. But if you've already built the house on a faulty foundation, you should still try to fix the foundation. Otherwise the thing will fall over eventually.Labels: coaching, lessons, parents, pitching
Permanent Link: Pitching Foundation
Thor, The Viking Bandit - part 1
by Dave
Sunday, June 21, 2009
This is part one of our multi-part interview with Chicago Bandits pitcher extraordinaire, Kristina Thorson. In this part, we focus on Kristina's experience as a youth player, rec and club, through the formative high school years. In the parts which follow, we will examine her experiences as a college and NPF professional player as well as private pitching coach and future high school coach, and then conclude with thoughts about career opportunities and general thoughts about the game.
Q: While reading your bio on your web site (http://www.kthorson.com/), I got the impression that fastpitch softball was not overly important to you as a youth. You played Little League ball in the early days, progressed to summer ball and took pitching lessons during your middle school years. Yet it was not until high school that you got serious because, as you say, your pitching coach told you that you "stunk like skunk poop."
Were you a dominant player in Little League or summer ball? Did you experience any rivalries with friends or girls you met while playing either Little League or summer ball? What drove you to become a better player in those early years?
A: "In Little League I was considered a top player/pitcher from the time I started until I quite LL after 8th grade. But on my summer ball teams, I was never really considered a dominant player, let alone pitcher, until I was much older. I think probably during my sophomore year in high school my summer teams started realizing that I was one of their better outfielders, but I only got a few innings to pitch here and there. Really it wasn't until my senior year in summer ball that I was considered a top pitcher for my team. I'd always been on teams where the pitchers were coaches' daughters. But it just fed my fire that much more to go out and prove to everyone that I could pitch with the best of them. The best thing that ever happened to me was that I was told I'd never be good enough to accomplish my dream of pitching and dominating in the PAC10. "
When I think of my experiences as a youth, high school and college athlete, there are certain periods which come back to me now, decades later, as having been my best experiences. Those periods are not necessarily my last years as a competitor. Those periods are not necessarily the years in which I had the most success or was most dominant. Is there any period which sticks out to you as having been your best or most fun years in softball? What made them special?
A: "I think, so far, the most memorable years I've had in softball were my junior season with my high school team, senior (HS) season with my summer team, senior year at Cal, and last year with the Bandits. It's funny, because those were hands down the best team years we've had, judging by win loss standards, but I think that's due to the same reason those are my most memorable seasons. Each team I mentioned had that chemistry that coaches always talk about achieving, and that players/teams dream about achieving, especially my summer team the WA Ladyhawks - that was a really special team. We were small, but had great talent and love for the game, but you couldn't separate us from each other. We never got in tiffs, no one ever talked bad about someone else, and we all loved being around everyone on the team. We always played for each other, and we always played for the love of the game. That's what made those years so memorable and so successful."
Are there any words of advice you might give to an 11 year old girl or her parents about how to make the most out of her softball experience?
A: "First off, the most important thing is that their daughter is having fun. I see a lot of girls playing because their parents want them to, and they end up resenting the game which is a really sad sight to see. Having fun is the most important aspect of the game, regardless of what level they're playing at.
Secondly, when someone tells you that you can't achieve something, or that you'll never be good enough, don't use that as an excuse to settle. Use that as a reason to work harder, to show everyone that you can be good enough, that you can succeed. It's so easy to take the easy path and just give up - but it's SO much more rewarding to work harder than everyone else and to reap the benefits in the end. Even if you don't reach your goals, you know you outworked everyone, and you know you gave it your best shot. You'll never have any regrets that way."
If you were going to coach a youth team and you had limited time to prepare them before their very first tournament or game, what are some of the skills you would focus on?
A: "Throwing and catching. Hitting wins games, but defense wins championships. Close games always come down to who has a better defense, who doesn't make the error that cost the game. Proper throwing and catching techniques make up most of the game. With hitting, it's great to have a nice swing with a lot of power, but even if you don't have that swing, you can find a way to get on base. With throwing and catching, if you don't have the right mechanics, it makes it really difficult to get outs, which is what you need to win."
You played several sports (volleyball and soccer) in addition to softball during your early years of high school. You gave up those sports when your pitching coach criticized you. If you had it to do over again, would you have focused on softball earlier? Why or why not?
A: "I think if I could do it over again, I would have tried to keep playing at least one other sport. But when I look back, I don't regret my decision. I enjoyed volleyball and soccer, but I wasn't passionate. Not only that, I was in band, marching band, national honor society, and I was helping coach the middle school softball team as well as doing weekly pitching clinics. So I had a lot going on, and school was always really important to me, so I couldn't let my grades slip. I would have loved to been able to keep playing another sport, but I wasn't willing to give anything else up, and something had to give. And besides, I have many years left to get back into volleyball and soccer, and all the other sports I want to try."
Did you pitch or play varsity softball your freshman year of high school? What about the other sports, did you play varsity, freshman, JV level?
A: "I didn't really play varsity my freshman year. I was a swinger, and I got the minimum amount of innings to letter at varsity, but most of my freshman year I pitched JV. I was SO mad when I didn't make varsity, but looking back, I'm glad I didn't because I got a lot more pitching time in JV than I would have at varsity, which made me better in the long run. The only other sport I played for Shorecrest was volleyball my freshman year, which I played on the frosh team."
It is difficult for most to imagine a pitcher going from "skunk poop" to state Gatorade player of the year. When you look back, do you think you really stunk or do you think your coach saw talent and he wanted you to be the best you could be in softball? What I mean is, how bad do you really think you were and how does one progress from that low point all the way up to the best high school player in your state? How hard did you work? How many hours per day, week, etc.? What did you do to improve?
A: "I fully believe my coach when he said I stunk worse than skunk poop. It's hard for me to remember how bad I came back, but I know that I was REALLY disappointed in myself. I'm sure Jim, my coach, also said what he said to try and light a fire under me. From that point, and not making varsity 2 months later, I never wanted to be that person again. I finally just had enough of people telling me that I wasn't going to be good enough, that I couldn't make the cut and my focus just shifted. From then on, I threw a minimum of 4 days/week, usually 5-6 days, and most workouts were an hour and a half long. It wasn't enough for me to just workout. I spent the first half hour of my workouts on basic mechanics, but after that the majority of my workouts focused on spins and getting my pitches to move. I was a perfectionist, and expected perfect spin on all my pitches. I knew I would never throw very hard, so that was never a focus. I wanted to have three different speeds between all my pitches, but more than that, I wanted/needed all my pitches to spin and move. With pitching practices and team practices, I probably averaged about about 10 hours of practice/week. But more than the time I put in, which was really important, I credit my growth as a pitcher more to my focus on details, spins, and the small things that got me the success I ended up with. I lived and breathed by the quote, 'Champions do uncommon things, things that are boring and tedious to others.'"
Thor, The Viking Bandit - index page- Part 1 - rec play through high school.
- Part 2 - experiences as a college player
- Part 3 - experiences as a professional pitcher
- Part 4 - future including high school coach, private pitching instructor, and some longer-term possibilities
Labels: national pro fastpitch, pitching
Permanent Link: Thor, The Viking Bandit - part 1
Can't Fight City Hall Or Bad Calls
by Dave
Monday, June 01, 2009
I've seen some pretty bad calls lately. So have you. I guarantee it. But, as I constantly must remind myself, you can't fight them. Worse, by arguing them or mouthing off from the stands, you very well can make matters worse. I advise against arguing calls. I hope you hear me on this. I hope I can take my own advice!
Recently, one of my daughters played a tournament in which the championship game was played against the host team. For years I have sung the praises of the tournament's umpires. I felt they were consistent, fair, and generally as talented a crew as any I had ever seen operate under any organization's sanction. This tournament was, with a few exceptions, not any different. But, man oh man, when we got into the championship game against the host, everything went out the window.
Our pitcher had a pipe into which to pitch. Their pitcher had a dumpster. I was thankful it wasn't my daughter doing the pitching. And ... then ... our young, inexperienced pitcher started to lose her cool and in came my daughter. Oh, no!
My kid is very experienced and understands that umpires have different strike zones. She also understands that sometimes the umpires are very close to being against you and for your opponent. We played against a host team at Pony nationals several years ago. I wrote about that at the time. My kid had learned a big lesson back then. Too bad I'm not as good a student as she is!
So my daughter adapted to the pipe, our kids swung at anything close, hitting many, and we were able to pull out a win thanks to an error by one of their outfielders. There's an important lesson in this experience. You can expend a large amount of psychic energy to get angry at bad calls. Alternatively, you can keep your boil down to a simmer and just keep going. If the softball gods are on your side that day, you can overcome some pretty bad umpiring.
Importantly, if you allow your emtoions to get the btter of you, if you give yourself a handy excuse on which you can blame your future loss, tyhe chances of experiencing a loss go up dramatically. Take the WCWS now underway. Danielle Lawrie has quite a good drop curve. Thrown, as it is, around 70 mph, it is pretty much unhittable. An extremely disciplined crew might lay off that pitch. You're not going to hit the thing. You might just as well take it. But if it is being called for strikes, what the heck are you gonna do then?
The camera angle which ESPN uses for its broadcasts is sometimes that great view of the pitch over the shoulder of the umpire. While, geometrically speaking, there is some room for error in perception, I think you get a pretty good idea of where the pitch is. Lawrie threw several drop curves which I feel comfortable claiming would get the ring up, a good 90% of the time. But yesterday, she got not one of these. The umps were pinching her east to west. I'm pretty sure she was getting upset with the zone but she didn't let it show that much. And she found a way to get through while not costing her team a shot at the overall title. She struggled for sure but she didn't let it take her out of the game.
A local HS team purportedly faced a similar pinching. I saw a few of these pitches late in the game. I wouldn't ordinarily say that the ump's pinching was egregious per se. But I also happened to witness the strike zone when the other team's pitcher was chucking. She through several pitches which were between 2 and 4 inches further outside and up and out of the zone to boot that were called strikes. nbsp; There was definitely something going on here but I didn't see enough of it to be 100% sure.
Several weeks ago, we were watching one of several games out in the outfield by some stands that had been set up. One of the umps from an earlier game took up a seat by us. She's a nice lady who is very good about handing out advice for parents of softball players so we struck up several conversations while we watched a game. She made some important points about plate umps and making the adjustment to their zone rather than getting upset. She told of an acquaintance who has a very low zone, remarkably low. Another has a very high zone. Some are big east and west. Some like the inside corner but not the outside. Some umps are very large north and south but want to see the whole ball come over white. There are nearly as many strike zones as there are umpires.
And there is nothing you can do about it. You can't go into warm-ups, realize that your inside stuff is working best today, and then dial up the ump who gives the inside but not the outside. You have to fit into whatever you happen to get on the day where your XYZ pitch is moving the best.
This is the primary reason why I think pitchers should NOT really develop two or three pitches. We discussed this a few months ago but the leading wisdom suggest something left or down, something up or right, and something with a chnge of speed. I think you really need to have something up, down, right, and left, and, and, and something with a change of speed, or two somethings.
You never know what you are going to get. You may get a guy who normally has a very broad zone and today his feet are swollen, his shoes pinching him, maybe his blood pressure is up or he feels a little queasy. Maybe the plate ump wants to get back home to put medicine on his pet parakeet's beak. Maybe he or she really has absolutely nothing to do later and privately hopes this game goes 4 hours. Who can say what the mental or physicval state of the umpire is going to be? Who can say which ump will show up at the biggest game of your year. You've got to be ready regardless.
So tyhe first lesson today, boys and girls, is you cannot control the plate ump no matter how badly you would like to. Getting mad serves absolutely no purpose. OK? Do you have that, Dave?
There was a contentious game the other day at which there were any number of bad calls. I didn't see that much of it because I was at another game. I stopped by in the 8th or 9th inning. The fans for one side were getting pretty ugly. In the end, they felt that the game had been stolen from them. I can say neither that I agree nor disagree. I believe the game was badly called. I believe it is within the realm of possibility that the umpires harbored some resentment against the one team, or some sort of motivation to call against them. I really did not see enough to make an informed judgment ... until someone associated with the team uploaded a video of a few bad calls to the internet.
There were a host of calls which the one team objected to. I guess I didn't pay close enough attention to really make judgments on most of these while watching the video. But one of the calls was absolutely horrendous. The issue of watching it in real time is not in any way relevant. It is not very much a matter of judgment or of positioning of the umpires. It was just a horrendous call, it was horrible. The ump who made the call had no business making any call. He demonstrated unfitness for duty - a complete lack of understanding of the rules - in making the call. It was just that bad. I defy anyone to watch the video and draft up a memo, under the rules, supporting the call. This guy was experienced though I think at this point, he should not be permitted to gain any future experience. I felt so strongly about this call that I took time out to write to the state athletic commission to have this guy's actions examined. I hope they pull his certification. I hope they prohibit him from ever calling a high school game again. And I was a disinterested party at that game.
It occurs to me that the call in question, while definitely a rally killer, really did not determine the outcome of that game. The team could have overcome it. They could have sc ored runs at other times, played a little better or smarter, or some hoe pulled this game out. They were evidently the better team. But I believe they lost that game because they allowed the ummps to take them off their game.
Conversely, I think Danielle Lawrie could have had a near meltdown, had she chosen to, given that the umps were pinching her. She's far too experienced - having been to the WCWS and Olympics before - to allow that to happen. Do you think she got mad when one of her drop curves really hit the zone and the ump called ball four? Of course she got mad. What else could she have done? But she didn't let it show and she didn't let it effect her subsequant performance.
There's a lesson in that. See if you can do anything with it.Labels: mental toughness, pitching, umpiring
Permanent Link: Can't Fight City Hall Or Bad Calls
Magic Number?
by Dave
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
I have read numerous pieces and heard plenty of discussions recently regarding the wisdom of developing three pitches and only three pitches. Three seems to be the magic number. A recent piece in Fastpitch Delivery discussed this notion while providing many further thoughts about how one should go about developing three and only three. Additionally, I have heard several coaches at levels from 10U up to and including Div-I college criticise any pitcher who claims to have more than three. I believe I understand what these coaches are talking about and don't necessarily disagree with their philosophy. At the same time, I do not believe it is good advice to tell a developing pitcher to get to the magic number and then stop. I believe this advice is absolutely wrong but I need to develop the topic in order to explain why I feel that way.
Some college coaches ridicule the notion that pitchers have 6, 7 or possibly more pitches in their mix. The rub is, when the coach goes to scout the pitcher, views her video or just happens to watch her pitch, she really only has 3 "good pitches." Additionally, many coaches advise against "using everything" or trying to make sure a good percentage of the pitches you have learned are used at least once during a game.
I have tried out too many pitchers to count. Indeed many times girls tell me they have 4, 5, 10 different pitches and then, when I ask them to throw these, I cannot tell the difference between pitches. I have tried out girls whose fastball is 53-54 and change-up is 51-55! I have seen girls who claim to throw a drop but it doesn't drop as much as their fastball. I have seen righties throw a screwball which moves more to the catcher's right than does their curve. I have caught girls who throw ten pitches which not only all do the same thing but on which their delivery is virtually identical - they make the same hand and lower arm motion on the drop as they do on the fastball, curve, change, etc.
I do believe that many times when a girl claims to have more than 3 pitches, either she really does not or everything beyond three is not ready for prime time. It takes a ton of work to have more than three pitches. Most are not willing to put in that amount of work. So attempting to have more than three can pollute the other pitches and cause everything to mish into a mash of mud. So from that perspective, keeping it to three is probably good advice.
Many coaches believe most pitchers should focus on what they are good at and what is working while ignoring their other alleged pitches. I would also agree with this. When Taryn Mowatt pitched her team to the NCAA title, she did so throwing a vast majority of that famous backhand change-up. That pitch was really working for her on that day. She needed very little else. So she shouldn't really have tried to throw much else.
My daughters pitch and many times the worst mistake I can make while calling their pitches is to force them to throw something else after they have been shutting down an opponent over several innings using mostly one pitch. My younger daughter has quite a good dropball. She also has a good change-up. In one game, the drop was putting the batters down pretty easily. So, what did I do? I started calling the change! And they started hitting her!!
When I think back over the several big games she has pitched over the past 3 years, she has mostly used the drop when she was successful and everything else when she wasn't. It finally struck me very recently that I have been mixing it up too much and need to just begin each game expecting the drop to be her number one pitch, period. We will spend more time perfecting the drop, perhaps throwing two to three times as many drops as other pitches and work towards getting her real command of it. We'll work on other pitches, of course, and I'll get into that soon. But it should have been plain to me that her best pitch is the drop and most of the time, that's what she should be throwing rather than trying to "use them all".
I get the idea that most pitchers do not nearly own quite as many pitches as they lay claim to. I also get the idea of using what is working and laying off everything else. Just to be clear, that doesn't mean you use one pitch 100% of the time but it does mean that you use the one that is working more than 50%. Other pitches can be worked in but their purpose is mostly to set up the one or two main pitches.
Still, when we are talking about a girl who is not a Div-I ace, I think the advice to develop three and only thee pitches is not particularly useful. The first, most obvious question is, "which three?" In fact the article in Fastpitch Delivery tried to hash out that specific issue and conclude which three the writer felt were correct.
It is pretty easy to examine college ball and determine which pitches the majority of coaches want their prospects to possess. Most likely those would include straight drop, riseball and something else with a different speed like a curve or change.
To the uninitiated, the fastball drops out of the game picture as soon as other pitches are mastered. I recognize that many pitchers early in their career throw nothing but fastballs. I suspect that many top level pitchers in years past arrived at high school or college with little else. But in today's game, even the fastest fastball gets rocked at very young ages like 12U. Some few incredibly odd girls play 12U ball at the highest national levels with little more than a 55-60 mph fastball. But the kid who tops out at 55 at 12U and 14U will be hit by even average teams which do their batting practices with the machine turned up to 60. Most good age group players can hit the fastball. Young girls in today's game can hit almost any speed.
You can look to pitchers like Japan's Ueno and conclude the fastball is not out of style everywhere. But Ueno does more with the ball than merely throw it fast. She puts movement on it via subtle hand manipulations and then of course also throws it hard while changing speeds at will. She also can put it just about exactly where she wants it!
I don't know why we don't teach this approach in the US but we don't. I've yet to find a pitching coach who teaches it. I think it could add something to a pitcher's game that isn't there now. But we do not use subtle fastball movement (the equivalent of baseball's cutter and two seamer) in today's American fastpitch softball.
As an aside, I have my daughters experimenting with two seamers but it's just an experiment. We do it to break up the monotony. My younger daughter claims that it is "fun." I disagree. When I try to catch two seamers, I have difficulty predicting where the ball is going to go. There are a few welts on my legs as a result - such fun! Perhaps in time, through numerous repetitions, this may become a little more predictable. For now it's just "fun."
Back to the subject, when a girl begins lessons, she starts with the fastball and the emphasis is and should be on mechanics. Once she has gotten into a pretty good routine on the fastball, once her mechanics have been built up pretty well in her motor memory, she usually begins learning the change. Some coaches begin this right alongside the fastball, before the fastball mechanics are set. Some coaches don't really emphasize changes until much later. I don't understand this second approach. Up until 14U, a pitcher can get by with a mediocre fastball if she also has a very good change. There are also valid arguments against teaching anything but the fastball until the motor memory has been solidified. I tend to agree with that thinking but I also know that even 10 year olds can get hit pretty hard if all they have is a fastball.
Later on, coaches begin working in other pitches. Usually this indicates what the coaches like to teach rather than any sort of logical progression. Some coaches have thought out the issue of what to teach next based upon many years experience of watching their students struggle with one pitch while quickly learning another. That's probably the better approach. Still others watch the way a kid learns something and may make adjustments, moving to other pitches if they feel this kid just isn't going to learn that pitch right now. That's probably the best and most efficient approach. Don't try to pound a square peg through a round hole.
Many coaches get bored or feel their student is getting bored when all they do is work the fastball or fastball and change. They get to the third pitch, whichever one it is, pretty quickly. Then, after the third, a fourth, fifth and whatever is initiated. Usually pitching coaches will move on to other pitches long before the student has mastered the second, third or fourth. They do this mostly because they are being paid and feel pressure to make sure their clients are satisfied they are getting their money's worth, not because they philosophically believe they should be doing it. So the typical young pitcher after about a year or two of lessons will claim she knows 4, 5, 6 or possibly more pitches. This is the phenomenon I witnessed while trying out pitchers.
By the time a pitcher gets into high school and perhaps is in hot pursuit of a college scholarship, she probably lays claim to 5 or more pitches and believes she really owns these. So when she makes her college video, it is normal for her to want to include fastball, change, drop, screw, rise, and several other pitches. That's true even if she really uses primarily one particular pitch in games. She believes she has lots of stuff and she wants to display her stuff to the prospective college coaches. Coaches, of course, get bored to tears when they view such videos and cannot distinguish the fastball and drop from each other. They automatically discount whatever else they may have seen in a positive light.
But in the early years, what sticks out to me is how a parent, coach or pitcher would know, before trying out many pitches, what is going to work for her. We all have slightly different bodies. Every kid learns different things at different paces. One girl will generally struggle with the drop and the curve while progressing speedily through the screw and then the rise. If she doesn't try them all, she is not going to know which one works for her.
Also, even when a kid seems to learn one particular pitch very quickly, that doesn't mean that a year or two from now, she is going to continue to progress with it. Many times I have seen pitchers who learn the drop very quickly in one year start losing it sometime later and instead develop a killer sweeping curve. They appeared to develop a good drop early on but some of that was luck, some of that was physical, and they were never really all that comfortable throwing the thing. Later, their bodies matured, they found "religion" with the curve, and that is the pitch they enjoyed throwing more than any other. So they worked harder on the curve, enjoyed throwing it - were willing to throw curves all day until dad refused to catch anymore, and developed relative mastery over it. Thier drop falls by the wayside and is not used often thereafter.
The same sort of dynamic can happen with any pitch. You won't know until you try them all. And it is often not the first impression which dictates what is going to be good several years into a pitcher's career. I know that when Jelly Selden arrived on the scene, she was said to be a riseball pitcher. I don't remember her throwing very many drops early in her college career. Then Lisa Fernandez began coaching her. This past year, I would say that Jelly threw predominantly dropballs in the games I saw.
Another pitcher I have watched used to throw mostly rises and now it seems as if a variety of drop-curves and screws are most dominant in her repertoire. That could be the result of many factors but I don't care to analyze what those factors might be. The point is, nobody really knows what a pitcher is going to use one, two or three years from now. So telling her to learn only three would seem to be counter-productive.
There is one issue I would like to raise in this context. The issue is what I call "pitch pollution." Pitch pollution occurs where a pitcher does not have relative mastery over one pitch and then tries to learn a very similar one before really owning the previous one. If we think of the possible hand manipulations as a clock, a straight drop would be 12-6. A sweeping curve could be described as 3 o'clock to 9 (or 9 to 3). Then the drop curve is somewhere between the two. If a pitcher tries to master all three pitches simultaneously, she can run the risk of all three coming out as if they are the same pitch. Her straight drop doesn't drop straight down. Her sweeping curve tends to drop and sometimes doesn't really curve. Her drop curve is sometimes a straight drop and sometimes a sweeping curve. That's pitch pollution and the result is three pitches that are really just one.
The way to avoid pitch pollution is to really master one before the other, similar pitch is learned and then, after both are fully being implemented, to practice them alongside each other while paying special attention to distinguish between the different rotations and action of each. What we seek is pitch purity - true desired action on each specific pitch. I talked about drops and curves but this is also true with respect to rises and screws.
Many times pitchers who lay claim to a rise are throwing screws with slightly less screw. They don't angle the pitch in the way they might a real screw. They are trying to throw the rise but the spin does not show a straight 6-12. Instead it is off kilter and the result is it doesn't rise. (No, lets' not get into the debate about whether a rise actually rises). Sometimes a pitcher might have a pretty good rise but her screwball goes all to heck because she can no longer get any lateral movement on it. It has been polluted by the rise snap. This is why, it is so important for pitchers to throw as much as they can. They need to continually purify pitches and that takes a lot of work.
In addition to experiencing pitch pollution over the course of an early career, you can also experience this after a long lay off. Some pitcher genuinely owns numerous pitches on multiple planes one year. She then takes off for a month or two during the winter. She starts throwing everything again in January aiming for the spring season. But early on, her fingers, wrist and arm get themselves confused and her cruve is a drop and her rise a screw yet again. This can be very frustrating even for a well experienced pitcher.
I suggest trying to plan a natural progression in the early pre-season to purify one's pitches. The first time out maybe just throw. The second time, throw the fastball and change. The next time out throw a few fastballs to warm-up, enough changes to feel like you are getting it back, and then one other pitch. Stay with these three until the third feels right and progress with a fourth which involves another plane. Then gradually work all your pitches into the pre-season workout while making doubly sure they are working on the right planes, with the correct spin.
Getting back into the subject of the magic number of pitches - whether that is to learn 3 total pitches or to use just one or two in games, there is yet another consideration. One of our pitching coaches like to talk about pitches "taking vacations." On any given day, a pitch can decide it is going on vacation and not coming back until you really invite it home. There is little you can do other than to simply keep working on it until it comes back. And, more importantly, you really cannot predict when one might leave or know for sure when it will be back. So what are you supposed to do when one of your pitches goes on vacation and cuts your selection from three down to two?
There have been way more times than I can possibly count in which a pitcher has lost one of her mainstays for a game or for several tournaments. One pitcher Ican think of, off the top of my head, had a pretty good dropball. But when she tried to throw it on one particular field, the landing area was so chewed up that she could not get the thing for a strike. She walked several hitters consecutively and was in big trouble. There was no way she was going to be able to land a drop that game. There was no field crew around to fix the mound area and if there had been, they didn't have equipment or dirt to fix it with. She had to use something else or we were going to be eliminated. But she had nothing else. She was stuck with just 3 pitches and one was not going to show up. Her fastball was pretty good but the opponenet could hit it regardless of where she placed it if that was all she threw. Her change was reasonably good too but it was not a good enough difference in speed to really matter ... unless she also had the drop working. So we had to pull her.
On a few occassions,pitchers I have worked with have experienced the loss of a pitch for several weeks. Even my own daughters do this from time to time. One kid has cruised along with her screw doing the majority of the heavy lifting until one day we found ourselves in a tournament and the screw stayed in bed because it was tired. Luckily she had something else to go with the other 2 pitches and they pulled her through. In the specific instance which first comes to mind, this involved an elimination game in which the fastball and changes were OK, the screw was not working but two curves, one underhand, the other overhand with very different action, came for the party. That was a very good game in which few runners got on base and all of those were early on, resulting from base hits on poorly thrown screws.
As a further comment on limiting the number of pitches, there are times when a limited pitch selection can play right into an opponent's strong suits. There have been many times when a pitcher was throwing perfectly well. She had all her stuff on her three main pitches. And the other team was teeing off on her. Many teams have one particular style they teach their batters. All styles have their own strengths and weaknesses. And it is just possible that a pitcher with particular strengths can sometimes run into a team whose strengths exactly match hers. In those cases, she needs to adjust. But if she does not have something to pull out of her hat, she is out of luck.
On one fine summer day, a fairly well experienced pitcher faced a very well experienced team. The pitcher threw good screwballs, a very good change-up, and a reasonably fast, well located fastball. Her opponent was an extremely well disciplined rotational hitting team. They sat on pitches they knew they could hit. The pitcher's first pitch was a fastball on the outside corner but called a ball because this particular ump had a narrow, low strike zone. Her next pitch was a high and tight screwball which clipped the inside corner of the "objective strike zone," the rulebook strike zone. Ball two! Her next pitch was also a screw but she brought it down a bit to see if the ump would give her that corner, if the pitch was lower. That ball was retrieved a few minutes later after the field ump had stopped twirling his hand and the batter had rounded the bases.
So, there she was, facing a good rotational hitting team. She thought maybe the ump was pinching the zone. So she threw a change-up, strike one. Then she tried a fastball on the outside corner again. The disciplined batter did not go for it and the ump did not raise her right hand. 1-1. Another fastball, closer in, ball 2. Change-up, strike two. Change-up, strike three. One out, down 1-0. The next batter stood in and she threw her fastball on the corner, ball one. Screwball high and tight but over the plate, ball 2. Change-up, double.
At this point, it was pretty clear the ump would not give either corner. She could and did throw it high to the batters and sometimes it would be a strike. The change was working pretty well but a few batters were sitting on and driving it. The screwball was pretty much out of the question. The choice was throw something else or you are going to be eliminated. So throw something else, she did. And those pitches worked. She threw some drops and learned that the ump was pretty liberal down, even away. Drop-curves also brought up the umps arm. And the batters could not hit drops away and drop curves. In fact, they started being very vulnerable to the change when they tried to adjust. Then they started swinging sat the high and tight screwballs when those were reintroduced. As batters began to sit down rapidly, their discipline fell apart and the outside fastball which would not get a strike call started to be swung at. The result of having one or two more pitches than the magical three was a very good outing when disaster would otherwise have occurred.
In conclusion, I understand what college and other coaches are getting at when they reason that a pitcher needs to have "3 good pitches." I am also hip to the idea that a pitcher need not throw "them all" in one game - go with what is working best. But I do not believe that pitchers going through early development stages ought to be told to learn just three pitches and then achieve mastery over them and afterwards stop learning new ones. If you never learn a pitch because you already have your 3 good ones, how do you know whether you might not be a better pitcher by learning the fourth and then maybe dropping one of your existing three? What do you do when one of your good three goes on vacation? What do you do when you have three good pitches and your opponent likes all three?
We do need to simplify the equation. We do need to take steps to avoid pitch pollution and achieve pitch purity. We do need to keep pitchers from laying claim to pitches they don't own and make them work towards perfecting each one individually. When pitchers begin training for the new season, they need to strive for purity rather than being in a rush to get everything back at once. We do need to tell pitchers not to throw 10 different pitches on their college videoes that when taken together as a whole leave the impression that the pitcher really only has one pitch. But young kids should not be discouraged from learning more than three pitches. They should be taught pitches they can learn in a logical progression and be led down the path by coaches and parents away from pitch pollution. There really is no magic number.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Magic Number?
Use Duct Tape For Repairing Ducts
by Dave
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
I remember arriving at the fields one day and seeing our first game pitcher in the parking lot with her father busily doing something in the trunk while she patiently sat in the car waiting for him. He had about the entire contents of the very big trunk of his car on the ground next to him. I wondered what was up so I parked, jumped out of the car and walked towards him to see what was going on. I figured he had a flat or had lost a glove or something in the trunk. I figured maybe I could help. But the girl's father had not lost anything and his tires were fine. He had just discovered a new use for duct (duck) tape! He was wrapping his daughter's worn out cleats with the stuff!!
For those interested in such things, there is no particular good reason to worry about whether you clearly say "duct" tape or "duck" tape. The names have been used interchangeably for about as long as this wonderful, multi-use product has been around. No, you did not mistakenly pronounce it nor hear someone mispronounce it. Both terms are actually considered correct. The tape has been called by both for over 60 years. Don't let Mr. Know-It-All, king of the put-down, convince you that you are a verbal spastic. If you are into such arcane things as the etymology of duct (duck) tape or doubt my accuracy on the point, pay a visit to Wikipedia. But I digress. Back to my friend's invention.
As you can imagine, this guy did not drive to the fields that morning expecting to find a use for the roll of duct tape he usually kept somewhere in his trunk. I imagine the sequence of events went something like this:
Dad (pulling into a parking space): "Come on, hurry up and get your shoes on. I want to get you warmed up.
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "We're playing (so and so) in the first game and you're pitching."
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "I don't know why you don't put your shoes on while we are driving."
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "You would think by now you would realize you have to get ready BEFORE we get to the fields."
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "Hurry up. Get going."
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "Shake a leg."
Kid: "Hey dad."
Dad: (something inaudible)
Kid: "Hey dad. Did I tell you I need new cleats?"
Dad: "No, why?"
Kid: "Cause I do."
Dad: "OK. Tell your mother."
Kid: "I think I did."
Dad: "Come on, let's get going, we need to warm up."
Kid: "I kind of need new cleats today."
Dad: "You what? (expletive)! You aren't telling me you need (expletive) new cleats right now are you? You wouldn't do that, would you? I mean, don't tell me you need new cleats right before a game. That's ridiculous. I don't care if you do need new (expletive) cleats today, you are pitching and playing with what you have now. We don't have time for this. You CAN'T TELL ME ABOUT THING LIKE THIS AT GAMES."
Kid: "I know."
Dad: "Wait a minute, let me see those things."
Dad: "Oh (expletive) (expletive) (expletive)! You have got to be (expletive) kidding me! (expletive) (expletive) (expletive)! Oh wait a minute, I think I have an idea. Give me those things.
This is about where I drove up, perhaps a few minutes before I pulled in. The father fished around in the trunk for a bit. Then he removed the equipment bag, the bucket he uses to catch his daughter, a bucket of balls, the crow bar, a cooler, assorted towels, the tournament t-shirt she just had to have two weeks ago, the little one's bat, a bag filled with whiffle balls, the old sneakers, some fishing tackle, a crab trap, etc., etc. Finally, back deep in the trunk, he found what he was looking for - the duct tape.
The father wrapped her cleats in the tape, held his breath, handed them to his daughter and prayed that his quick fix would be acceptable. It was. And that miracle tape would hold for two games after which he would re-wrap them.
If you have a pitcher for a daughter, there is nothing unusual about the story I just told you. You may have already lived through such an episode. If you don't have a pitcher for a daughter, you may have observed such an event and not realized what was going on. You probably wondered what was happening and didn't equate this event with the kid on the rubber with the weird shoes. You wondered what that stuff was wrapped around the cleats of the pitcher on your team or the one your kid faced. You may have asked yourself or someone nearby, "is that legal?"
Let's face it. Pitchers go through cleats lots more quickly than others. If they don't, they are probably leapers or hoppers. Yes, there are lots of hoppers out there. I have heard and read tons of criticisms about how all these pitching coaches must be teaching the kids to hop because it gives them an advantage. I don't have much time for that today but I sincerely doubt any (many?) pitching coach is intentionally teaching kids to pitch illegally. I suspect that just happens. It does provide an advantage to the pitcher but not necessarilly a competitive one in games, at least that's not the primary advantage of hopping.
The primary advantage of hopping is an economic one. When a pitcher hops, her family is still able to go out to dinner occassionally at Applebee's. &jnbsp; Otherwise, they can't. That's because, if she drags, the family is in hock up to their eyeballs trying to pay for two, perhaps three pairs of decent cleats every season. And in the current credit crisis, with the price of gasoline being what it is, a family just can't afford to buy as many pairs of shoes as it needs without foregoing some sort of "necessity."
Worse still is the fact that many pitchers don't just run through pairs of cleats. They also blow through the multi-hundred dollar pairs of sneakers (they just had to have) when they move indoors to practice! Gym floors and practice mats are just as hard on sneakers as the area in front of the pitcher's plate is on cleats. And you probably practice much more than you pitch in games.
One variation of the above scenario, in the parking lot, is the one where your daughter comes down for breakfast on Friday morning and informs you that she needs new sneakers ... today ... for PE ... or she is going to fail gym class ... and you absolutely have to be out of the house as soon as she leaves for the school bus for an important appointment for some medical specialist which you have tried to make for the past three months ... but she is going to fail gym class and thereby no longer be eligible to play school ball ... and her sneakers look most similar to the snout and mouth of a crocodile ... because after the hole formed at her big toe, she pulled on it and eventually opened a gaping hole which the gym teacher said two weeks ago is no longer acceptable ... and she gave her zeroes every day she showed up like that ... and while your daughter swears she told you about that, you have no recollection and are left simply swearing!
You resolve that your daughter will be going to school late today. She'll accompany you to the medical specialist's office after which you'll be visiting the shoe store and then she can go to school since she doesn't have gym class until last period.
We solved the first of these problems, the one with the cleats. This issue first reared its ugly head long ago. We had credit cards and so were able to procure the needed equipment. But after a while, this became a problem. We sought expert advice via one of the many softball forums which dot the internet and were advised to try this or that brand of shoe, this or that device you attach to any old shoe, this, that, that, this and finally Ringor cleats.
I suppose we probably first balked at the price of this product. They're a bit more expensive than others. But after going through several regular pairs, we finally decided that, if they worked, they represented a more economical approach. You can spend 50 bucks so many times, instead of $100, before you do the actual math. After a while, it is easy to figure that if something costs double its alternative but you go through one of the more expensive ones while 3-6 of the cheaper variety, it makes more sense to spend more. You are actually spending less by spending more.
My daughter really loved her first of two pairs of Ringors. They were lighter and more comfortable than her previous cleats. I believe her feet also were able to "breath" more than with other shoes. They didn't sweat quite as much. Everything aside from durability was a positive. That's nice but the reason we got these was so they would last - so that we would spend less on shoes. That they and we did.
The Ringors last because they have this "Pro-Tec-Toe" built into them. The "Pro-Tec-Toe" is basically a very hard rubber protective shell which runs from about the front of the arch to just beyond the middle of the toe area. This is superior to the devices you attach to other shoes because it doesn't stick out. You wouldn't buy shoes that were a size or two larger than your kid's foot (unless she were in a growth spurt). Why would you want to attach something to the end of shoe if you didn't have to? I guarantee she is going to trip when she runs the bases or plays elsewhere in the field. She may get used to the thing you attach to the shoes but I'm not willing to ruin a pair of cleats to test this out - these attachments do not come off. The "Pro-Tec-Toe" is part of the shoe - it does not stick out. It will not cause you to trip.
Our pitcher daughter's dragging did not wear out the shoe. And generally they were otherwise very durable. We'd probably still be using those shoes today, several years after the purchase, were it not for an unforeseen event, a change of teams. The problem was, on one team, everyone had red cleats to go with their red and white uniforms. It was almost a part of the uniform to have red cleats. Yes, a few of the smart parents bought black but we were, as usual, not among the smart crowd. When we decided to make the jump to another team, we learned too late that their uniform colors were purple and yellow - red cleats were just not going to cut it. So we bit the bullet and sprung for another pair of shoes. But as I said, we are not particularly bright.
As winter turned warmer, my wife decided she had to buy new cleats today. She did a little research and discovered that Under Armour ® had come out with a product of their own which also had a protective shell for pitchers. We decided to give these a try. There was nothing wrong with the pair we purchased. I'm not trying to advocate any particular brand of shoe. And they were cheaper than the Ringors. But, honestly, my daughter just did not find them as comfortable. So my wife returned them and bought the Ringors, this time in black.
So that's cleats. That was the solution to our first problem. But that actually has nothing to do with why I am writing today. The reason I'm writing about this topic has to do with the second problem, the one with the sneakers.
I don't know what sort of training regimen you do but I know we most often throw pitching practice four times a week. Sometimes we do more, sometimes quite a bit more. Sometimes, when rest is more important, we do a bit less. The bottom line is that, in any given year, my daughters are usually throwing about 200 hours or more of pitching practice. Some of this is done out at fields wearing the Ringors. But most is done in a gym or in our basement. This wears out the sneakers pretty quickly.
During some of our pitching practices, you can almost smell burning rubber. If I stop my daughter in the middle of any session and walk over to touch her sneakers, they are very warm, almost hot, to the touch. It is easy to see why they would burn out quickly. And burn they do. I am so shell shocked by the number of pairs of sneakers we wear out in any given year that no number sticks out in my mind. Do we go through 4, 6, 12? I really don't know. But sometimes it seems as if we burn through a pair once a week. Truthfully, maybe once each two months is more accurate. But at the very least, we go through four pairs a year, this for a kid who has about stopped growing. We used to joke that it will be great when she finally stops growing so she can keep the same pair of sneakers for more than a week but that was before she took up pitching. We don't joke about that anymore.
Recently, my wife had a revelation. She was looking online at Ringor cleats for my younger daughter, also a pitcher. She must have clicked on the wrong thing and found what she learned were called "trainers" or "turf shoes." These are suitable for indoor use. And the Pro-Tec-Toes do not mark the ground as the foot is dragged. My wife decied to buy a pair and see how well they last.
I can't tell you that these will last longer than sneakers. We haven't had them long enough to judge that. I can tell you that they are more expensive than cheap sneakers - nothing is more expensive than expensive sneakers. I can also tell you that we are very satisfied with our purchase.
We are happy with the purchase because they are far more comfortable to pitch in. The results were apparent from the first time my daughter used them. We tried them first in the basement and she declared them her favorite without elaborating. Next she used them at a speed / agility clinic. She was able to use these in place of her sneakers for every kind of indoor softball activity. Then we tried them on a gym floor expecting someone to complain because if you look closely at the shoes, they are intended for use on articial turf rather than a wood gymnasium floor. But they did not mark the floor and my daughter said they were as comfortable or more so than sneakers. So we solved our problem with burning through sneakers and that's not all.
More than solving the sneaker burnout problem, we also realized some unanticipated side benefits and that's actually why I sat down to write this morning. You know I quipped about coaches teaching pitchers to hop earlier in this piece and concluded that rather than the coaches being to blame, maybe parents had conspired to do this in order to save money. That's not really why I think so many pitchers hop. I think pitchers learn to hop because you cannot pitch with proper footwork in a gymnasium on a wood floor. Pitching mats are better but they are not perfect.
When I think of my baseball pitching days, one of the things that comes to mind is the difference between pitching in the yard or street and pitching off a mound. The first thought I have is finding the pivot point on the rubber. I used to place my cleats so that the spikes (plastic and then eventually metal) would bite into the rubber - the cleats at the back of the front of your foot push against the rubber. My next consideration was the landing zone where I wanted my cleats to dig in and hold firmly so I could hinge properly and not lose control due to sliding. Softball pitching is obviously different but you still need to have a clean push off and good landing.
The trouble with gym floors is there is no place to push off and they slip a little. I suppose there is good reason for gym floors to be a tiny bit slippery. There has to be a little give and, then, a hold when basketball players are darting back and forth. If there was no give, players would blow out their knees. If there was no subsequent hold, they would slip and fall. Gym floors are made for certain activites. One of these is NOT pitching.
The first time my daughter pitched on a gym floor, she had considerable difficulty. She couldn't throw hard and more importantly, her control was way off. After a few times, she adjusted her motion and did much better. That's troubling. The last thing you want a pitcher to do is practice 200 times in an environment in which she adjusts her motion in order to not fall or just to get better control. If her muscles learn this, and they will, what is she going to do when she is out on the dirt, using a rubber?
When pitchers are young, I suppose any sort of throwing improves them. We certainly don't want our 9 and 10 year olds to develop hops. But little kids seem to adjust better to gym floors, as long as they're flat and have some resistance to them. Older girls with their heavier body weight and much more powerful legs do seem to make more adjustments on gym floors than younger ones. They do seem to devolve into crow hops and leaps. They do seem to adjust their landings to use the natural gym floor slide. The results cannot be good.
Older pitchers need much more than to simply throw. They need to work movement pitches and, more importantly, location. If a pitcher goes several months without pitching from a real mound, adjusting her delivery to get the desired location, when she finally goes onto a real field, she is going to have to adjust back again. She will have wasted a lot of time working on locations for all her pitches. She will probably get the location she desired after much hard work and then she is going to learn that everything she did all winter doesn't just NOT help her location on the real field, but may actually hurt it.
It finally occurred to me that, while I sat there watching our pitchers throw in that gym, there were several hopping. And then I saw my daughter doing it too! Also, she was adjusting her motion to get locations. I was very upset at the propect of her doing this so I began bringing our pitching mat with me to practices. Let me tell you, that was one big hassle.
Our mat is filthy, heavy and difficult to roll up. Once I bring it to a practice, I have to lug it out of the car and back into the basement for our next session. Once I bring it into the basement, I have to lug it back out for the next practice. I didn't enjoy this but developing a hop was worse. There was an interesting side occurence when I brought the mat to practices. The pitchers took one look at that and wanted to use it. So when my daughtet did some hitting or other drills, one of the other pitchers would invariably take over the mat. Then when my daughter returned, they were unwilling to give it up. I had to be the bad guy. That was fun. Get your own darn mat.
Also, as I said, pitching mats are not perfect. They are better than a wood gymnasium floor but while you have a place from which to push off, the landing is different than a dirt one. And, since you don't have cleats on, there is no bite on push off nor hold on landing. The rubber on a pitching mat gives you a place to grab with your feet and to push from but, without the soft clay in front of it, without cleats on, it is not all that similar to a real rubber. When you land on a mat, there is some give. There is also a little slide - more than you would get in game conditions.
The Ringor trainers took care of some of these problems. When using a pitching mat, the cleats on the trainers do allow you to dig in more to the rubber. They also hold on landing better than sneakers. In a gymnasium, they provide enough bite on the wood floor to gain a point of impetus much better than sneakers do. It isn't perfect, just better. On landing, they also hold better. The result is a pitching motion which more closely resembles the real, on the field kind. It isn't the perfect situation but the weather here isn't perfect either. We need to throw. Sometimes that doesn't involve ideal circumstances. The Ringor trainers vastly improve those circumstances.
So that's my revelation for the day. Ringor makes some good products for use on the field and in training situations. These products are durable for pitchers. You will save money on cleats and sneakers. You may also see some side benefits which, for me, are more important. I don't necesarily recommend Ringors over Under Armor but my kid does. You don't have to listen to me and run out and buy trainers. But I'll be watching your location and looking for leapers and hoppers come springtime.Labels: parents, pitching, product reviews
Permanent Link: Use Duct Tape For Repairing Ducts
Throw That Changey Thingy, Girl
by Dave
Monday, September 29, 2008
I hope nobody took me too literally this past summer when I discussed "my new favorite pitch, a backdoor curveball." Despite that discussion, I still am throughly convinced that the best pitch in softball is the change-up. I've never seen a good change-up hit particularly well. I've seen plenty of bad ones drilled but those are bad ones in which the pitcher slowed her arm down, otherwise tipped it, or just did not have enough of a speed differential betwen her change and her other pitches. I've never seen a good to very good change-up hit well. Yet, all too often this pitch is ignored in favor of something more complicated, more sexy.
Early on, everyone is after speed. Pitchers learn proper mechanics and then set off practicing so as to get the pitch speed up as high as possible. Then they learn a change-up and during practice sessions, for every 90-95 fastballs, maybe, 5 to 10 changes are worked in. The result is many pitchers can throw the fastball, some even where they want it, but very few have a change-up which is anything more than a junk pitch. They can't throw it for a strike more than perhaps once out of ten times. And batters quickly learn to lay off of it.
The pitcher builds her speed up and if she is good, she begins to feel as if she can throw the ball past a lot of hitters. At 10U maybe she can. At 12U, that's harder to do. By 14U, she begins to realize that anybody can hit a fastball no matter how fast she throws it.
This has not always been the case. Years ago, some pitchers were able to get by just throwing hard. But as time has worn on, smart coaches have figured out how to turn the jugs machine up to 55, 60, 65. A winter spent hitting pitches five miles per hour faster than 95% of what you'll see during tournament season is now pretty common.
The dominant 10U pitcher works up to 50, a few higher. And many of the batters she faces will be overwhelmed by that. They are neither strong enough nor experienced enough to hit a really fast pitch. But by 12, many girls are in their 2nd, 3rd or 4th year of travel ball, have had at least one coach who wasn't afraid of turning up the pitch speed during the winter, and have matured enough to deal with anything reasonably fast. A few monster girls hit 55 or up and overpower lots of girls but in higher level tournaments, teams can deal with even these speeds.
By 14U, most girls have developed the musculature to turn anything fast around. There are certainly some teams which will fold like a cheap suit on anything close to 55-60. But such teams become increasingly rare. You can get by a game or two with a very fast pitcher but eventually, by your third game, you are going to run into a team which has no trouble hitting it. By 16U, it is relatively rare to find any team which cannot hit almost any fastball.
Moving back to the young pitcher. She builds her speed so as to be at the top of her class. Then she learns a change-up but doesn't pay enough attention to it. Then she learns one of the movement pitches and the change goes to the back burner. In any given 100 pitch practice sequence, she might throw 50-60 fastballs, 30-40 movement pitches, and a scant 10 changes. The result is a fastball which is pretty good, can be located and with good speed; a movement pitch which can be put into the strike zone; and a change-up which can only be thrown for a strike twice out of ten game tries. Again, batters learn to take their lumps and lay off the change.
As time moves rapidly forward, the pitcher learns yet another movement pitch and still keeps her change on the back burner. It never really got the attention it deserved before the new love, the movement pitch, came into her life. She gets batters out by mixing the fastball, located well, with her movement pitch and only throws the change in odd moments. But now she has a new movement pitch which takes up another twenty to twenty five percent of her pitching practice. So perhaps she goes fastball-drop-curve-change in a practice mix of 40-25-25-10. She plows through competition with her drop and new curve while using the fastball far less frequently and mixing in the change-up only when she has absolutely no other choice. If, by this time, she can land 30% to 50% of her changes, she'll probably use one mostly when the count is 0-2 or 1-2. Then it goes to the back of the line until the next time she is way ahead in the count.
The result of such a practice is, eventually, the pitcher becomes fairly patterned. She only throws her change on 2 strike counts. Batters start looking for it then. They struggle against her curve and drop but she almost never throws the fastball. Their only chance is to hit the change and they come to realize that they can sit on it 0-2, 1-2. Sometimes they won't get a change, sometimes they will. Then somebody takes one of those changes and drills it which takes the pitcher's confidence in the pitch down another peg. But no matter, she's working on a riseball or screwball now. She doesn't need the change. She doesn't throw it well anyways. And she doesn't want to give up another homerun, not today.
So now, maybe the 14 year old pitcher has 5 or 6 pitches including the seldom used fastball and the not very good change-up. She throws entire games using just her 3 or 4 movement pitches. But as girls get older, they learn to deal with the curve and drop. They look to see whether the pitcher is throwing her screw today. They begin trying to figure out the pitcher and since everything comes in at pretty much the same speed, it isn't that hard. The pitcher struggles at 18U or in her first year or two of varsity ball. She works all her pitches very hard but just cannot seem to get any better. The typical practice mix now is 15% fastballs - just to warm-up, 80% movement pitches, and 5% change-ups thrown in for good measure and because her work habits have always included throwing a few changes.
She has missed the real opportunity to totally confuse batters. Batters don't deal well with a change-up unless they are sitting on it. If a pitcher never throws her change, due to lack of confidence, as a first pitch or at other times when the count isn't 0-2 or 1-2, batters don't look for it and instead focus in on a smaller selection of movement pitches. That makes guessing quite a bit easier. And when the count goes 0-2, they sit on the change. The pitcher should have a big advantage on 0-2 but if she pulls out her change-up frequently then, that advantage is completely lost. The batter expects a change, watches to see if the incoming pitch looks like it is going to be a strike, and then if it is a change-up in the zone, they typically hit it pretty hard. The result is the pitcher loses what little confidence she might have had and laments the fact that she doesn't have a better change.
The question is, how can we avoid this scenario. The answer is, as soon as a pitcher has some degree of control over a reasonably fast, mechanically right fastball, start working the change. And work it the same way you did the fastball. Instead of the mix of 90-10, how about something different? How about something novel? Why not split your pitching practice 50-50? That is, in 100 pitches, warm up the fastball for say 20, then throw 30 to locations, but then work on change-ups for the remaining half of your time. Get to where the fastball is at least 80% as predictable as your fastball. Be able to throw it for a strike almost as frequently as the fastball and then start locating it where you want.
It isn't as if working on the change-up is going to take something away from your fastball. It isn't going to slow you down. And having a good change-up is actually going to make your fastball lots more effective. All those girls who hit really fast pitches during the winter are going to get a little annoyed when you make them look silly, lunging for pitches which haven't crossed the halfway point to home. They are going to try to adjust. And when you throw your next fastball, they are going to struggle to catch up because you cannot both sit on a change and drive the fastball.
Of course, this requires come crafty use of the change in games. The pitcher is going to have to throw some on 0-0, many on 1-0, 0-1, fewer on 0-2, and perhaps some even when she is down in the count 2-0, 2-1, 3-1 even 3-2. I would advise using the change-up only sparingly on 3-0 as it is possible a girl will be back on her heels, taking and then when she sees something she can tear into, she may be ready enough to drive it. But almost every other count is OK time for changes. Just don't get patterned in your usage.
I remember a coach coming up to congratulate me on my pitch calls. The reason he was so impressed was because I called change-ups on non-two strike counts and because I seldom called them on two strike counts. Big deal! It was hardly brain surgery. The whole idea of throwing the chnage on 0-2 comes from the notion that the batter is either going to take it as soon as she recognizes or otherwise won't be able to hit it. So, you throw the change to the tensed up batter and she strikes out. But I don't see the difference between doing that and using the change 0-1, pushing the count to 0-2 and then throwing something fast past her because her timing is now way off.
I also like the first pitch change-up, especially if it can be landed fairly predictably. That doesn't mean 100% or even 70%. If you throw 50% of your first pitch fastballs for strikes, the same criteria applies to changes. And if you;ve been practicing the way I suggest, you should have about the same accuracy with the change as you have with the fastball. Choosing between fastball and change shouldn't be any more complicated than choosing location. You thorw fastball in, then out, you throw change out and then maybe a little further out. You can go inside but you've got to have the thing below the zone, far inside, or both. What you shouldn't do, once you get the change-up to similar accuracy with the fastball is, you shouldn't treat it like something odd or special. It is just one of your (two) pitches. Mix it in.
As the pitcher ages and learn one or more movement pitches, she will hopefully continue to make time for the change. A practice 100 might look like 15-20 fastballs just to loosen up with a few for location purposes, 25-30 changes, 25-30 movement #1, 25-30 movement #2. In short, keep your change as well tuned as your other pitches. And of course, when it comes time for games, mix it in.
I was having a conversation with a catcher who was learning to call pitches. She was working with a pitcher who had 3 pitches that were working very effectively aside from the change. The pitcher also had two pitches which were not p[articularly reliabel yet. I had previously told her I didn't want her to call the fastball more than a couple times per inning, certainly never twice on the same batter. I told her I wanted to see more change-ups called. I think my precise words were, "you have to work in a change like any other pitch." She replied "do you mean once an inning?" I said, "no, once a batter." I told her I didn;t mean she had to work a change into every batter but she should call it like any of the other pitches she routinely called. She didn;t like that but I stayed on her until she would call the change for any batter in almost any count.
This brings up a couple corollaries which I don't really have time to dig deeply into. But let's just say that, yes, you do need to allow catchers to call pitches and you do need to coach them through this.
Too many coaches call all the pitches in softball. In baseball, it is far more common for the catcher to call the game or most of it. We consider this an important skill for a baseball catcher to possess. And when we switch over to our daughter's games, we call everything and turn the catcher into an extension of the backstop.
Also, when a catcher is first calling a game, too often we just let her (or him) go on their merry way. Now you're calling the pitches. Good luck! It doesn't have to be that way. It shouldn't be that way. You let the catcher ease into calling pitches by sharing the responsibility. And, if you don't like a pitch she called, talk to her about why. Teach her to call the game. Many catchers will call for pitches which give them something they are looking for. They look for something they know they can catch on 0-2 so they don't have to fumble around and then make the throw to first. When a runner is on first or second, they look for pitches they can use to throw out the runner. A catcher left to her own devices will often call the first pitch with a runner on base as a high outside fastball. She won't call for a change-up because it makes her job harder. Coaches need to recognize that and make appropriate adjustments.
A overheard a pitching coach asking his charges how many change-ups they threw in games. One girl volunteered "20" our of an approximately 100 pitch outing. The coach asked how many of those were hit hard. The girl said something like one. The coach then asked how many fastballs she thought she had thrown. She said the remaining 80. He asked how many of those were hit hard and the girl replied, I think, about 8. So, he said, "what does that tell you?" The girl loooked back confused so he helped her out. He said, "if 1 out of 20 change-ups were hit, that's 5 percent , and if 8 out of 80 fastball were hit, that's 10 percent. So what you needed to do to have less balls hit is throw more change-ups." I think that about sums it up.
So philosophically speaking, the change-up is my real favorite pitch. I believe I should see more of them used in games. But any old change-up will not do. There are a couple of things to remember about your change-up.
First of all the motion you use when throwing it must be very similar to what you use for other pitches. You must deceive the batter into thinking you are throwing something else. This takes lots of practice, someone with good eyes watching you while you practice, and, preferably, good instruction on how to throw it.
Secondly, a change-up cannot just be slower than other pitches. It has to be a lot slower. The bottom speed differential has to be at least 10 mph. As your speed goes up, the difference should be greater. If a kid is throwing 50, the change needs to be at 40 or below. If she is throwing 55, 42 is a nice number. If she's up to the sixties, a 15 mph differential would be about right.
Third, anything which tips the hitter should be avoided. You can't accomplish the diminished speed by slowing your arm down. The grip and the last ten percent of your motion is how you slow the thing down. Whereas a fastball is snapped, and each of the other pitches you throw similarly involve dramatic wrist motion, the change-up usually has something all its own. There are variants which involve a dramatic snap like the backhand change you may have have seen Taryn Mowatt throw. Some involve no wrist snap at all where the pitcher's arm is stopped by her side and she only pretends to follow-through after she has released the pitch. Others involve wrist motions which copy those of other pitches but, again, are not used to move the ball. For example, one change-up variant mimicks the wrist movement of an overhand curveball but does not use that snap before the ball is released. Still, to the batter, it appears at least subliminally, that a curveball is inbound.
There are many different grips I have seen used to throw changes. I can't go over all of them here. It should be sufficient to say that many of these grips are intended to either remind the pitcher that she is throwing a change - not to snap - or to prevent her from being able to snap the thing. Usually the ball is placed deep in the hand, off the finger tips. Sometimes the finger tips are placed so they can't get any bite on the seams. Sometimes a knuckle or two is employed in the style of a knuckleball although the object is not to get a true knuckleball. Sometimes, the old stand-by, "OK grip" is employed. In any event, the grip and how the pitch is completed are usually the manner in which the pitch is slowed. Any slowing down the arm speed to reduce ball speed is a cheap imitation of a change-up. It is the biggest tip off to the batter and should be avoided at all costs.
I can't emphasize this point enough. Of all the change-ups I have seen at all levels, the most common mistake is to slow the arm down. The batter can see your arm slowing down. And, in doing this, other body reactions tip the batter even further. A pitcher who has performed her usual arm circle for 50%, 60%, 75% of the cycle and then slows down dramatically is going to give all sorts of body posture clues to the hitter. She'll lean forward, stumble, etc. And the batter will know exactly what is coming next.
Fourth, location is at least as important on a change-up as it is for other pitches. You wouldn't throw your curveball so that it breaks over the middle of the plate. You wouldn't throw your drop ball so that it break from the numbers down to the belt. You wouldn't throw a rise so that it comes across the plate at the belly-button. Don't throw your change-up exactly to the wrong spot.
The place you don't want to throw the change is up in the batter's eyes, especially in from center of the plate. Batter's have an easier time seeing a change-up thrown high. They also find it easier to get their hands to one thrown inside. If you are going up, you want to be out. If you are coming in, you want to be down. Most of the time, you are safest throwing it outside but that doesn't mean it can never be right over the middle, though down, or somewhat inside.
If I were practicing a pitcher on her change, I would make sure she could throw it outside and low for a strike before moving to other target areas. Then I would want her to be able to hit it right below the knees (down to the ankles) in the center. Then I would work alternately outside and inside off the plate in each direction by 6 inches.
The ideal change comes at the batter as if it is going to be a strike at the belt or knees. Then it drops out of the zone. A change that is not all that effective, particularly at older ages is one with a hump on it. In other words, I want you to learn not to throw the change so that it rises up to about the top of the batter's head and then sinks down to her mid-thigh. I think this becomes too easy of a target and this is maybe the second most common mistake I've seen. As batters get better at hitting changes - they never get really good - they learn to deal with any sort of hump-backed change first. On the other hand, if the thing looks fat until it gets to within 15 feet of home and then drops to just below the knee, the batter is probably going to swing at it. If she lays off, it is still probably going to be a strike.
So we've talked a bit about how many girls throw hard and few are capable fo throwing slow at will - using the change effectively. We've also recognized that batters work hard to be able to catch up to any speed a human being can throw. Still they struggle to adjust between very fast and very slow. I hope you recognjize the need for a good change-up. I also hope you will agree with me that the pitch needs a lot of repetition in practice - as much as any other pitch. I hope you can work in an appropriate percentage. The thing needs to get exercised in games - frequently. If you want to know how much to use it, the best I can tell you is, probably more than you think you should. All this assumes you have a change which is deceptive, is much slower than your other pitches, and can be located pretty well. If you've got all thease things together, well, you've really got yourself something. You've got yourself maybe the best pitch you'll ever need. You've made yourself loads more effective.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Throw That Changey Thingy, Girl
Coordinated Pitching Forces
by Dave
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Recently, I sat listening to a pitching coach discuss the attribution of speed to various parts of the windmill motion including the wrist snap, arm circle, and leg movements. The idea was that if you can attribute a certain percentage to each piece of the pie, that would tell you what to work on. To me, this is an over-simplistic, yet overly-complicated approach. Let me explain why I think that.
This coach claimed that he could calculate an approximate range of percentages applicable to the majority of pitchers' speed. He threw out some numbers he believed to accurately depict accurate averages. Then he showed us how this could be verified by arbitrarily choosing a pitcher, having her perform each function, clocking her with a radar gun, and then calculating the percentages of the whole for each.
Let's say that a given pitcher throws 50 mph. She performs a wrist snap and hits about 32. Then she stands with her body trunk motionless while making a throw with a full arm circle and hits something like 47. This translates into 32 over 50 or 64% for the wrist snap; 47 over 50 or 94% less the wrist snap (64%) for 30% attribution to the the arm circle; and just 100% minus 94% for anything and everything else. My numbers are not precise but I think you get the idea.
There is little question to me that the wrist snap is absolutely critical to speed in pitching. Obviously, it is critical to movement pitches as well but we're focused exclusively on speed right now. The arm circle is also an aspect which is obviously really important. These elements plus several others must be perfected in order to succeed in pitching. We go to this particular coach for a number of reasons not the least of which is his ability to explain how to improve wrist snap and arm circle. His emphasis on these two elements is well placed and he's excellent at getting results with the girls. But part of his point in the above exercise is to validate his opinion that leg drive and other pieces of the puzzle are unimportant. I disagree with that opinion.
The trouble with looking at anything in a vacuum is nothing much in our world exists in a vacuum. Wrist snap is important but measuring it involves isolating the motion. This coach had the girls stand with ball in hand, and their arms next to their side. He then had them simply snap the ball to a partner without using their bodies or any other part of their arms. It doesn't take a genius to say that nobody actually pitches that way. It isn't difficult to picture the snap part of the motion and recognize that it takes place within the context of an arm moving very rapidly. In other words, it isn't merely a girl's ability to snap her wrist that generates 64% of her speed. Rather it is her ability to do so while her arm is moving very fast which generates speed.
Maybe it isn't clear to you what I mean. The only way I can explain this is to give you an example. Go get into into the car and drive at or just below the speed limit (I can't advocate even to tournament parents that they exceed the legal limits!) on a major highway. At some point, there will be no cars around you. Roll down the window and stick your arm straight out into the wind - be careful, I don't want any decapitations on my conscience! Now do some arm curls and wrist snaps. It isn't quite as easy as it is with no force against you, is it? The point is, the force of air working against your arm while driving 65 miles per hour is significant enough to require far greater force in order to accomplish an arm curl or wrist snap than would be needed if you were parked on the street. And when you perform an arm circle, that kind of force, though less, is what your wrist is up against. This observation doesn't diminish the importance of the wrist snap but it complicates the physics quite a bit.
Further to the point I'm trying to make, when you perform your arm circle, you are similarly up against forces created when your body moves forward after pushing off the plate. Again, this force is not quite as strong as it might be if you were say standing atop a vehicle moving 65 (something I absolutely do not suggest), but the primciple is the same. That is, a pitcher does not make any of the movements elemental to a windmill pitch in a vacuum. Rather, all of the movements create a coordinated whole which is essential to produce significant force upon the ball and propel it at high speeds. Isolation of pieces of the movement is fine, in and of itself, as are exercises performed to strengthen individual pieces. That analysis is just not enough to completely analyze what is necessary to produce a fast pitch. Performing exercises for pieces of the whole is not enough either. And ignoring pieces is not something I could ever advocate.
When a girl pitches, she first gets her body into position to explode forward. Different coaches approach this subject differently and I tend to be uninterested in it. The bottom line to me is a girl approaches this in the way that feels most natural to her and provides the most relaxed and comfortable circumstance. The goal is going to be to propel the ball rapidly and any movement that involves an initial balanced state followed by a beginning shift in forward momentum is OK with me. Some girls twist, some bring their hands over their heads, some do very little at all other than to begin leaning forwards. I don't have an opinion about what is "best."
Once the body begin forwards, basically the shoulder open to the corner of the infield - in righties towards third base, in lefties towards first. The arm then proceeds overhead in as straight a line as possible along the power line towards home. It swings forward as the shoulders, hips, etc. begin to "close the door." Then, finally, the arm is alongside the body as the wrist begins to snap.
All of the motion which brings the ball to the release point has some impact on the eventual speed after it is released. The wrist is undeniably important. So is the arm speed. But also important is your entire body's inertial force created when all of your weight is thrown forward at some relatively high speed. Likewise, the manner in which your body's inertial forward force is converted into speed at your finger tips, via blocking - the door swinging on its hinges, etc., are also all very important. It is the unified whole, working together not the individual elements operating separately which generates speed.
Just a word on blocking since I seem to have glossed over that. When your body jumps forward, it has a force in proportion to its weight and the speed it is moving. When your landing foot comes down, you, like a batter on the front foot, push against the forward force of your body. This force causes a small part of the force of your body to be stopped and the remainder to shift to the other side, causing an increase in forward speed of the other side of your body. If you land with your left foot while your entire body is moving at say 20 mph, the right side of your body continues forward at something more than 20 mph. This effect is what happens when say you and a friend run side by side with your arms around each other's waists and then the friend suddenly stops. You end up getting catapulted forwards and in front of your friend! Your friend creates a "blocking." You are like a door on its hinges.
In certain respects, my discussion above about performing arm curls or wrist snaps while driving in a car is completely erroneous because in a real sense, a wrist snap is decidedly easier, requires less force, when your arm is propelled forward as a result of the conversion of your body's intertial force through blocking. Similarly, the final piece of the arm circle is sped up as a result of this. The same thing is evident when observing overhand throwing, batting, or any other force application in which the body is propelled forward, one side blocks, and the other side swings on a hinge.
If this were not the case, there would be absolutely no purpose to an outfielder performing a crow hop before throwing home. If her wrist snap or arm movement were the only thing necessary to propel the ball, she shouldn't take any stepo at all since this wastes time! Yet, forward body momentum, blocking, and follow through are all necessary components of many movements within this sport.
As a further point ot this discussion, if you were able to examine the muscular makeup and motions of all best pitchers collectively for the purpose of determining which elements of pitching were most important, I believe what you would find is no absolute pattern beyond some simple likenesses. First of all, longer arms provide a benefit of producing a circle of bigger circumference which basically translates into more speed. Yet the world's fastest pitchers are not necessarilly its tallest ones. Japan's Ueno is arguably the fastest pitcher and she stands far below the stature of a Finch or Osterman.
What the group does share is a higher density of well-tuned fast twitch muscles. That is, what produces speed is not muscle per se but rather fast twitch muscle. The best pitchers are not muscle bound but their muscles contain a high proportion of developed fast-twitch fibers.
Further, many of the world's fastest pitchers do indeed have well developed leg muscles. They do use their legs to propel the ball. Their eight-foot strides show that. Not every pitcher strides that far but many of the top ones do. Monica Abbott frequently lands out at the circle. So does relatively dimunitive Ueno. All these pitchers explode off the rubber, block, and so forth. Legs are important!
The top pitchers' core (abdomen and related areas) muscles are also well trained. And most importantly, all of the muscle groups are trained to work together to create a highly coordinated whole. This is an important point. If you explode off the rubber, then in an uncoordinated manner use your powerful arm to propel the ball while having weak leg and core muscles, what you get, regardless of the speed of the pitch, is ... injuries!
I am a bit of a history and anthropology nerd when it comes to watching TV. I've seen the Discovery Channel shows about Neanderthal man several times. At this point I might be able to write the script from memory! One of the important findings regarding Neanderthal man was the high density of arm bone in the right arm. Scientists view this as indicative of Neaderthal getting loads of exercise with his right arm as a result of learning to use a thrusted spear to kill prey. His right arm was highly developed from use. Development of muscle causes density of bone to increase. So our possible ancestor's right arm bone grew to support muscles developed from hunting.
Softball pitchers might be expedcted to develop similarly large right arms as a result of pitching so much. One would expect a pitcher's pitching arm bicep and forearm muscles to bulge and the arm to grow much larger than the glove hand side. But that doesn't seem to happen in an obvious fashion. Perhaps their throwing arms are much stronger than the other side but it doesn't appear as a hulking, muscle popping appendage. Pitcher's legs do tend to be a bit thicker than others'. And their overall strength is probably somewhat greater. But more important than any particular muscle or group of muscle's strength is the coordination of explosion of all of them.
In conclusion, it is OK with me if you do things intended to improve one aspect of the pitching motion. But do this in moderation. Time spent strengthening the hand, wrist, arm, etc. is important. But you need to strengthen leg and core muscles too. And the most important thing is to make sure you spend a large percentage of your time getting the whole of your body to work together.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Coordinated Pitching Forces
Final Word On Rotational
by Dave
Friday, July 18, 2008
I guess I have gone and done it again. I'm caught dissing rotational hitting yet again! I am going to try hard not to get into this discussion anymore and I want to close the book on my opinions about it. Good enough?
OK, so now lets move on to another subject. It is championship season. Loads of teams are or shortly will be travelling to far-away locations to play against teams from all over the country. I have a little piece of advice for some of these teams, the ones which may be playing in higher level rounds. When you see teams from the east coast, you are likely to run into more than a few which hit using rotational mechanics. I want you to: 1) be able to identify them, 2) pitch them a certain way, and 3) learn to adjust to any adjustments they might make to deal with your pitching.
First of all, you need to identify the rotational swing. Ted Williams is the father (if not god) of rotational hitting. So take a good long look at his swing and commit it to memory. Here is a video of Williams: http://youtube.com/watch?v=JwogLVGtDa8.
Notice the front foot on which the heal is lifted and slammed down. The front knee turns inwards as the heal lifts and then out as it is slammed down. Next the lower half comes forwards and the hips explode open before the hands really begin. The backward loading of the hands by Williams is unimportant - most rotational softball hitters do not do this. Most of them will keep their hands stationery - the upper body load being accomplished by the flying open of the hips. If you see the front heal lift, get followed by the front knee turned inward, and then by the hips exploding open, most likely you have a rotational hitter. Actually, the only element you need to look for is the hip explosion but that has to be before the hands come forward. Every hitter should explode their hips at some point. Rotational hitters do it much earlier.
When you are in game, you may recognize rotational hitters by the movements they make in their practice swing before entering the box. Most will not make a complete swing. You won't see the foot or knee work that is evident in William's swing. But what you will notice is the hip explosion before the bat moves. They are doing this in the practice swing to remind themselves to explode open their hips. Almost every rotational hitter does this right before she steps into the box.
Please take time to watch the Williams video over and over again. You want to form an impression of the rotational mechanic so you can identify it in the heat and exhilaration of games. You want to commit it to memory so you can use a strategy against it.
Once you have identified it, you need to consider what might or might not work against it. I suggest to you that anything low and inside is a decidedly bad idea. If you are facing predominantly right handed rotational hitters, the screwball from righty pitchers is inadvisable unless you have command up and down and can bring it inside and high (at or above the hands) most of the time. If you throw it inside and low, it had better be off the plate - almost hitting the batter - or it will be sent a long distance.
Additionally, pitches which are too fat will be hit by rotational hitters. Anything out in the middle of the plate from the hitter's hands down are going to get hit. The best way to pitch these hitters is with an "inverted L" view. That is, anything outside and/or above the hands . The best pitches to use against this are drop and rise curves from same-side pitchers (righty to righty / lefty to lefty) and screwballs from opposite-side pitchers (lefty to righty, righty to lefty).
Riseballs (particularly outside ones) can be effective but how many youth pitchers do we see with a really effective rise? How many youth pitchers who have decent rises have command of it? You can also use change-ups because many rotational hitters get themselves off balance as they explode open their hips. Not all will do that but it can be an effective approach. The best rotational hitters will be schooled to keep their hands back fairly long to deal with changes If you use the change, you should still use the same "inverted L" approach. But because a change up in the hitter's eyes is a bad idea, I'd stick with the outside corner, preferably moving away from the hitter. If your change is a backhanded one with little lateral movement, I'd keep it low (below knees) and from the middle out.
If your pitcher relies on the fastball, you may struggle against these hitters unless she has very good command and the ump is giving the outside corner (maybe a little beyond it) as a strike. The fastball can be effective against rotational mechanics when it is kept on or off the outside corner. It can also be effective as a high and tight pitch. But if your command isn't all that great and you make mistakes, you are going to pay.
As the game progresses, many rotational hitters and coaches will get wise to your "inverted L" approach. They'll move in on the plate to better deal with the drop curves. The thing you'll need to do in this case is get them to move their feet - throw inside, preferably at or above the hands, without fear. I say without fear because you may have to hit a few batters to get them unsettled in the box. If they move in on you and you succeed at getting them unsettled, now it is time to make more use of the change-up. If you can't get them to move off the plate, you'll need to stick with stuff up in the zone.
If they move up in the box to catch your drop-curve before it slides away, you will also need to make adjustments. You'll have to try to get your curve further out. But with them up in the box, you may be able to sneak in a screwball, even a lower one. If the batter is at the very front of the box, you can probably throw inside and high fastballs but a better pitch might be the screwball starting just inside and moving towards the batter. Rotational hitters can deal with inside pitches very well but nobody can hit a pitch which moves from the inside part of the strike zone, thrown on an angle in, and spinning as much as a good screwball should. They may hit these but they won't hit them anything like they want.
If the hitters move both in and up, you are going to have trouble getting them with drop curves anywhere near the plate. The rise curve and fastball will be more effective, resulting in lots of pop-ups and miss hit balls. You may try high fastballs to deal with this approach by the hitter. And this approach should open up the inside corner quite a bit.
As an aside, rotational hitters generally, though not always, pull the ball. It is when good rotational hitters make adjustments, in their second and third at-bats, that they sometimes will hit balls to the opposite field. A few very strong rotational hitters may actually hit the ball pretty far to the opposite field. But most will hit it weakly there. So position your players in accordance with this expectation.
If you've got a smaller, apparently weaker hitter coming up for her second at-bat, you are pitching her outside, and she is making adjustments, expect balls hit to the opposite field to mostly be little dinkers. Move the opposite field outfielder in a bit. If the girl is big and strong, keep them at regular depth and move your 2B back a few feet to cover pop-ups that might normally be expected to fall out of her range. The balls rotational hitters hit to the opposite field will usually not be line drives. Most of the time they will be pops and grounders. Balls that end up being well hit to the opposite field will almost always be mistake pitches in a little too far and find the opposite field - center gap. They'll have some air under them. So, if you are making use of this strategy, I suggest moving your CF a bit towards that gap.
I offer this tip sheet as a way to deal with the kinds of hitters you are likely to see from certain areas of the country in which the Ted Williams approach has become very popular. It is relevant to note that Williams, a lifetime almost .350 hitter who blasted more than 500 home runs, struggled against lefties. In fact, he hit far less than 100 homers against lefties (as opposed to Babe Ruth who hit nearly 200). He also hit for a sub-.300 batting average against lefties. Why do you suppose that is? I am of the opinion that any lefty who can't hit lefties is vulnerable to outside pitches, particularly curves. My approach is based on that analysis. It has been ratified in high school and 18U games I have observed over the years.
Finally, the real reason I wrote this piece is not for you. Rather, it is for my wife because she will be with my daughter at a tournament this weekend. I cannot be there so I initially wrote this into an e-mail for her use in my absence. My daughter has been schooled in this approach but she is a bit slow to identify rotational hitters. I want my wife to become a second set of eyes for her - a set that is adept at identifying rotational hitters.
I hope this helps someone besides my daughter!
Best of luck to you at whatever nationals you attend. Please forward your stories from nationals. Let me know how many pure rotational teams you saw. Let me know if you beat them. Let me know what strategies helped you get their hitters out.Labels: game strategy, pitching, rotational
Permanent Link: Final Word On Rotational
My New Favorite Pitch
by Dave
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
I have a new favorite pitch. OK, so that's not entirely accurate. I can't say that I have any "favorite pitch." I like almost as many different kinds of pitches as I do various kinds of musical genres. (For the record, I appreciate Mozart as much as I do Hendrix, punk rock, progressive and everything in between but no, I don't like gansta rap or any other rap.) I have about equal appreciation for all pitches but when I see a particular one thrown very well, I usually proclaim that it is my "new favorite pitch." So that's what I'm doing today.
My "new favorite pitch" is a backdoor, underhand curveball. I saw it thrown well and used properly the other day. The girl who threw it is a high school sophomore who is known to be a very successful pitcher, even at high levels for her age. A few years back, she and her team went pretty deep at NSA nationals. The girl is not the fastest pitcher around. She is known to have good movement, use the screwball very well, and to throw moderately fast. Her fastest pitches usually come on those with which she hits a batter!
The girl was working against a very well schooled rotational-/western-/hip-first-load-/Ted Williams-style hitting team. This pitcher has a good screwball but I do not believe she has command up and down with that pitch. She also has a good riseball but she sometimes leaves it down too low. Those two pitches, when thrown badly, can be death when facing a good rotational team. So she resorted to the backdoor curve and cut them down, one by one.
The girls who were facing this pitcher, while well-schooled, were pretty young. Ordinarily one might expect a rotational team to hit anything inside very well. But these girls were unaccustomed to this pitch. Many backed out of the box and then were stunned when blue called it a strike. They made adjustments as each one fell in succession. They either positioned themselves further from the plate or stepped in the bucket as pitches were released. This opened the outside corner and the pitcher continued to mow them down, using her other stuff. This made the backdoor curve even more effective.
To my knowledge, there are two ways to throw a curve. One is with the hand coming over the ball and the other is with it beneath the ball. In either case, the hand finishes in front of the lower belly. I believe it is possible to use any curve through the backdoor. I'm not partial to the underneath version per se. But what I observed the other day was one thrown underneath so that's what I am talking about.
I have worked my daughters on curveballs (underhand and over) for a couple years. One throws a good one, the other is still struggling to get any sort of command. The one throws more drop curves in games than any other pitch at present. The other does not have a curving pitch which is ready for primetime - she has only thrown a few in games, usually with bad results.
With my older one, the one with decent curves, we are now going to work on the backdoor variant. I believe this pitch takes a lot of work to perfect. Most young girls work curveballs which land from the middle of the plate out. Ideally, a girl should be able to clip the outside, front corner of the plate with some of her curveballs before the pitch is game ready. Getting the backdoor variant takes still more work.
When curveballs are thrown, the right-handed pitcher lands her front foot just slightly to the right of her power line. She then swings her arm back towards and beyond the power line after she begins to release the ball. The backdoor curve needs, obviously, a little more distance to the right in order to get to where you want it. From what I can tell, that involves a slightly more to the right step and a slight change to the arm angle. Big changes to either or doing one without the other seems to yield bad results. If you step too far to the right, you are probably going to hit the batter and/or not get enough sideways torque on the ball to make it move back to the left. Similarly, changing the arm slot too much is going to result in stress and strain to the arm and shoulder as well as less torque and an overly inside pitch. Doing one adjustment and not the other is going to mess up the pitch entirely. You need a slight adjustment to both to get what you are after. I'd say start with a one inch step to the right and very slight modification of the arm angle and work from there.
You really need to find ways to practice this pitch off the field of play. I suggest getting your life-sized cardboard cutout of Jeter, A-Rod, Bustos, or some other right hand batter and setting it up in the right-handed batter's box. As an alternative method, set up the batting tee where a righty usually stands. Then try adjusting your curveball pitch delivery ever so slightly and see if you can get a good moving curveball to land gradually to the right of its usual spot. Set a goal of moving the pitch back to the right a couple inches at a time and be happy when you get it to go where you want. Over a lot of time and effort, you should be able to have a curveball which curves and which you can use on the inside corner.
It is difficult to find an aim point which suits your backdoor curve without seeing it in person. Everybody's curve moves a bit differently. If it swings two feet to the left, I suppose you want to throw it as if you are trying to hit the batter in the side. If your movement is less, you might want to aim at the front knee of the batter - obviously depending on where she positions herself. That will bring the pitch to the inside corner or just off it on the inside.
Remember, you still want the thing to catch corners. There's a term for a curveball used in games which lands in the center of the plate. That is "extra-base-hit." It is OK to throw the pitch too far inside in games but you don't want to hand anyone a free trip to first. While there is definite value to landing the thing for an inside strike, it's OK to get a very close ball call since the batter presumably can see just how close she was to getting punched out. But if you are not able to ever land the pitch for a called strike, it definitely loses much of its effectiveness. Batters need to know that they have to guard against it rather than just letting it go by.
Also, as you move up, I caution against a low inside backdoor curve thrown to rotational hitters. That one time the hitter does not step into the bucket or positions herself at an optimum location, she is going to hit this pitch a very long way if it lands in her hitting power slot. Most hitters of whatever variety strugle to hit a backdoor curve that is thrown along the height of their hands or just below them. Anything belly button down should probably be avoided, particularly when throwing against rotational hitters.
The underhand curve is a nice pitch even when it is thrown as a slider, a dropping pitch (though again, not too low) or a flat sweeping curve. And it can be even more effective when its got a bit of rise. The girl I saw throwing the underhand backdoor variety could throw it on each plane. One hitter saw it drop, another saw it rise, and some saw it remain flat (slide) as it curved back into the inside corner, right at their hands. Nobody hit one of these. Discussing the rise curve in detail is beyond the scope of what I wanted to discuss today. Suffice it to say that if you can throw curves which rise, sink and slide, you could consider learning how to make any of these come through the backdoor. You decide which you want to try first. Perhaps a little experimentation will indicate which is easiest to do first. But I think the rising curve is probably the most effective. That's just an observation. Feel free to disagree. And anytime you can get the curve to come in via the backdoor, it is going to make your other pitches, including a curve on the outside corner, more effective.
Having a good inside backdoor curve can open up the outside corner for fastballs. It can also confuse hitters when you rely on a nice tight screwball in at the hands but off the plate. It can make a batter unsettled in the box causing her to move her feet around. Everybody wants to adjust to a pitch they are having trouble hitting. The beauty of an inside backdoor curve is the adjustments most hitters make to deal with it are really bad for their hitting mechanics.
As I said earlier, this is merely my "new favorite pitch." I have seen some top level college pitchers use it effectively. This well-known experienced high school soph. used it effectively more recently. But all these pitchers already had sound mechanics and were throwing effective curveballs before they tried the pitch. One should not simultaneously try to learn a curveball (or general pitch mechanics) and the backdoor curve. You've got to have a good curve before trying to make it come in via the backdoor. I have observed coaches try to teach the backdoor curve while just really teaching the curve. The result is a girl who can't throw a curveball that actually moves but thinks she has something because she is hitting the inside corner with her non-moving curve. Get the curve down first to a useable-in-games degree and then work on bringing it to the inside corner.
Sometimes when you try to learn a new pitch, the old ones feel neglected, get angry and leave. I haven't experienced this per se with the backdoor curve. But I caution against ignoring the curve you use to punch out most hitters on the outside corner when you try to land the thing inside. If anything, you need more repetitions with your old reliable curveball once you start trying to land it inside. Give it more love and attention than ever before so it won't leave you for being unfaithful. Let both pitches and all your other ones know that you are one big happy family and nobody here is unloved.
Best of luck!
Follow-up posting
Steve writes in to comment:
"A 'backdoor' curveball and/or 'backdoor' slider has always meant a pitch from a LHP to a RHB or from a RHP to a LHB that starts OUTSIDE the plate and breaks BACK into the plate. Thus ... breaking in the 'backdoor.' This is opposed to, as you note, starting into a batter and breaking out over the plate. Backdoor is an 'old school' definition that shouldn't have any difference in softball as it has in baseball. However, I've heard this mis-definition now 2-3 times in softball. I believe what you describe is just a good old fashioned inside curve. I can cite many articles, definitions etc. from a quick google search, but I am assuming you can do that on your own if you so choose. The oldest definitions and MLB notes/articles always demonstrate the opposite handed pitcher throwing to a batter (Left to Right or Right to Left) ....therefore the 'backdoor' pitch must be how I described."
Steve, I wonder about the "mis-definition" you've heard "now 2-3 times in softball." I disagree with your characterization of the backdoor. I'd prefer not to Google this in order to prove a point since it seems to be a difference in symantics but here goes:
Performing a Google search of the "back door curveball" yielded me:
1) Entirely irrelevant result - not sports related
2) According to "The Language of Baseball - Dictionary and Research Guide"
a curveball that appears to be outside the strike zone but curves in to cross the corner of the plate.
3) A video called "Vin Scully gets his first chance to broadcast Clayton Kershaw's curveball" in which a lefty pitcher back doors a lefty batter.
4) A Wikipedia article briefly discussing the slider which makes no mention of backdoor.
5) A forum with nothing much on point.
6) An article entitled "4 Reasons to Throw the Backdoor Curveball" written by former college All-American and professional softball player, Cindy Bristow, which refers exclusively to the backdoor consistent with the way I have defined it.
7) Entirely irrelevant result - not sports related
8) An article about a pitcher trying to make it to the big leagues which does not describe what is meant by backdoor curveball.
9) An article and video describing the result of a backdoor curveball consistent with your definition.
10) Entirely irrelevant result - not sports related
So much for Googling terms. The results in no way resolve the argument. My definition of back door curveball is not right because I found consistencies on Google. Your definition is not right because I found an instance consistent with it. I believe what we have is disagreement over a slightly ambiguous term.
Finally, I will add that the term "back door" does not really refer to the fact that the pitch starts "OUTSIDE" the strike zone and breaks back in, but rather that it catches the back end of the strike zone, over the back corner of the plate, rather than clipping the front corner.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: My New Favorite Pitch
More Numbers
by Dave
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
For those of you looking to kill time via anything having any relation to the sport of softball, you may want to peruse the results from some of the National Fastpitch Coaches Association (NFCA) Administered and Endorsed Recruitment Camps. Just pick a camp that has already taken place and then take a look at "Camp Quick Links," go down a bit and click on "2008 Camp Results." There are other interesting pieces of information accessible here aside from the results. Enjoy!
Several camps have not yet taken place and, as such, have no results posted. In these instances, the names of participants are usually listed. If you want to spy on your friends and neighbors to see exactly who may aspire to a college softball scholarship, take a look! Actually, that's a joke. What is interesting about the lists of participants is the graduation years. This is a good way to understand what aged girls usually participate in case you are contemplating applying for acceptance to a camp.
There are few 2012s, a few more 2011s, many more 10s and 9s signed up for one camp I looked at. In my many perusals over the years I do not think I have seen very many girls at these camps who are just going into their freshman years in the upcoming school year. Those are a relative rarity and for good reason. As soon as they set foot onto a high school campus, they are untouchable to college coaches. They'll mature and ripen into prospects late in their sophomore years, become approachable July 1 after their junior years, and while there is a lot of buzz about those early "verbals," I suppose one must really be a standout, approach the coach on their own, or otherwise catch the attention of a coach to attain that kind of status. What I mean is college coaches, to my knowledge, don't jump out from underneath their radar guns (reading 67!) at recruitment camps, walk by next year's freshmen, and pretend to drop their business cards and piles of papers detailing their programs' attributes. A little birdy tells me that there are other ways to skin that cat.
Another piece of information concerns the teams these girls play for. Lots of times I hear from people looking to find a team which can garner their kid some exposure to college coaches. The list of teams who have players at the NFCA camps doesn't really provide that information but it does show you some teams which might be a bit more serious about the college recruitment process. I believe all of these camps conduct a tournament in addition to the recruitment camp so you can cull out which of the teams with participants don't play the tournament. From there you can supplement this limited information by looking at which of these teams play some of the more serious showcases. This should give you at least a snapshot of teams from your area which may be of interest to you.
I suppose some of the more important figures folks might be interested in viewing are pitchers' pitch speeds, catchers' pop times, and all players' throwing and running speeds. The available stats vary depending on whether you look at administered or endorsed Camps. The administered camps list 20 yard dash results under the SPARQ testing results. Some of the endorsed camps list results for times from home to first. I don't have much knowledge regarding SPARQ but from what I can tell, the 20 yard dash does not resemble the home to first runs. I say that because there are few sub-3 20 yard SPARQ runs and many sub-3 times to first.
One of the things I like to do with data like this is pull it out of the charts and combine multiple camps results for a particular position, like catcher, and then post it into an Excel spreadsheet which allows me to manipulate the data. Once everything is pulled into a single spreadsheet program, you can sort the data fields by listing pop times, throwing speed, etc. by fastest to slowest. You can determine an average for all participants, pull out the fastest and slowest 10% (or whatever) and then see how that impacts averages, or a whole host of other numbers crunches just to see where your kid stacks up.
In case working with spreadsheets is beyond your capabilities or just plain bores you, there are other pieces of information which the NFCA publishes, not having anything to do with the camps, which can provide some of what you are looking for. For instance, there is a PDF page in the "Frequently Asked Questions Regarding Recruiting Camp Results" which answers the question: "How do my daughter's results compare to that of a NCAA Division I athlete?" But I'm not entirely sure I trust the information provided therein.
The pitching speed range for Div I athletes looks like this:
66 & above Excellent
63 - 65 Good
59 - 62 Average
58 & below Needs Work
To me, this is not all that valid or valuable. I've watched a lot of college games and I'd have to say "66 & above" may very well be excellent but it is also quite rare. The past couple of years I would hazard to guess that there were but a handful of pitchers whose top speeds in games were recorded at or above 66. Those few were not merely "Div I athletes" but athletes at elite Div I programs. It may not be commonly discussed but there are actually run of the mill and even some very weak "Div I programs." Those kinds of programs do not always attract the sort of pitcher who records 66 and up. Besides, there are effective pitchers who never get close to that speed but who have superior location and great movement.
Additionally, while the chart lists 63-65 as "good," I'd have to say that at least in my limited experience, it is a bit better than merely good. if you watched any of the ASA Gold national championships last year on TV, you saw very effective pitchers throw in this range and below. Some of them had already signed or received verbal commitments to top Div I programs. Can you imagine someone approaching you and noting that your or your daughter's recorded speed of 65 after her junior year of high school is "pretty good, keep working and maybe one day you'll be excellent, you're a pretty good little pitcher, keep working hard and maybe, if you're lucky, you might get into a mediocre Div I program."
I don't dispute that 59-62 is average though I haven't crunched the numbers or seen where anyone else has. I do believe I've seen a number of Div I pitchers who seldom hit 59. These girls usually have movement and command on their side, not to mention good mental toughness and loads of experience pitching high level games. 58 and below probably does "need work." But, on the whole, I'd say this chart could use some work. Not that many high school aged pitchers throw at or above 59.
As an aside, I feel the need to mention two things lest I get a bunch of e-mails "informing" me of some facts. Yes, I do know that pitchers in college throw from 43 feet while kids in high school and younger levels of youth softball throw from 40. This should not have any effect on the top recorded speed of any pitch. Obviously, when throwing longer distances, the ending speed of the pitch will be sloser. That is, a single pitch will record a slower speed when it is say 43 feet from the pitcher than it will when it is 40 feet from her. The pitch's top speed, however, is the same whether it is thrown from 40 or 43. If you do not understand that, please do not write to me for a clarification. I can't help you understand this.
Additionally, the way radar works, the gun (assuming you have a good one) will register a more accurate reading if it is pointed on the same line as the pitch. If the catcher were to hold a gun instead of a mitt and the pitch were to come in and hit the gun directly, the reading should be very accurate - though perhaps the gun would be broken! If the radar gun were held by somebody in the on-deck circle, the reading would be relatively inaccurate. That's because of the Cosine Effect which is "called this because the measured speed is directly related to the cosine of the angle between the radar gun and the target's direction of travel." If you want a more accurate reading of your daughter's pitch speed, stand behind the catcher and use a good gun. Don't sit in the stands and get discouraged because she is pitching too slow. Don't stand to the side and measure your daughter's overhand throwing speed from a point not pretty much in a direct line with the throw.
It often amazes me how many people don't understand the Cosine Effect. In fact, it is apparent to me that many, many people have never heard the term. I have been to many tournaments including showcases and watched as somebody, sitting 10 or more feet to the side of the direct pitch line, lifts the gun and takes a reading. You can imagine the lower echelon college coach doing this, looking at the gun and thinking to his or herself, "gee whiz, just 62, that's only average, I'm not interested in her."
So, be careful to not be concerned about getting speed measurements of pitches only at 43 feet, checking speeds from a "safe distance" from the line of the pitch, and/or spending too much time getting stressed out because your poorly taken measurements don't stack up well enough with the recruitment camp crowd or the NFCA's chart of typical Div I pitchers!
I can't say that I've ever timed pop times for some of the best catchers I've seen either in college or high school (or anywhere else for that matter). But if you compare pops at the recruitment camps with the NFCA chart, I do believe that while there are a few 1.8s, precious few are below that mark. And, interestingly, one girl who threw beneath a 1.8 pop also threw one try above 2.0. Her overhand throwing speed was 58 mph which happens to just barely make the mark of "good" found at another location on the NFCA's chart. I cannot judge this girl's prospects because for all I know she could be an 8th grader. She might have had a stomach virus or a bout of insomnia the night before the camp. But the important thing is that there is not a lockstep correlation between throwing speed and pop times. Using the chart, you might come to the conclusion that your throwing speed is so good, anybody would be nuts not to pick you for the Olympic team. Or, alternately, you might conclude that whikle your pop time is better than anybody else, your throwing speed is just average so you might just as well join the chess team and give up this stupid softball dream.
I saw one catcher who threw successively 1.72, 1.78 and 1.65. Those are some great figures. But I've never seen this no-name player catch a game. I can't say if her overall catching mechanics are good, if she is a good, average or poor receiver, if she blocks pitches in the dirt well, etc. I don't know if she can hit. I don't know if she can run to first in under 5 seconds. I expect a kid with that much throwing talent probably has the whole thing together but there's no way to be sure. Besides, while dry pop times are one measure, there's no way to tell if she tenses up too much in games, especially big important ones. That's not even to mention that she might stand, after hours of traction, at no more than 5 feet tall or maybe weigh less than 100 pounds. She may be a gifted 5 foot 11 athlete who plays better under real competitive pressures but whose school grades average around C+ in relatively remedial or basic courses. Pop times are a valuable measure but, as always, just one of many considerations.
The average pop for a Div I catcher may very well be in the range of 1.91-2.00 but I question the usefulness of some straight-A high school honors student freshman (just beyond puberty, who starts varsity, hits the heck out of the ball in competitive Gold games, calls pitches for the all-America, 67-mph-throwing pitcher on her elite travel team, and rarely suffers a PB) using this chart to get discouraged because her still youthful, muscularly-undeveloped arm throws only 57 and her dry pop times come in around 2.05.
Anyways, that's my rant for the day. I get so many questions about numbers that I thought I'd direct everyone to places where I would ordinarily obtain my understanding of them. It is easy to get discouraged by looking at the NFCA's chart. It is also possible to get unwarrantedly optimistic based merely on pitch, running or throwing speeds. These things represent a measurement. They, in and of themselves, should not encourage or discourage anyone.Labels: catching, coaching, college, parenting, pitching, players
Permanent Link: More Numbers
The First? Fielder
by Dave
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Paul writes in to ask:My daughter, a pitcher, has some problems fielding her position defensively. She tends to have a panicked look when the ball is hit back to her and loses focus on what to do with it once in her glove. Part of this is fear of getting hit with an odd bounce and part is just lack of proper fielding technique. After that she needs to understand where her place is after a hit and she needs to move to a back up position. I don't want to teach her the wrong things but need to get her working on this.
Here is my response:
The very first thing I want to address to you is the "fear factor." Pitchers may develop a fear of balls being hit back at them, especially if they have a little scar shaped like laces on the ball or located where their broken nose or jaw was fixed. It's very tough to be so close to the gal with the stick in her hand. I strongly believe that every pitcher needs to be schooled on keeping the pitch away from the sweet spot on the bat, that is, to hit corners on every pitch. If you can paint corners, your fear of having a hotshot hit back at you should gradually diminish.
My personal belief is that in fastpitch softball, pitches should never be on the middle 8 inches of the plate. From 10 or 11 on, pitchers must be taught to work corners. Our game's ball is just too big and bright. 1 thorugh 9 of any team worth its salt can rip it when it is thrown down the midddle.
Some of us out here watch too much baseball on TV and fall in love with a 95 mph fastball thrown down the middle, challenging the hitter to catch up with it. That's baseball, not fastpitch softball. I am an advocate of teaching pitchers to throw hard before learning command. But even I have my limits. I don't particularly care whether your 11 year old can hit 55-60 on your coach's radar gun. If she throws that cheese down the middle, eventually she is going to find someone who can hit it and hit it hard. If the ball is in the center of the plate, chances are pretty good that the 60 mph pitch is going to come back at her at 94-98. And that may end your stud's pitching career regardless of how fast she can throw. Stay on the corners. It is extremely rare for a hitter to hit anything on the corners hard, straight back at the pitcher. That is the first thing you need to teach your pitcher in terms of defense.
(As an aside, to umpires who "require" the pitch right down the middle - who don't give corners, particularly when one team is beating another pretty badly, you must be ready to take personal responsibility for the broken noses, jaws and other body parts, the shortened careers, etc. which your approach has caused. I have seen so many umps change their zone or do other things to make the game move along or to provide the beaten down team with something, anything, to make them feel less bad. Just the other day, the field ump called our runner out when she was obviously safe in order to end the top of the first because we were up by 7 already. He pretty much admitted this to me. He noted to me that the other team was all 11s. So I told them we have 5x11s and 1x10 on the field with just 3 young 12s. I think he was a little surprised but not as surprised as he was when the other team scored 3 runs in the bottom half and then held us down in the top of the second before scoring again in their half. Umpires should never try to control games like that. That's what the time limit and run rules are for. And they shouldn't try to make pitchers throw down the middle unless they want somebody injured.)
A lot of how a pitcher does things defensively depends on her team's coaches and players. General fielding (balls back at her) is a matter of normal fielding mechanics, athleticism, repetition, and confidence. Let me try to develop this topic, give you some advice on what you can do, and try to list some of the issues which may vary from team to team and situation to situation.
A pitcher is in a difficult position defensively, standing about 35 feet from the plate after release. She needs to get immediately in some sort of defensive position after release. She needs to be in shape physically so that her reactions are good. And she needs to practice fielding mechanics the same way any other player does.
The first, most important step, is to get into a good ready position. That means low, balanced, and ready to move. In my opinion, she should not aspire to get quite as low with her glove as the third baseman whose glove should probably be just inches from the ground, if not actually touching it. There's not enough time for that anyway but it isn't necessarily the best defensive position for a pitcher. Most balls hit back at the pitcher are bouncing ones hit hard into the dirt. She should be low but not as low as 3B and her glove should be about knee high, in front of her, and open. Pitchers sometimes close their gloves hard or slap it into their thighs as they release the pitch. They need to be schooled to get it out in front, open and ready to make a play right after this.
Her knees need to be bent, feet even and about shoulder width apart. Her glove hand should be out in front of her. And her shoulders should be square with the plate. You can't do anything without a good ready position. You can't move equally well to either side if your feet aren't squared up. So your first goal should be to finish the pitch with a good ready position after release.
The second consideration is physical conditioning. If you want to react faster to balls hit back at you, being in the best physical shape is the pathway regardless of natural athletic ability. Kids who are in the best shape they can be will necessarily have shorter reaction times. A good off-season, or in, program of speed and agility is advisable for any softball player. The same is true of pitchers. While it is a given that everybody possesesses different athletic ability, engaging in a good speed/agility program can help anyone. It will also help a pitcher's pitching so I encourage you to pursue this.
Pitchers, like anyone else who walks onto a softball field need to be schooled in fielding mechanics. My guess is your daughter doesn't pitch every inning of every game she plays in. She could play many other positions. She should be schooled in fielding mechanics of all varities at this age in any event. If there are good fielding clinics near you, Kobata, etc., sign her up. Aside from this, I would hope your team's coaches work all the girls at fielding mechanics of all positions anyway. If they do not, you need to have her out fielding grounders, linedrives, etc. from all positions just for her own development. If you can get out once or twice a week to hit a half hour's worth of balls, that will definitely help her.
The next consideration is drills for fielding grounders from her position after release. Repetition is the key to sound fielding at any position and this does not exclude the pitcher. I recently saw a pretty good drill for doing this run at an OC Batbusters clinic. Basically, you put a girl at first, a catcher behind the plate, and the pitcher out in the circle. The pitcher pitches the ball like she would in a game and a coach immediately hits a grounder back at her. She fields it and throws to first. You can place fielders at each of the bases or have her throw home as you wish. Obviously the footwork on throws to each of the bases is different and should be practiced.
The coach should hit all sorts of balls to the pitcher. You want hard ones and soft ones, liners at her feet, bouncing balls to either side and so on. Coaches should do something like this in practice but if they don't, talk to them about a "drill I saw done" and describe this to them. You need to have other players to do this drill so it's best done at team practice.
Sometimes coaches will assemble an infield and hit balls to the various fielders including the girl standing around the pitcher's plate. This doesn't get the job done. Sometimes the coaches will have the pitcher mimick making a real pitch. This isn't enough either as she will go through the motion but make getting ready her primary goal. The pitcher needs to throw a pitch and then make a fielding play. And it is really so simple to do. There's no good reason not to spend 5-10 minutes on this at every or every other practice.
If you cannot convince your team to do my (really the OC Batbuster's) drill, I suggest modifying it at your local field. If you can't get somebody to catch or play the bases, use surrogates. A pop-up net will suffice for a catcher. Most fields have garbage cans standing around - move one over to cover first. And then hit away. This is certainly not optimal but do what you have to do to get this work in.
Additionally, there needs to be an understanding between the pitcher, the coaches, and all other infielders regarding what a pitcher's responsibility is on struck balls. My team uses a general rule of thumb which is a pitcher's responsibility for fielding a ball ends inside the circle. That is, she should not have to run outside the circle to field grounders and pop-ups. Bunts are the responsibility of the first and third basemen. There are obvious exceptions to this and the pitcher will end up fielding surprise drag bunts and other balls which do not fit neatly into my general rule of thumb - those will be practiced in the drill I discussed above.
In my experience, there's no need top tell a pitcher to go after balls. Usually she will naturally and reactively go after a lot of plays beyond her area of responsibility. But it is important to let her know that she has a team of four infielders behind her, excluding the catcher who generally will cover anything hit within a few feet of home, and she needs to develop judgment about what she can and cannot do better than the other fielders.
The corollary to this is, while a pitcher should not field a ball outside the circle, even if the ball is in the circle and another fielder can make the play, the pitcher needs to let them do that. This is really a pop-up rule. If a batter hits an infield pop-up with any real height to it, the pitcher should not usually make that play. If the ball is coming down in front of her, that is typically first or third's play. If the ball is coming down to her left at or beyond the circle, that's either 2B or SS's play. If the ball is right in the circle, the SS should take charge and call for it. In these cases, the pitcher should get out of the circle and away from the play, allowing her middle infielders to make it.
About a year ago I witnessed a play on which a pop-up was hit sky-high and came down about where the pitcher's plate is located. The pitcher stood there, hands high, watching the pop-up come down. I'm not sure whether I heard both the pitcher and SS call for it, or if nobody actually did. But in any event, the SS and P collided and the ball fell to the ground. By the way, the bases happened to be full and there were two outs at the time of the "major league pop-up." I don't recall how many runs scored but I think it was two. That left runners on second and third with still two outs. The next girl lined a single into the gap and both baserunners scored. That one simple play allowed four runs to score. And that was a Gold level game. The defensive team never recovered from those four runs.
I think sometimes we, as coaches, coach a little too much to the age group we have in front of us. In 10U ball, often the team has something like 3-5 good players, often including the girls who pitch. We encourage the pitcher to get to everything she can and make the play because it is a matter of winning and losing. At 12U, we should hope to have more than 3 players who can make routine plays every time but sometimes because of conditions beyond our control, we still encourage the pitcher to make every play she possibly can.
Even at 14U, I have heard coaches encourage pitchers to do similarly. I like to think of this as the "BNB principle" which is, the tendency to view the team like one would the Bad News Bears - a few good players who should be encouraged to jump in front of all those kids who "don't belong out there" and make every play they possibly can. But the question is, what does this practice do to the kid who continues to pitch into her later teens, perhaps even playing at the Gold level? What it does is set up the play on which an infield pop results in the pitcher running into another infielder, maybe getting hurt in the process, and allowing 4 runs that should never have seen the light of day to score.
So, in this discussion, what I'm saying to you is teach the pitcher to get out of the way on high pops, to field balls only within the circle, and let her infielders field the rest of them including ordinary bunts. That is true regardless of age level since every 10 year old is eventually going to be 18, God willing. She will naturely field some balls outside the circle anyway. She doesn't need to be told to do that. What she needs to hear is that her fielding responsibility should usually end at the pitcher's circle line. Teach good habits early. Don't subscribe to the BNB primciple.
With this in mind, I certainly recognize that not all teams' coaches will agree with me. And you do have to get along with your team's coaches. But there are limits to what you as the pitcher's parent should tolerate. One of my kid's teams follows the BNB principle due to a certain lack of talent on the roster. For example, we have a first baseman who cannot field a bunt. To me, a first baseman who cannot field a bunt is similar to a slap-hitter who tends to pop the ball up. I call that person by a particular name which is "bench player." A first baseman who cannot field a bunt is not a first baseman.
The first baseman also cannot field a pop-up more than 5 feet in front of her, no matter how high it is hit. She sees her role on the defensive side of the equation as one in which her job is to get to the bag and then catch the throw from infielders. Anything that is too far to her right is left for the 2B to field because she just has to get to the bag.
I'm not a coach on that team. Actually the father of 1B is a coach. And he encourages this errant approach because he is far too steeped in baseball. He doesn't know anything about the FP game. So he has schooled the girl that her primary responsibility is covering the bag. And the other coaches feel there is nothing they can do about this. So, instead of correcting the mistaken approach to playing the position, they tell the pitcher to get everything to her left. This includes all bunts, every soft grounder, and pop-ups. They don't worry about the P colliding with the first baseman since she will see the ball is more than five feet in front of her and retreat to cover the bag.
(As an aside, the 1B also believes any throw that is not perfectly thrown is not her responsibility. If she cannot catch it without moving her feet, it isn't her responsibility. I've never heard her corrected for not pursuing the ball first and the bag second. I just don't understand how any coach or parent can allow a first baseman to continue to play the game at that position with such a wrong understanding of what her responsibilities are. But they do and maybe you've seen similar circumstances too. But to me, a team which follows this approach is a team we won't be playing with any longer.)
As far as backing up bases, etc., this often really depends on your team's approach. Some teams use the pitcher as the primary cutoff between other fielders and home. Some teams teach their first baseman to perform this function. Obviously, if the pitcher is the primary cutoff, she is not responsible for backing up bases. Her work is to get lined up between the catcher and the outfielder or infield cutoff between her and the outfield. My personal preference is for the 1B to be primary cutoff and the pitcher to be a base backup. I think at higher levels this is usually the case. But I don't want to go any further into the topic because I have seen a fairly wide amount of variation and regardless of what I said about the BNB principle or the lack of talent at other positions, the pitcher should perform base back up responsibilities in conformity with her team's practices. I'm not willing to be taken to task on this issue as I was with the other one.
Base backup responsibilities are not something you can handle within a vacuum. You need to have this covered in practice. Yes, I have seen teams which never handle cutoffs or base backups in practice and then scream at the pitcher for being out of position on base backups. This is wrong and maybe there is nothing we can do about it other than to have a discussion with coaches that these things need to be handled in practice.
Aside from this, I think the bottom line is, if the pitcher has base backup responsibilities, the coaches do not handle this in practice regardless of how much you implore them to do so, and you are frustrated about what to tell your pitcher daughter, here are my suggestions:
If the backstop is not a college one where there is considerable distance between it and homeplate, there is no purpose to trying to backup the catcher on plays at the plate. If the play is at home and nowhere else, the best you can do is pick a point to retrieve errant throws. I believe that is a point along the third baseline in foul ground. The first baseman should cover the area in front of home along that baseline. And the 3B should be covering her bag since, if there may be a play at home, there may also be a play at third.
If the backup seems to be most important at third but the fence and out of play are say 15-20 feet from the bag, again, I suggest about the same position though closer to third than home. This way if the ball gets away from the 3B towards home, she can retrieve it quickly. If the ball goes out of control up the line towards the outfield, the LF should get after those. If the LF is making the throw to third, the pitcher would need to be in foul ground along the baseline anyways to back up the throw. Otherwise the LF should be crashing in and handle everything up the line. Some coaches would have the pitcher positioned right behind third to prevent the bad throw from going out of play. But if the pitcher is just 10-15 feet behind the 3B, there is little chance she'll be able to make a play on anything the 3B can't get. I believe along the line in foul ground is the place to be.
On all other plays, where the ball is going to 1B, 2B or just in to some infielder, the pitcher, and everyone else for that matter, need to be aware that the ball may get away and be prepared to retrieve it quickly in such eventuality. Just as I want the first baseman to be wide awake and aware that a throw in to second on a basehit with nobody on may go astray, I want the pitcher to be watching any throw in that might get away. Everyone should backup every throw just as the 2B must backup all throwbacks to the pitcher with a runner on. Outfielders make mistakes just like anyone else, even on easy, no action plays. Everyone needs to be awake on every pitch, every play, every throw in.
As far as learning the situation on which a pitcher needs to back up home, if appropriate, third, etc., given that she is not the primary infield cutoff, I'm not sure what to tell you. Basically, this is dictated by game and inning situation which I'll get to in a minute. More importantly, the coaches need to explain to their pitchers where they want them on certain situations or during the actual play. The best teams conduct drills with this in mind, remind pitchers before the play develops, and then instruct them during the play. This is just like having a baserunner on first with one or no outs and telling them to watch linedrives. You've taught them this in practice, you tell them the situation when they are on first, and then you scream "BACK" when there is an actual linedrive. The same should be done defensively.
When, say, a ball is hit to the outfield and gets past the fielder, coaches should be instructing, for example, the SS to go out and get the cutoff. They also should be judging where the play is going to develop based on where the ball is coming to a rest, the apparent speed of the baserunner(s), etc. In doing this, if they want the pitcher to, for example, back up third, they should yell this to her. What should never happen is a situation in which the coach wants the pitcher to back up third, he or she never says anything (either in practice or before or during the play), and then when the right backup has not taken place, the coach rants and raves at the pitcher for failing to backup. That does happen but it is wrong.
Finally, it is an absolute that every player on the field needs to know the game and inning situation on every pitch and have some idea of what they will do if a ball is hit their way. The CF needs to be aware that she cannot merely soft toss the ball in to the 2B after a hit when there is a runner on second. She needs to know that there may very well be a play at home. Similarly, with runners on first and second, a pitcher needs to know that if a grounder is hit back to her, she is going to third with her throw. I don't need to go over all the possible situations. You ought to be able to handle this in practice if you are a coach or jot it down on paper and go over it with your daughter if you are the pitcher's parent.
The bottom line is, before throwing every pitch, a pitcher needs to check off in her mind where she will go with the ball if X happens. Sometimes, it can be difficult to do this with young kids. It is difficult but it still needs to be done. It is an important part of any player's development. You cannot move up to the next level if you do not think this game through on every pitch. It is as important as getting into a ready position or learning good fielding mechanics. If you have to stop and think after you field the ball, you're dead at least 75% of the time.
In closing, teach your daughter to get in a ready position after release. Do this whether you are conducting pitching practice or running specific drills. Improve her athleticism by engaging in speed/agility drills or by signing up for clinics which do this. Anything that improves her physical condition will improve her ability as a ballplayer and pitcher. Teach her good general defensive skills. She needs this anyway. She may decide to quit pitching in future years but still want to play ball anyways. Good defensive skills are a necessity for every player who wants to keep playing. Conduct drills specific to the pitcher position. I gave you one. Maybe you'll find others in your travels. But do something. Try to convince your team's coaches to conduct pitcher-specific fielding drills. If you are unsuccessful, conduct some on your own. The drills must involve throwing a real pitch and then fielding a ball and making a throw to a base. Teach your pitchers, whether you are a team coach or just a mild mannered parent, what the limits of their responsibilities are - in the process also teach the other fielders to take charge in the right circumstances. Teach your pitchers to think through game and inning situations before making the pitch. If you find yourself on a team which follows the BNB principle, get away from them. You are doing your daughter a disservice if you stay. And eventually, through lots of repetition, discussion, and learning, you should develop your pitchers' defensive skills.
Follow-up:
Tom writes in to discuss something for the pitcher which I'll include here and in another place I mention defensive drills for pitchers:
"One of the more important drills that I've seen involve teaching pitchers to defend themselves from batted balls. A fielded ball can result in an out and a missed ball can take out your pitcher for the season. The most effective practice that I have discovered uses the lite-flite Jugs ball. They look like softballs and throw like softballs but don't break anything. When the pitcher is in her workout, the coach throws lit-flites back at her to defend as she pitches to the catcher, starting easy and moving to more difficult. We work with her trying to deflect the ball with her glove and not using her throwing throwing hand. Pitchers tend to try to catch with the bare hand which can cause a season ending injury) We work with her to get into a defensive position as soon as possible after delivering the pitch. Again this is practiced with the emphasis on safety and NOT on making a play. I can get the next out but I can't replace an injured pitcher easily. This changes her focus and quite frankly her overall fielding improves as her confidence increases."Labels: coaching, defense, fielding, parenting, pitching
Permanent Link: The First? Fielder
Numbers Game
by Dave
Friday, June 20, 2008
It is going to come as a shock to you but baseball and softball are not really strict numbers games. I guess it is more accurate to say that they are not always strict numbers games. Certainly from a fan or fantasy league perspective, numbers are important. And sometimes players and coaches have to "play the percentages." But, for the most part numbers are not what rules decision making in this game.
I was very amused once when someone tried to tell me, "In softball, a good batting average is .500 and up. It isn't like baseball where .300 is considered a good batting average." What was most amusing to me is the fellow telling me this was comparing up high school fastpitch softball batting averages with those of MLB baseball. It never occurred to him that batting averages were indeed higher in youth, high school, and even college baseball than they were up in the big leagues of baseball. Also, in college softball, batting averages are quite a bit lower than they are in high school.
In our local high schools, once upon a time there was a girl who hit .700 for the season. I watched her play a couple games against some of the better teams and her results were not quite as good. She had an outstanding swing, made good contact against even the better pitchers, but I would say that in top level competition, she was about a .333 hitter. It is relatively easy to impeach a player's high school stats because these are often reported to newspapers by coaches who really do not take this function particularly seriously. often, the kid or parent who keeps the book doesn't really understand how scoring works or how errors should be assigned. They are well meaning but they just don't know.
For example, we see that in high level NCAA play, balls that are struck back to pitchers who apparently boot the play generally do not result in the assignment of an error because it is rather difficult to field a ball hit in the 90s when you are just 37 feet from the contact point. Usually, sharply hit balls are given hits when the pitcher fails to make a play. But most people do not appreciate that.
Secondly, I have heard more misconceptions about when to assign a stolen base, a passed ball, a wildpitch, etc. than I have heard folks bragging about their daughter's .450 batting average. For example, I have seen "WP" written in books on pitches which hit the dirt directly in back of the point of homeplate and which bounced true. I won't argue the point but to me that's not a wildpitch. Similarly, I have seen "PB" written into books on curveballs which bounce in the dirt a foot in front of the plate and fly past the catcher a full two feet outside of their wingspan. I have seen books which reflect a stolen base for the runner from first on double steals on which the lead runner was thrown out at third. I don;t wish to debate particular plays but my point is, the books do not always accurately reflect what has transpired.
Even if books are perfectly kept, high schoolers sporting those .700 BAs do not usually run off to college and repeat their monumental successes at the next level. In Div I college softball, girls who hit .500 and up in high school generally don't come close to that. A .500 batting average is quite rare in Div I play. Anything above .400 is rather stupendous. .300 is often a quite good BA.
On a related topic, I am often amused by youth softball managers and parents who try to use the numbers to make or change decisions with respect to the lineup. One manager once told me that so and so has a really good on-base percentage so we're going to bat her first this (elimination) game. She had been in the 7th-9th spot all season, had maybe two basehits in 40 games, and proceeded to strike out every time up from the first spot in that important game. During the year, she had walked quite a bit, particularly against weak teams. She had walked a lot mostly because, after the first couple of games, she didn't hit and had gone up there trying to get walked. I worked to make her more aggressive at the plate, but she refused and continued to go up looking to walk. Against better teams and pitchers, she often struck out looking. Still, those 4 walk games against weak opponents had her on-base percentage pretty high and the "by-the-numbers" folks were convinced that this mattered. The kid she supplanted at the top of the order, by the way, went 2 for 3 that game. But because she was deep in the order where some of our weaker hitters were and she was left on base every time.
When I try to make out a line-up, I have my own philosophy and I don't want to really get into that. Some coaches try to spread out the real hitters. Some coaches use a traditional baseball approach. But whatever way you try to craft a line-up, the way you evaluate hitters should not be based on the numbers. Lots of kids get most of their stats compiled in games against weak pitchers and the numbers look really good. But when they face better pitchers, their numbers drop off precipitously. Some girls don't get a lot of hits when the team is up 8-0 after two innings. Yet they are the only ones who hit or otherwise get on base in the later rounds of the tourneys. A coach has to use more feel than that.
Once upon a tryout season, a father came to me to tell me that his daughter had achieved a .300 BA and .450 OBA during the previous season. The idea was I should take her and probably bat her in one of the top 4 spots. But her swing was terrible and she went after a lot of bad pitches when the stress was high. I can judge a kid's potential and swing for myself. I don't need to look at her stats. I'm pretty sure other youth coaches, not to mention HS, college and bigger time coaches, feel the same way.
A very long time ago, I played on a baseball team which produced a kid who had a decent major league career. He had a great swing and was an exceptional defensive player. When all was said and done with our summer travel league, I had a better batting average, more RBIs, etc. than this fellow. I know this because the manager compiled stats at the end of the year and went over them with us. You know, that other fellow batted fourth for us in every game while I batted 5th or 6th. There was never any thought of moving him off the clean-up spot. No coach ever contemplated it. I never contemplated it. Nobody in their right mind would have even considered it. It was a far superior hitter than I. Stats be damned. Anyone, especially the MLB scouts, could see he had something and I didn't.
So the moral of this part of the story is, please don't tell me about, or manage your team, exclusively by, compiling the stats in your scorebook and basing your line-up by your hitters' batting averages or other numbers.
I've gone astray from what I originally wanted to do with this piece. Where I wanted to take this is in the direction of some numbers which are actually somewhat important. The numbers which are actually important, though not controlling in the decision making process are those numbers which college coaches use, at least in part, in their evaluations of players. We are at a time of the year during which players go to these NFCA recruitment camps to show their stuff and some of the numbers which are recorded there can have an impact.
Also, recently, I have received a number of e-mails inquiring about some numbers. Folks want to get some idea of where their daughters stand with respect to other players around the country and, in particular, the "typical college player." I'm afraid I can't do anything for you there. I am unaware of any statistical table which shows pitch speed, catcher pop times, infielder/outfielder throwing and running speed, or anything like that for the country as a whiole at a particular age group or at the high school or NCAA levels. The best I can offer is a proxy, an easily available link to some numbers recorded at an NFCA recruiting camp.
Recently, the NFCA administered recruitment Pennsbury camp in Yardley, PA took place with a couple hundred college scholarship hopefuls and over one hundred college coaches from all levels in attendance. The campers were not necessarily the top prospects within these United States but there were some pretty good players there. The 2008 camp results can be viewed online. And now for my take on these numbers.
First of all, keep in mind that the players who performed these tests are not all juniors and seniors in high school who are headed to play in college. There is an application process by which kids are admitted into the camp. Many seniors who will play ball in college have already performed at these camps. They likely won't participate in the testing if they already know where they are headed. Even many recent juniors are already armed with pens, waiting for July 1, when they can sign NLIs or otherwise formally commit to schools. I can't seem to locate the list of participants at this camp but, in years past, I have seen a good number of middle schoolers, freshman, etc.
Secondly, Pennsbury represents one area of the country. There are five NFCA administered camps in various corners of the country, of which Pennsbury is but one. There are also numerous "NFCA endorsed camps." I cannot speak to the relative talent levels at the various camps. What I can tell you is that conspicuously absent from this camp were any representatives from the PAC 10, Big 10, Big 12, SEC, etc. And while there certainly were some reasonably competitive college programs in all divisions there, even many Big East schools were not in attendance. In short, I'm pretty sure that the best kids across the nation as a whole are not reflected in the test results.
The first thing which interests me is the pitching results. Of just less than 140 girls who had a couple fastballs recorded, the average speed was about 56 mph. The fastest speed recorded was 63 and the slowest (on a fastball) was upper 40s. I don't know about you but upper 40s is shocking to me. I wonder why someone throwing in the 40s would participate in such a camp regardless of what else they might bring to the table.
Of greater interest to me was the disparity between some of the fastballs and other pitches. One girl threw a 60 mph fastball and a 38 mph change-up. Another hit 63 on her fastball and 65 on her curve. While a 63 fastball might not garner a kid a ton of attention in and of itself - not all that many true fastballs thrown at the college level - a good breaking curve at 65 should. You cannot judge a change-up purely by its speed or lack thereof since all change-ups are not equal. But a 22 mph gap between fastball and change is at least noteworthy.
What strikes me in all this is loads of people like to use 60 mph as the measuring rod for their pitchers. I have heard a number of claims that this or that pitcher throws 60. My 13 year old daughter's coach has frequently said something to me along the lines of "how fast do you think she throws, I'm guessing 60." I tell him that I cannot judge pitch speed with my rather poor eyes but I do believe she's mid 50s, maybe 57 on occasion." He usually gets upset with me but I know what I know and 60 is somewhat rare, particularly with 14U players. Apparently, these claims by others are just not valid.
Understand that I'm not dissing everybody on pitcher's speeds. I'm just suggesting that when we stand there along the sidelines and claim this kid throws 60 or whatever, we might be wrong. Also pitch speed is not the only evaluation tool that is relevant to evaluating pitchers. Let's face it, even if the fastball were the only pitch available, some girls might throw a flat 60 in the middle of the plate or not be able to hit corners. Other girls might throw a 58 with sharp break due to good wrist snap, be able to hit corners at will, and have a very crafty approach to pitching in games. Which would you start in your most important game of the year?
The pitching number which intrigues me most on the chart is the rotations per second. Obviously, break on whatever plane is to a high degree controlled by spin. There are other factors but spin is undeniably important. I have no way to evaluate these numbers because this is the first time I have seen them. But I am intrigued by these. I need to get a gun which can give me that. That's got to be my next toy!
Still, you can't evaluate a pitcher simply by measuring her spins. Lots of girls get over-adrenlaized and then overthrow their movement pitches in big games. And aside from not getting the right amount of break, some girls are just so crafty with their curves, drops, rises, and screws, that the pure amount of spin or break is not nearly enough to judge them. The best HS pitcher I have observed is a girl who throws a nasty curve. The stuff itself is nasty but what is more nasty than her stuff is the way she uses it. She throws a drop curve on the outside corner and batter's usually sit and watch it only to go down 0-1. Her next pitch is usually 6 inches off the corner, basically unhittable. Then she's typically up 0-2. the next one might be further off the plate, a backdoor version, or possibly some other pitch in a location which causes the batter to go fishing. She never gets batters out purely via her speed or the amount of rotation on her pitches. She gets batters out by pitching - with her mind as much as her body.
Enough about pitchers. Let's move on to catchers.
The metric most often used to evaluate catchers is called "pop time" which is basically the time between pops - the pop of the catcher's mitt and that of the infielder covering second. Another somewhat though less important measure is overhand throwing speed. At Pennsbury, overhand throwing averaged around 56 and pop times averaged just above 2. I have heard some coaches claim that the cutoff for pop times is about 2 seconds. This is so because average runners get to second in about 2.7 to 3.0 seconds, pitches take about a half second to reach the first pop, and if you're going to throw out a reasonable percentage of runners, anything over 2 seconds isn't going to get the job done even with an accurate throw.
The fastest throwing speeds were around 60 - 64 and most of these girls, though not all, had sub-2 pop times. It is interesting to note that several catchers who were in the top 10 or so of pop times had throwing speeds beneath 60. Also noteworthy is the fact that several girls with plus throwing speed had pop times above 2 and were in the bottom half of all participants in the record. That goes to show you that throwing speed is not everything when it comes to evaluating catchers.
To be fair, pop times and throwing speed, even when combined are not sufficient for evaluation. There are girls who once they are in games, throw a lot less hard or have trouble matching a dry pop time. There are also girls who thrive so much on real competition that when they are in game situations, their pop times and throwing speed can go up. Let's face it, some people are gamers and some are not. And that's why, despite the availability of numbers, coaches still want to see kids in games.
As a final view of pure numbers, several times over the past year parents have written to me inquiring about running speed. What I usually tell them is it depends on position and age / physical maturity, and good times are usually something like below 3 seconds to first. Unlike in years past, I believe, the Pennsbury results do not show running speed to first by position. One speed measurement that was published was home to home and these figures weren't published for all positions. The next best number to home to first was the SPARQ 20 yard dash.
SPARQ stands for Speed, Power, Agility, Reaction and Quickness. It is supposed to be a measure of overall athleticism. I know very little about it and so I won't bother to get into it. If you want to do some research, here is this venture's website: SPARQTraining. I'm not sure how they measure the 20 yard dash but it stands to reason that this should be a close approximation to a run to first. If anything, I would expect the times to be somewhat faster than times to first since, from what little I know, you should get a better start when doing a sprint. Yet, I saw no sub 3 times in this record. And that surprised me.
My kids do some speed/agility stuff, though not officially SPARQ. I'd say one of my kids runs at an above average speed and the other is about average. My 11 year old regularly runs a 3 or just below 3 20 yard dash. She's hit 2.9. My older kid sometimes has trouble getting below 3.1 but on rare occasions she has just barely broken 3. Maybe I better go check the stopwatch of the guy timing them. Maybe there is something flawed about the way they have been measured.
Still, I have always understood that times to first of good runners generally run in the 2.7 to 2.9 range. I'm a little shocked that of all these girls at Pennsbury, some of whom are very good athletes, nobody broke 3. I've seen some of the girls run before and they are quite fast. I cannot explain these numbers but maybe it has something to do with the way SPARQ testing is performed.
Of all the relevant numbers used to measure softball players, I believe running speed might be the best one we use. Batting average depends on who batters are facing, who is keeping the book and other things. A girl can pitch 70 mph but if she throws it flat and down the middle, she isn't going to make a big splash on the pitching scene. A pitcher can really spin the ball when she wants to but she has to find the right speed to throw each breaking pitch, has to have command, and needs some craftiness if she is going to get people out. Catchers can throw very hard but if they are slow to get the ball out of their gloves, if they do not rise to the adrenaline rush of real base stealers running, they are not going to get people out and coaches are not going to be as interested in them. Fast girls can and often are taught how to run bases. yes there is a discernible skill with respect to baserunning. But more and more we are seeing at the college level a type of kid who might be described as a designated runner. She might play soccer, basketball or run track. But she is undeniably quick and college softball coaches seem to feel that they can take these girls and make them pinchrunners.
I suppose people are always interested in some objective measure with which to compare themselves or their kids against others. We throw numbers around pretty loosely. How many pitchers in your corner of the world supposedly throw 60? How many .500 batting averages are bragged about? How many people claim that their kid runs sub 3 home to first, sub 13 home to home? How many people tell you that their daughter throws the ball overhand at about 65-70 mph? How many really good softball players are there? We need numbers to describe things but we should never become slaves to them.Labels: coaching, hitting, pitching, players
Permanent Link: Numbers Game
Bring It
by Dave
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Here is an announcement from Rich Iorio, founder of a concept called "Bring it to NJ.""I was wondering is it possible to get the word out to the younger rec leagues and girls who are thinking about trying to pitch, on your web site. The info is on http://www.longvalleysoftball.com and http://www.eteamz.com/BringIt2NJ/."
This clinic is just another one of those pitching clinics except for one thing, it is being run by 1998 NCAA National Player of the Year Nancy Evans. Nancy is a former University of Arizona Assistant Softball Coach who coached Team USA member (Olympic alternate) Alicia Hollowell as well as last year's Women's College World Series Most Outstanding Player, Taryne Mowatt.
Nancy, as a player and coach, has been involved in 6 of Arizona's 8 national championships. She was the first in a line of dominant pitchers at AZ which includes Jennie Finch, Hollowell, and Mowatt
A Tucson newspaper report said "Evans was credited with savvy pitch calling as Mowatt led UA to the 2007 College World Series title." If you watched last year's WCWS, you know what is meant by the phrase "savy pitch calling." I don't have to explain that one.
The clinic is being run as a joint fundraising effort by Red Bank Regional HS softball team and Long Valley youth recreational softball. The clinic will be held May 30, 2008 5:30 PM - Jun 1, 2008 - 7:00 PM at Red Bank Regional High School which is located about ten minutes from exit 109 on the Garden State Parkway, about an hour's drive from Manhattan.
Please see the web site for more information. Rich can be reached via e-mail at "bringIt2nj@comcast.net"
I would like to note that this announcement is being published for a very specific reason. I have no desire to turn this blog into a vehicle for announcements concerning local clinics, tournaments and events. I have an ulterior motive behind making this announcement.
I know I've mentioned it before but several years ago I recall watching a college game on TV involving teams from Florida in which one of the broadcasters made an interesting comment. She noted that just a few short years earlier a college would not have been able to pull together a competitive program using all the girls playing softball in the Florida. Let me repeat that in some context because today I find it astounding. When the current crop of college players were born, you could not pull together enough Florida kids to fill one reasonably competitive college team.
Today, May 21, 2008, there are 16 Division I programs left standing as the Super-Regionals get ready to play ball. Among those 16 teams is number one seed, University of Florida. Florida, like most big schools, draws players from lots of locations but more than a half dozen kids on the roster are from within the state. Also, at least an equal number of Florida kids are playing for the other 15 teams. That's not even to mention the several dozen other kids who participated in but are now gone from the overall NCAA tournament. Almost wherever you look in Div I softball, you find Florida kids. The rising prominence of Florida softball is evident elsewhere too. Of the top 25 high school teams listed on the NFCA site, 4 are from Florida. Some of the biggest college recruiting dates are held in Florida each year. At various youth national competitions, Florida youth teams make a name for themselves.
So the question is, how did the state of Florida rise up from the junk pile of girls softball to become one of the most important states? I don't have an answer for you but I can make a guess. I may be wrong but still I think I know the formula for bringing real softball to any place, provided you get buy-in from parents and girls alike.
My guess consists of the formula I believe any state can pull itself up in any sport or other endeavor. Bring in those with world class knowledge to train anybody around willing to listen for a few hours. Keep bringing back the experts until you have developed a critical mass of people with a reasonable level of knowledge. Send forth these trained people amongst the masses and have them teach what they have learned. Interact with (play games against) the very best participants in the activity (sport).
In other words, if you want to bring an activity out of the dregs, hire yourself some folks who know what they are talking about. In softball, that would be people like Nancy Evans, Howard Kobata, and many of the "diplomats" of the sport who are willing to go anywhere in the lower 48 to conduct clinics if they have sufficient interest. You bring in people like this to teach the teachers (coaches) and then, as these folks spread "the word," skills should rise to the point where you can send forth your teams to compete with the best.
You cannot merely send forth willing victims to be mauled by highly skilled opponents and expect them to be made stronger because they survived. There's a time and place for that but before you engage the "enemy," you've got to learn the skills. Many involved in this sport at high levels are willing to travel to conduct clinics. I've been to maybe a half dozen such clinics involving people from thousands of miles away. The kids certainly benefit but any parent paying close attention to the goings on is going to come away with an education too. I haven't observed Nancy Evans teaching pitching before but I imagine that she has a wealth of knowledge to impart upon the girls and their parents.
Many organizations are looking for ways to raise funds for tournaments, travel, uniforms, etc. Sponsoring clinics such as these can be a better way to raise substantial amounts of money while also doing something for the general state of the sport in your area. I know of one very well respected organization in Ohio which conducted a Kobata fielding clinic. A couple organizations by me sis similarly and we attended those. I wasn't there at the counting of the green but I can operate a calculator and know most of the associated costs involved. This can be a very lucrative venture. In one fell swoop, a softball organization can raise money, increase the skill level in their area, and make a name for themselves with the local youth. That's a win-win-win situation.
Yet, it can also backfire on you. There are certain fixed costs associated with conducting a clinic like this. And, if you fail to schedule the thing at a time convenient for the masses, if you fail to properly get the word out, if you do not get yourself a bona fide draw, you can end up sitting in a big facility, rolling your thumbs, and wondering what you did wrong.
The announcement above was not particularly well timed and Rich freely admits that. He did not consider that most local travel teams, the people who are familiar with Nancy Evans, would be playing tournaments during this clinic. Also, many high schools in the region have proms scheduled for the same day. Normally you would expect a "name coach" like this to draw every travel ball player within an hour's drive of the area. You'd have a bigger job explaining to people why you don't have room for them than you would promoting the event.
I've been to a couple events at which "big name" coaches have taught and entire teams arrived wearing their practice "uniforms" complete with t-shirts listing their biggest wins, etc. These kinds of things can really be a lot of fun since you don't often get to practice alongside the very same people you will despise at your next tournament!
And the level of instruction is usually extremely good, whether that be on fundamental skills or mental aspects of the game levels. I've yet to be completely disappointed in a clinic run by a "name coach." Even at extremely crowded events, you can walk away with one very important aspect of the game which you had not previously considered.
So to the youth reasonably close to Red Bank, especially those who already pitch or might want to give it a try, I urge you to attend the above clinic. Even girls who have never pitched will gain something from this. To those who want to bring the game in their area or state up, I implore you to find ways to attend similar clinics or host some of your own. Support the local softball organizations, if you can, and at the same time bring your children's skill levels up. To parents and coaches, I command you to pay strict attention when a giant of the game is conducting such a clinic and your kids are there in attendance. You may be the future teachers who bring the level of play up to national prominence for the next Florida!Labels: lessons, pitching
Permanent Link: Bring It
Breaking Views
by Dave
Monday, May 19, 2008
I have to admit that when the NFCA held their caucus (no not for the US presidential nomination) and decided to alter the strike zone a bit for NCAA games, I never heard anything nor paid much attention. But anyone who aspires to the next level ought to give this a good long think. And the powers that be in high school and youth fastpitch softball also should take this into consideration as we move forward.
First of all, the NCAA strike zone is now from the top of the front knee to the bottom of the sternum when the batter takes up her natural stance. Take a look at the chart at the bottom of this web page: NCAA Softball Rules Changes for 2008 for a visual aid. At first glance, this doesn't seem to be much of a big difference. Looking at the picture, it seems to be maybe two inches. But, in practice, this is a huge difference.
The reasons I feel this is a huge difference is because it moves the umpires focal point to anything at his eyes down to the knees to a spot below his normal eye level. Human beings, being fallible, will have a tendency to frame this new strike zone a bit lower than it might have been, that is, the actual strike zone in practice will be lower than the bottom of the sternum. As it was, umps hade a tendency to call strikes above where it was supposed to be. They didn't stop at the arm pits of a batter taking up her natural stance. They called anything near the shoulder a strike. So, I suspect the actual strike zone has shifted downwards more than the 2-4 inches which should result from moving it from the arm pits to the sternum.
I expect many of you watched some of the NCAA Regional action this past weekend. We recorded hours and hours of these games since we were at tournaments and then watched them a little too late into the night. While watching these games and many others in the weeks previous, several effects of the strike zone change struck me.
I would like to see a statistical analysis comparing run production 2008 vs. 2007 for the entire college game. I don't have that nor the resources to put together a proxy. But I'll go out on a limb and say that I believe run production was up this year. I may be wrong but that's my perception. I can't say that more homeruns were hit but the scores I saw were definitely bigger than in year's past. Before I ever heard anything about the strike zone change, I felt run production was up. I was actually a little shocked at the amount of hitting and run scoring there was at the college games I attended. Again, I have no statistics to back up my claim but those are my perceptions.
I believe this was the objective of the rule change. In softball as in baseball, folks have been eroding any advantage pitchers have in order to slowly change the game from one dominated by pitchers to one dominated by the offense. The same way we have watched a steady, though deliberate, gradual changing of the rules of the game to make more "hitter friendly." The pitchers plate was moved back to 43 feet from 40 in college and higher level youth and international play. We have begun to see a greater focus on the legality of the pitch including the amount of time a pitcher can stand there while a batter gets tighter and tighter, and to a lesser extent, pitchers remaining legal with their feet and hands.
(I still say the foot work rules are not enforced in a meaningful way but they are sometimes enforced as they were against Finch in the B-4-Beijing tour and several college pitchers at various times. My thinking is that since the same infractions were occurring over and over again yet the illegal pitch called no more than 2-6 times per game, the rule isn't being enforced in a meaningful way. Yet, if some umpire decided to really make an issue out of it, that would really kill a game. You'd have perhaps some of the greatest pitchers to ever have played the game breaking down in tears in the circle while runs were pushed across the plate by multiple, consecutive illegal pitch calls! &nbasp; We want hitting to be more important in the game but we don't want to go through transitional experiences like that to get us there.)
The objectives of ruling bodies has clearly been to inject more offense into the game. Nobody really makes any bones about it. There are still too many 1-0 games well into extra innings where the winning run scores primarily because of the ITB plus a misplayed ball or two in the field. We set our game length limits to 7 innings because we feel that is how long a game should be. The ITB is used because ... well ... this thing has to end sometime. I am one of those purists who loves a well pitched and played 1-0 game but even I have to admit that when only a handful of balls are put into play, I sometimes find myself confused, waking up in a beach chair with a terrible sunburn and bug bites at a field after everyone has long gone home. In other words, even I get bored when 21 outs are recorded, 17 of them by the K, or when the game is decided on an error in the 19th inning by some girl who really needs to get to a doctor's appointment and is getting nervous that she'll miss it if this blasted game doesn't end.
So I think the objective of shrinking the strike zone has to be about getting more offense into the game. Rule makers, in effect, wanted to neutralize the most dominant pitch, the rise ball.
I believe over the past several years (perhaps longer than that), it became clear that the riseball was the "Cadillac" of all pitches. Pitching coaches worked hard to teach girls to throw it at younger and younger ages. Even when they didn't specifically teach a particular girl an actual riseball, they were focused on skills which would eventually lead up to it.
On the whole, the most effective pitchers I observed (particularly in HS and college) all shared one thing in common, an effective riseball. I can't count the number of times I saw pitchers who relied upon the rise. There was one well known college pitcher who during her freshman year seemed to throw 60-80% rises with tremendous success. There were some extremely effective drop ball pitchers too (including obviously Texas' Osterman and Alabama's Stephanie VanBrakle) but I believe the vast majority of effective college pitchers relied upon a good riseball. Certainly many of the top strike-out pitchers like Abbott were riseball throwers. Osterman's success with breaking stuff cannot be disputed but the largest percentage of dominant strike-out pitchers used the rise.
You can argue that a riseball can be brought even with or under the sternum but this is not its most effective location. The most effective location is just above the armpits (the old upper limit of the strike zone). It gets into the eyes of the hitter and, at first, looks like a meatball that she is going to drive out of the park. Then as the pitch gets into the no-see zone (the last .15 seconds of its trip), it drifts up and out and there is no way to keep your hands on top of it. It is a swing and miss pitch except on those rare occasions you can make contact with it and pop it up to the infield.
Yes, an effective riseball pitcher can throw it in the zone as well as out but if the thing is thrown too low, it truly can become a meatball and end up on the wrong side of the outfield fence. And the riseball thrown under the armpits was always a set-up pitch, a set-up for the one thrown just above the zone. You brought a rise into the zone say on 3-0 and then threw one above it on 3-1, then maybe again on 3-2 after the batter swung and missed on 3-1. It also complemented an effective screwball since batters might misread the rotation and react to the screw only to swing and miss as it rose up and tied up their hands.
So the principal advantage of the rise has historically been as a swing and miss, just out of the zone pitch. And moving the strike zone downwards is a way to neutralize that particular pitch. One of the observations which surprised me while watching this year's NCAA Div I Regionals was the transformation of Jelly Selden from a riseball pitcher into a dropball one. Jelly can certainly still throw the rise but she doesn't necessarily rely upon it. She throws drops in and out, mixes in other pitches including the rise and she gets girls out with the breaking stuff. I believe we will see more of that from all college pitchers in the future.
I totally get that this change will not completely erradicate the riseball from the game. You can get a girl to swing at a high one regardless of where the strike zone is. I assume we will continue to see efective rises thrown on say 0-1, 0-2, 1-2 counts. But I don't expect to see its use be as dominant as it has been in the past. That is because any good batting coach, who has many empirical observations in which the rise is called a ball, will eventually begin working with his or her hitters to lay off the pitch, even at the risk of being punched out by umps with an over-extended zone. Eventually college hitters will lay off the rise the way many do the low thrown change-up.
This development has many far-reaching implications for high school and youth-play girls who aspire to play at the next level. For one thing, pitchers are going to need to work the low, breaking stuff more. It is no longer going to be in a pitcher's best interests to go through youth with a killer fastball and change while having other pitches but not having relative command of them, then as a young high schooler, develop a rise.
Pitchers who want to get the attention of college coaches are going to have to have good breaking stuff and laterally moving pitches. The softball strike zone is still fairly broad and pretty low. Who knows, those may be the next things to go? But for now, merely grazing the sides and bottom of the zone have become the most effective pitches. And a pitcher is more likely to succeed by "expanding" the zone laterally rather than trying to push it up, at least in the college game. Sure there will be fewer Ks as badly hit balls will be the sign of a pitcher who is on. And as the riseball is made more and more ineffective by the confluence of umps not giving the pitch and batters being trained to lay off it, the pitchers who will dominate the game going forwards will be throwing breaking stuff.
As a result of this development which I think will take place over the coming years, batters will, of course, have to adjust to the gradual change in the pitching they see. I don't believe I will get an argument that some girls are better low ball hitters than others just as some are better high ball hitters. You can work to change your swing but some girls physical make-up puts them in a better position to hit lower balls than others. The girls whose bodies make them better high ball hitters will have to adjust. And the world of hitting instructors will also make the adjustment. As another aside, I believe it is just possible that we'll see further inroads made by those who teach more of what is referred to as "rotational hitting" mechanics in which the bat head is often held below the hands - something you can't do when facing a riseball pitcher. But I'm getting way ahead of myself. I don't want to expand the restriction of the upper strike zone quite that far.
The bottom line in all this is what are high school aged players going to do about it? I expect pitchers will work the breaking stuff more and hitters will change their swings to adapt but the major consideration which I think must be looked at is the way high school and youth umps call the game. We conduct neither youth tournaments nor high school games in order to provide talent to the colleges. The largest percentage of age group and high school players will never set foot onto a college diamond. We don't need to alter their game in order to prepare the few college prospects to play at the next level. Yet, the history of all games begs the question of why we would want the thing played differently below 18 than it is above. In baseball, the game is essentially the game, in terms of rules and the way it is played, from say 14 years old onwards. The same is true of most, if not all, other sports. Why should we have different rules between HS and college just for girls softball?
While we don't want to change the game only so the colleges have a small percentage of kids prepared to play, there is no reason to penalize the kids who will move on in order to keep the HS and youth games stagnant. If the lowered strike zone is good enough for the college game, it should be good enough for every level of competition from say 14U up. And if the rule changes could make for more offensive production in games at these age levels, why not adopt them? What are the affirmative reasons to make the game different for these slightly younger age categories?
Having said this, I just realized that perhaps the HS strike zone has already changed but I did not bother to check that. And even if it did, it isn't being enforced properly, at least not in my state. I've been to dozens and dozens of high school games already this year with hopes of seeing maybe another dozen in the coming weeks. HS umps are definitely still giving the high rise continued importance in that game. Several times I have had to wonder if the strike zone ended at the chin, nose, eyes, or top of the helmet of the batter! I have had the opportunity to observe a few senior pitchers who have already signed NLIs as well as many juniors who may this July and several underclassmen who have either already gotten the attention of college coaches or may this summer. Most of these kids, not all, at least in their high school personas are riseball pitchers.
I cannot say with any certainty that high or low ball hitters have been the focus of college coaches but I have to wonder if this might be a consideration going forwards. If they start looking to recruit dropball and sideways movement pitchers, you really have to wonder if simultaneously they'll be looking to pick up low ball hitters.
Well, I hope this piece provides you food for thought. Obviously, there is, as always, a fair amount of my own personal opinion here. I have to say that I'm a little late to the picnic. This rule change has been out there the whole college season. I didn't know about it until recently. I thought I saw more offensive production in colleges this year but I really didn't know why. I also thought I saw fewer riseballs being thrown and, again, wasn't sure why. Maybe I'm just making a mountain out of a mole hill but I suspect my observations are right. I don't mind if you disagree with me and as always, if you do disagree, please feel free to write. The only thing I will warn you about is, if you write, I just may publish your opinion!
Scott from Texas writes in to offer his opinion:
Baseball moved from pitching advantage to hitting advantage because scoring meant more fans. I think in general that has proven true. As a dad like yourself with two pretty decent softball girls, I have fallen in love with the game and wish it had more of a fan base. So I would love to see the strikezone get a bit smaller and generate some more scoring. We also have a hard time keeping girls interested in the game, because unless you are the pitcher or the catcher, not a lot of action. Hitting is the funnest part of the game and it would go a long way to keep girls playing this sport instead of soccer or basketball.
I say this as a pitcher's dad as well (and travel ball coach). My daughter isn't old enough yet to pitch the rise ball - she is just 12. However, we are ahead of the curve on the drop and curve and screwball - most of her peer pitchers are fastball/change up pitchers. I love that she can spin the ball and I think it makes her game a ton of fun, trying to outwit her batting opponent. I get really bored with pure power - I'm more of a Greg Maddux fan. Most of the pitching coaches I've interacted with are teaching power pitching and I also believe it leads to injuries that are unnecessary, particularly for the age that we are in.
So all in all, I believe the change would be good for this game. I am probably reaching a bit, but it could also be a formula that re-instates it as an Olympic sport. Right now, what chance does the rest of the world have against the US and Japan with the pitching as dominant as it is?
Labels: hitting, pitching, rules
Permanent Link: Breaking Views
No Evil
by Dave
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Do you know the classic image of the three monkeys, one with hands over eyes, a second with hands over ears, and the third with hands covering mouth? I'll add an additional one but I'm just taking poetic license. I believe that whether you are a fan, a player or a coach, you must think umpires:
A) don't know the rules (hear no evil);
B) know the rules but do not see these things as infractions (see no evil);
C) know the rules and see the infractions but are reluctant to make these calls because nobody among their cohort is calling them (speak no evil); or
D) know the rules, see the infractions, are perfectly willing to make the calls, but interpret the rules as intending players to not take an advantage and absent any such advantage, see no reason to make the calls (think no evil).
What I'm getting at is the rules regarding the pitcher's feet. My take on this is selection D. I believe umpires know the rules well, can generally see fine, are never unwilling to make a call where they see an infraction, but do not see pitchers gaining an advantage. The bottom line is they aren't making the calls.
In my corner of the world, most people aren't all that knowledgeable or sure about the overall rules concerning pitching but they seem to feel comfortable about those regarding the pitcher's feet. They see pitchers doing something in games and they cry foul. When nothing is done about it, they first blame umpires for not making the call. Then they reason that just the pitchers in our state do these evil things. They sometimes go so far as to claim that once our pitchers travel outside the state, they'll get caught by the real umpires enforcing the real rules and these pitchers will fail, fail, fail. They act so superior and claim that the reason why softball from our state doesn't have a better reputation has something to do with the failure of local pitchers to pitch legally and umpires to call them in such cases. But the facts remain our pitchers do travel outside the state, don't seem to get called an inordinate amount of times for illegal pitches, and a good portion of them are successful at high levels.
Let me explain a little bit more about the issue I am looking at. In general, a pitcher must stand on the rubber with both feet before taking a signal from the catcher. In Pony and some other sanctioning bodies, one foot (the pivot foot) on the rubber is OK but the landing foot must be behind the rubber. In NCAA play, the pitcher must keep one half of her pivot foot in contact with the rubber when taking the signal. Then the pitcher must keep her feet in contact with the rubber until she begins the pitch. Many pitchers, particularly NCAA pitchers, drag their pivot foot in from the edge of the rubber to a point closer to the center or all the way over to their landing foot before stepping off and striding. During the stride, obviously the pitcher can take her landing foot off the rubber as she steps forward. At this point, the pitcher's pivot foot is supposed to remain "in contact with the rubber" but this is ruled to be the case when she drags the pivot foot away from the rubber after pushing off and before release.
If a pitcher lifts her pivot foot off the rubber during her windup (when she might be dragging it along the rubber), this is illegal since she did not keep in contact with the rubber. If she pushes off with the pivot foot and it leaves the ground (does not drag), this is called a leap and is illegal. If she pushes off with the pivot foot, it goes into the air and re-lands to a new point of impetus - she pushes off from the new spot, this is called a crow hop and it is also expressly illegal. Another related infraction along these same lines occurs when the pitcher takes a slight step forward with the pivot foot before striding and gains a point of impetus in front of the rubber. This isn't a crow hop but it is illegal since the pitcher did not remain in contact with the rubber and has gained a new point of impetus that is not in contact with the rubber.
Another though somewhat unrelated common infraction occurs when a pitcher takes the signal from behind the rubber and then walks into the pitch. You usually see this in early age groups like 10U or 12U. You don't normally see anything like this in ASA ball since it is mighty difficult to walk into a pitch and begin your wind-up with two feet on the rubber! Some girls continue to take signals from behind the rubber as they age but generally umpires do a good job of preventing pitchers from walking into the pitch since this provides an obvious advantage - pitchers throw somewhat harder when they are allowed to walk into a pitch. And as girls get older and play ASA ball, they must stop taking signals from behind the rubber and walking into the pitch or they must give up pitching because it will almost always be called illegal.
The rules infractions I am looking at today are only concerned with leaping, actual crow hopping, and deliveries in which the pitcher pushes off from a point slightly in front of the rubber. Also, when I talk about umpires not calling these infractions, I mean all umpires. Pitching rules in high school can be different from those in college, ASA and ISA. But as far as crow hopping and leaping are concerned, they are pretty much identical. Yet you almost never see an ump call illegal pitch for something the pitcher is doing with her feet.
As I said, many near me claim that this is because only pitchers in our state are doing this. I beg to differ. I have made a close examination of numerous NCAA pitchers as well as the entire Team USA pitching staff. I defy anyone to closely examine Jennie Finch, Cat Osterman, Monica Abbott or similar caliber pitchers and show me a full game's worth of pitches in which all are fully legal in terms of their feet. I say I defy anyone because I have clearly seen these Olympic pitchers and the replacement players who did not make the team roster all make repeated infractions.
It would be akin to picking low hanging fruit to say they stride outside the 8 foot pitcher's circle. Most of them do but not on every pitch. It would be equally easy to say they do not stay within the two foot corridor between the pitcher's plate (rubber) and homeplate. I've yet to see a top level pitcher throw a screwball while keeping within the two foot corridor.
I have watched, I think, three of the Team USA games against NCAA opponents. In those games, I have observed at least one pitcher who: 1) lifted her pivot foot off the rubber during the "drag" before push off, 2) replanted the pivot foot in front of the rubber before releasing the ball, or 3) performed what is commonly called a leap - did not drag the pivot foot after push off. I have seen each of the Team USA pitchers (as well as each of the replacement players who are pitchers) commit one of these infractions on multiple occasions. I haven't seen one called for it yet.
I have watched about a dozen and a half NCAA games in two of the divisions, both in person and via television, and while I have seen plenty of pitchers who commit none of these infractions, I have seen quite a few who do but are never called for them. I have watched several dozen high school games this year, seen numerous infractions and one call for an illegal pitch. The one call I witnessed involved a coach from one team complaining to the ump about it, the ump demanding her to show him "where in the rules it says that," and then, after a ten minute discussion of the rules in which the coach in fact showed the ump the rulebook, he made the call just once after which the pitcher continued to commit the infraction. Ironically, the pitcher for the coach who raised the stink also arguably commits some foot fouls in her delivery!
One local HS pitcher was photographed in the midst of her delivery with both feet quite obviously off the ground. Tha photograph made the front page of the local newspaper. The pundits went absolutely berserk about the illegal pitch! They claimed the girl's pitching coach was to blame for the infraction. They claimed the pitching coach had pretty much taught every pitcher in the state who hops or leaps to do it. They stopped short of blaming the pitching coach for the high price of gasoline and pasta but everything else that was wrong with the world was, I believe, ultimately traceable to this particular pitching coach! The truth is the guy does not tolerate any such infractions from his students. When he sees them, he corrects them. I know because my daughters go to him and one of them developed a very slight leap when she was 10. We worked for weeks to eliminate that. So the charges have been dropped and he will not be brought before the UN for his alleged crimes against humanity.
Now, I told you that many in my area do not have that firm of a grasp upon pitching rules. They also do not seem to understand the limitations of umpires eyesight and attention. There are often complaints about the feet of the pitcher during preliminary tournament games in which there is but one lonely, single umpire. It is not commonly understood that a plate umpire cannot watch the pitcher's hands and feet while also calling balls and strikes. Generally a solitary umpire will focus on the pitcher's hands and the strike zone since both are within a normal human being's line of vision. When there are two umpires, the plate ump usually still maintains his interest in the hands of the pitcher and it is the field ump who might be concerned with her feet. It should be noted, however, that even when you have two umps, the field ump is more concerned with baserunners' feet not leaving the base before release than he is with the pitcher's feet. Still coaches go to the plate ump for discussions about feet and the field ump for questions about her hands. It's absurd but I have seen this repeatedly done by people who should know better.
The most egregiously ridiculous thing I have seen a coach do with respect to the legality or illegality of a pitcher's delivery happened in a 10U game which was being played generally under ASA rules but which allowed the pitcher to place "one or two feet" on the rubber before delivery and made no point about enforcing leaping or hopping rules due to the age of the participants. The first base coach of what was essentially a local all-star team didn't like what he saw. What he saw was a pitcher who, while basically legal, might have been hopping off the rubber due to poor conditions in and around the rubber. It is rather difficult for anyone to push off the rubber and maintain contact with the ground when there is a 6-9 inch hole in front of it, more so when the kid's foot is only 9 inches long!
This coach complained to the lone ump behind the plate. Then when illegal pitch was not called, he again approached the ump who, rather unsure of himself, instructed the pitcher to not leap. But he made no illegal pitch call. The next time the coach approached the ump, he decided he'd had enough and told the coach to go back to the coach's box (basically, shut up and let's get on with this). The coach not knowing what else to do, began to yell "BALK" on every delivery. He strategically yelled this as the girl began the last 25% of her arm circle and before she released the pitch. The poor girl didn't know what to do and she began to cry. At this point, she somehow managed to finish the inning without missing the strike zone too badly and the jackass went back to his team's dugout.
Interestingly, when he came out again, he began to yell at every pitch again and then it turned ugly. People from the other side began yelling back and threats were exchanged. Finally the guy began to shut up. If I'm not mistaken, one of the other coaches replaced him at first base in subsequent innings. Then they guy's kid came out to pitch late in the game. If you want to see the picture of an illegal 10U pitcher who should go back to taking lessons for 6 months before entering the circle again, this guy's kid fit the bill. Enough about an imbecile who should learn to keep his mouth shut. I know I'll never forget the guy. Neither will some "well connected people" who were involved with another team he pulled the same stunt on. The guy is marked and many now know him. I hope this doesn't effect his kid's future but I know if I ever see his kid, I won't have her on my team. And I'm not alone.
The point is, people just don't seem to know the pitching rules and recognize when they really ought to be applied. By the way, there is no such thing as a "BALK" in girls fastpitch softball. There are situations in which the ruling would be similar to a balk. But balk is a baseball term. It applies only to situations where there are runners on base. It involves the requirement that the pitcher come to a set position and then either throw to a base or deliver a pitch. Balks are called to prevent the pitcher from taking an unfair advantage when he tries to pick a runner off base. These rules do not apply to fastpitch in which there is no leading and there is no "set position." Yet I have heard many people exclaim "BALK" at softball games. Some rec leagues have a rule concerning balks but this is ridiculous and usually proceeds from fathers who played baseball and don't have time to understand why it is inapplicable to fastpitch. Most likely they have a poor understanding of the baseball balk rules!
These rules concerning the pitcher's feet are apparently made in order to prevent the pitcher from gaining an unfair advantage. It seems pretty clear that any rule prohibiting a pitcher from doing X or Y must be in the realm of obtaining an unfair advantage. Otherwise it would be merely arbitrary and capricious - there's no other valid reason for rules governing a pitcher's behavior. If there is, please point it out to me.
It is pretty clear to me that most umpires understand pitching rules pretty well. I've talked to many of them in passing and I've yet to find one who is completely ignorant about them. That's probably because these rules have not varied that widely over the years and, when something major has changed, it is usually discussed ad nauseum. I don't get invited to many umpire BBQs but I do know a couple of the fellows and they usually like to talk.
In the NCAA, there has been some recent effort to make sure the umpires know the rules with regards to footwork. Spy softball included in its April 1 update a publication the NCAA distributed to umpires which exhaustively goes over "the pitcher's feet." If you don't understand my explanation of these issues, please take a look at the publication because it makes the rules extremely clear. Any umpire receiving this information and actually reading it should not have any questions whatsoever about what is legal and what is illegal footwork. Still, you don't see frequent calls on this and that isn't because pitchers aren't leaping and hopping.
It is also pretty clear to me that many pitchers offend the letter of the rules concerning leaping and hopping in such a manner that it cannot be missed by umps. As I said, I observed one HS ump call it after being badgered by a coach. But he called it just the one time though I did see him watching the pitcher later and her infractions were pretty obvious. By the way, I have seen ASA Gold level college prospects leap and hop on numerous occasions. These girls are from all over the country. And I've seen a good number of them do this when they played games in front of big time college coaches they wanted to impress. Still, I have seen no calls from the ASA umps and a good portion of these girls end up filling the rosters of top 25 Div I schools. So I suspect it isn't quite the big deal many make it out to be and it certainly isn't isolated to my state.
It is very easy to observe illegal footwork on TV, relatively simple when watching a game from the sidelines and quite another thing entirely to do so on the field when you are trying to call a game. The other night we were watching a televised game and my wife turned to me and asked, "did you see her hop?" I hadn't so we rewound the game via our DVR. It was pretty obvious. Similarly, we attended a game recently in which a pitcher was obviously hopping. Another time we saw a pitcher who replanted her foot about 6 inches in front of the rubber. And I have seen too many leapers to count. I'm obviously unconcerned with making sure I call the right outs on plays in the field since I'm comfortably along the sidelines but these infractions were pretty darn obvious to me. There's no way an umpire could have missed every infraction. I can see it a few times when there are runners on base or other things going on but there's no way these infractions could be missed over an entire game. They see the evil and know it when they see it.
The third option I gave you above was the umps were reluctant to make the call because none of their buddies make it. As I said, I've known a few umps here and there and I can't say that these guys and gals were ever reluctant to give their opinion on any subject whatsoever, even if everyone disagreed with that opinion. I've yet to meet an ump who I would expect to be afraid of voicing his opinion on the feet of a pitcher because none of his cohort is currently making the call. I just cannot see that sort of thing happening. I've seen umps make all sorts of calls on arcane rules nobody else was familiar with and none of their cohort had called recently.
The only thing I am left with is the notion that umps know the rules, see the potential infractions, and would be perfectly willing to make the call if they thought the pitcher were obtaining an unfair advantage. I believe many of these fellows would also make the call in age group ball if they felt there was any chance they were helping the pitcher's career. What I mean is most of these guys and gals are out there for love of the game. They generally have a very high regard for the young girls who play it. Most of them dream that one day they'll see this or that girl play high school or college ball. And they really appreciate young pitchers. If any of the umps I know saw something badly illegal, they would work hard to try to help the girl overcome the issue. They might talk at length to the coach or even approach the parents after the game to at least discuss what they observed. I have had this happen and I have observed it happen to others. These people take their jobs very seriously and most see helping a kid get better at the game to be an integral part of the responsibility they sign up for.
Finally, it is my belief that the reason we don't see illegal pitch called often is because the umpires see what I see. That is, they and I do not see any advantage gained by the questionable foot work. I may be wrong about this and I welcome any sort of inquiry or comments by umps but from what I can see, leapers do not get an advantage. And crow hoppers may appear to get an advantage but when you put a hopper next to a legal pitcher and watch the degree to which the hop helps or hinders her, what you are left with is the idea that a hopper loses something on her pitches as a result of the hop.
Hoppers really get no closer to the batter than draggers. They do not gain anything by the new point of impetus. That's because their normal forward momentum would be greater if they didn't re-land and push off. You come off that rubber about as fast as you can explode. If you re-land and then push again, you have lost a good deal of forward momentum. To see what I mean, try it for yourself. Go into a wind-up, leap, land and push off again. Its pretty awkward. And most importantly, you are moving faster during the leap than you are after the push off from a new point of impetus. I just don't see any real advantage but maybe you do. Aside from this possible explanation, I cannot otherwise explain why you almost never see illegal pitch called on a leaper or hopper.
I also think many of us would be better served if we focused on something besides the pitchers leap or hop. We can yell all we want from the sidelines or dugout. We can even eat into the game by constantly going out to go over the rulebook with umps. But that's not going to put runners on base or make our hitters hit the ball. In the end, the rules are what they are, the umps call whatever they call, and the game continues. If you want to win, do so by putting the ball into play.Labels: pitching, rules, umpiring
Permanent Link: No Evil
Random Observations
by Dave
Thursday, April 03, 2008
I haven't been able to write much recently for a number of reasons. I've experienced some complex web server problems which took more than a full week to clear up. I've been to a lot of practices and lessons. I've spent a lot of time catching practice pitching sessions. And, to be quite honest, when there are good games to watch, I prefer that to sitting in my home office typing away. I've watched a pretty good number of games in the past week or two. I watched a couple college games on TV - you really have to invest in the available college sports packages if you want to watch great softball as often as possible. I've watched a few more via the internet - a subject for another day? I've been to a few Div II college games, at least 4 high school games, and even a 14U Pony national qualifier. I have lots of observations but I doubt I'll have time to tickle the keyword about all of them. Two sets of issues, however, call to me as I lay in bed awake at night.
The first set of issues which is on my mind involves pitching. I've seen some very good pitching and some not so good. Interestingly, both the good and not so good have been evident at all levels, 14s, high school and college. The biggest problem I have noticed was pitchers whose arms were not straight or fell out of the "perfect circle." I don't think I can overemphasize that the top pitchers have one thing in common and that is a straight arm from the top of the circle to the bottom point of release.
The physics are self-evident. When we talk about spinning a stick (your arm) around an axis (your shoulder), the further the end point of the stick (your hand and the ball) is from the axis, the greater the speed, and therefore, force on that end point.
To explain this most important point, think of two circles, one inside the other. The outside circle has a larger circumference - the distance around the outside circle is greater. If your elbow is traveling around the inside circle, it travels the circumference of that circle. If your hand, holding the ball, travels around the outside circle, it travels the circumference of that circle. I think it stands to reason that the elbow and hand travel their respective circles simultaneously. In other words, the hand travels around a bigger circle (over a greater distance) during the same period of time the elbow travels a smaller circle (over a shorter distance). So the hand is actually moving at a faster speed than the elbow. That speed is transferred to force applied to the ball at release point. The bigger the arm circle, the faster the ball at release. If you, the pitcher, do anything which decreases the size of the circle, you reduce the speed of your hand and, therefore, the amount of force you apply to the ball.
Understand, I'm not talking about having a bent elbow on the follow through. I understand that the arm is not perfectly straight after any pitch. Whether you're throwing a rise, a curve, or almost any pitch, your arm is going to be bent on the follow through. I'm talking about the time between the top of the circle and the bottom when your arm should be as straight as possible.
I believe the reason windmillers sometimes throw with bent elbows has to do with control. I think that throwing with a completely extended arm makes the pitcher feel as if she is out of control. The only way to get over this is to throw a lot of pitches with the arm fully extended and then to experience a degree of control over the ball, after lots of trial and error. It seems a heck of a lot easier to find the controlled release point by bending one's elbow. I don't know why that is but it does. So, many pitchers develop a tendency to bend and then they can't break the habit. This is why I emphasize throwing with the greatest possible speed, the straightest arm, when you are just starting out and worrying about control later.
You may have read the article I wrote a long time ago entitled "just get it over". The essence of that article involved a youth pitcher whose parent, coach or friends' parents "encouraged" her to "just get it over, just let them hit it, just, please God, throw a G....D....... strike."
If we travel back to some 10U recreational game to observe this phenomenon, we may see the young pitcher do something in an effort to just get all those people to shut up and stop yelling at me. What she'll invariably do is shorten her stride to the plate, slow her motion down, and ... bend her elbow. Fast forward this young girl to high school or whatever age level, if she's still pitching at all, chances are pretty good she'll continue to bend her arm when she needs to throw a strike. And that's a pity!
If you are such a pitcher or working with one, the best way I know to get out of this habit is, as I said, to throw lots of pitches with a straight arm until you begin to break the habit. It's a motor memory sort of thing and the only way out of it is to throw thousands of pitches with a straight arm. I have seen a at least one pitching coach who routinely has his students perform what he calls "double arm circle." This is a good practice. Every lesson, during warm-ups, these girls are instructed to do the double arm circle in order to speed up their pitching. As you can guess, a double arm circle involves nothing more than doing a regular windmill but not releasing the ball when your arm hits the bottom of the circle. Instead, you just go around again. This encourages the girls to rotate their arms quickly and usually they end up throwing with straight arms. The rythym can be a little difficult at first but after some trial and error, most girls get it pretty well.
You don't have to stop at two rotations. I have seen coaches trying to straighten out kids' arms by having them go around as many as five times before release. I suppose the possibilities seem endless. Sara, go around 500 times before release! But the reality is, at some point, the effect is wasted and the girl again bends her elbow because she is bored or her shoulder is beginning to hurt!! If you want to try this, I suggest keeping it to just two rotations at first and then, maybe later, trying more but not exceeding 5 full rotations.
Whether you do double, triple or whatever number of arm circles, it is most important ot remember that what we are after is not control. The pitcher must feel free to throw the darn ball wherever it goes. That's the most important part of doing this drill. Drills without a point are just a waste of time. Don't waste your or your pitcher's time by doing double arm circles unless you are willing to stop worrying about control.
Another drill you can use to get the speed up and hopefully straighten the arm is to walk into the pitch. The pitcher stands to full strides behind the rubber or place from which she would be pitching. She steps first with her normal stride foot, then with her usual pivot foot, then takes an actual pitching stride towards the plate. This may start out as casual, slow steps but it should progress to fast stepos in which lots of forward momentum is developed. It should result in a fast arm circle which is almost out of control - it becomes difficult to maintain a bent arm because she is moving so fast. Just as with multiple arm circles, the object of this drill is not control. It is arm speed and straightness.
If you'd prefer to not do multiple arm circles or walk into the pitch, and want to just pitch instead, the same general rule applies. Control has to be allowed to go out the window. You can work on arm straightness without doing these drills - just over-emphasize and exaggerate arm straightness. The pitcher should work on speed first and control will come with experience. Otherwise what you end up with is a girl who throws the ball 5+ miles per hour slower than she should be.
Another mechanical pitching flaw I noticed recently while watching games is related to the bent arm. In this case, what I observed was pitchers who did not keep their arms locked into a straight circle. What I mean is, if we draw a circle around the axis of the pitcher's shoulder and make that perpendicular to the pitching rubber, what we have is a circle which runs from 6 o'clock to 12 o'clock and then back down to 6. I've seen a few pitchers whose arm circles are from 6 to 11 and then down to 5. They sort of throw sideways rather than straight at home.
It's difficult to draw this picture with words but think of yourself standing at homeplate and observing the pitcher's arm motion. The arm swings straight up and over her head and then travels down to about the same place it started from. The circle you see should be straight rather than exposed to you. if we lived in a world with two dimensional lines, you wouldn't be able to see the back of the circle because it is blocked by the front. Understand? In other words, the circle is a circle rather than an irregularly warped disk.
The best analogy is a golf swing in which the driver attempts to make a operfect circle with his club. If he or she comes off that perfect circle, the ball is either missed or mis-hit. If by chance it is hit squarely and well, it is because the driver has adjusted the swing and, as a result, has not hit the ball with the greatest possible force. The same mechanics apply to windmill pitching with a few additional coinsiderations.
Obviously there is more to a windmill motion than there is to swinging a golf club. That's because there is a stride to the windmill and because, whereas a golfer stands sideways to the path of the ball, the windmiller stands straight to it, moves to a sideways position as she strides and then moves back towards being straight (depending on whether she is a closed or open hip pitcher). Also, different pitches require slight modifications to an otherwise perfect circle. Still the degree to which a pitcher varies off her perfect circle should not be as extreme as what I have observed.
I believe pitcher vary from the perfect circle because, just as with the bent elbow, they are trying to control their doby too much. It is natural for a human being performing a complex motion to try to shorten it. Both the bent elbow and variance off the perfect circle provide the illusion of greater control. But the variance from a straight circle with a straight arm should be discouraged.
I'm less certain about drills one can use to straighten out the circle. I think the object of a product known as "the perfect cricle" is to do just this. But I haven't had time nor money to buy one and test it. What I do with my pitchers is simply observe them and let them know when they vary from a good straight circle.
The other set of issues which calls to me late at night involves the mental part of the defensive side of the game. I have observed some really bad defense recently. I had to turn off a college game because I couldn't allow my eyes to watch any more horrendous defense. I almost walked out on another college game because of bad defense. But the worst defensive plays I observed involved a single high school game in which there were bad decisions at critical points in a game.
The three errors which caught my attention at high school games involved what I felt were wrong decisions, one relatively minor one by a coach which is probably more a matter of opinion and the other two by players.
The "mistake" by the coach was not a very bad one but it could have had a bad outcome. With a five run lead and runners on first and third with nobody out in late innings, the coach of the defense called a play for his team to execute in the event that the runner from first tried to steal second. That play is the one where the catcher pretends to throw through but actually throws to a middle infielder (the cutter) who cuts short between the pitcher and second base in order to catch the runner from third off the bag. The runner did go but the play was not executed well. Nobody seemed as if this had been practiced enough. That could have been a mistake but I'm not sure as perhaps they just flubbed something they'd been over hundreds of times. The shortstop was the cutter but she did not pick the ball cleanly as the catcher (a very skilled one) made a somewhat bad throw, in the dirt. That throw never looked as if it was meant to go through and the runner at third immediately recognized this and returned to base. That could also be called a mistake but let's ignore it for now. The third element of the play which was flubbed was the third baseman never got back to the bag in time to make a play had the runner been caught off. But we're also going to ignore that too because I don't think they should have run the play at all.
To go back over the situation, it was late in the game with the team in the field leading 5-0, first and third with nobody out. In that circumstance, I would rather throw the runner from first out and concede the run. That would have left me with a still four run lead, one out and nobody on. It wasn't as if the team up to bat had done anything else all game. They hadn't. One should reasonably expect the pitcher to continue her domination and retire the side. The result of the flubbed play was runners on second and third with nobody out.
My preference is to avoid second and third, if I can. With runners on second and third, especially with one or no outs, I want both my runners to try to advance on any infield grounder. This puts pressure on the defense and can cause infielders to make poor judgments like trying to get the runner out at home. That's a low percentage bet unless the infield is playing in, the fielder has a good, accurate arm, and the catcher is also skilled at making the tag. Offensively, I want to get a run in with runners on first and third again so I can try to steal second and get back to this advantageous situation. Such are large rallies made.
Anyway, what happened next was the hitter hit a tough groundball to an infielder who stopped it but was unable to make a play on any runner. So it was first and third again, with still nobody out, and a run across. Again the offensive team tried to steal second but this time, the coach had wisely decided to throw her out. &mnbsp; The throw went through easily nailing the runner from first and the girl at third froze too because the throw from the catcher was nearly perfect and very hard - not so much, I believe, because they had run that cutter play previously.
So the situation was runner on third, one out, still a 4 run lead and the inning ended well, without anyone else scoring. But this could have been an important juncture of the game because in the final inning, the other team tightened it up further. The game ended with several runners on base and just a one run lead. Had the defensive team tried the cutter play a second time and flubbed it or given up a second run, this game would have turned out differently.
My point here is you have to adjust strategies to the game situation. It's great to run the first and third cutter play successfully. It takes the steam out of the team batting. But when you have a chance to close out a game without such an aggressive defensive play, I think you should take the opportunity. Sometimes just nailing the runner from first on a first and third is enough.
I say this "mistake" in judgment was something which stuck out to me but it wasn't really that big of a deal. It's a matter of opinion. The bigger deal happened in the same game during the last inning when the team up to bat in that first and third, got something going and made it a close finish.
To set the stage, the defensive team had a 4 run lead, 5-1. The team up to bat got a couple runners on first and third. The batter hit one softly back to the pitcher who wheeled around and attempted to get the runner from first at second. But the middle infielders had nonchalantly covered second and were a bit surprised by the pitcher making the throw. The middle infielders made something of a mental error by not being ready but the bigger error was the pitcher trying to get the out at second.
In fastpitch softball, I don't need to remind anyone that the bases are just 60 feet apart. Runners get to leave base when the pitcher releases the ball. If the runners are fast, it takes them no more than two to two and a half seconds to reach the next base. If they are running on a play, they are 20-25% of the way to the next base by the time the batter strikes the ball, further by the time a fielder fields it. By the time her throw gets to a fielder covering the bag, even if she makes a perfectly clean play and perfect throw, the runner should be just about ready to slide. It is going to be a close play no matter what. With a 5-1 lead, the pitcher should be less concerned about the batting team's potential run number 3. Instead she can easily gun down run number 4 with a casual throw to first in plenty of time. Also, throwing to second makes it much harder to nail the runner potentially coming from third. The throw from second is a harder one than that from first, if she had just thrown out the batter.
That's besides the fact that getting the easy out at first rather than the hard one at second leaves approximately the same situation. She could have had one out, runners on first and third, tying run in the on-deck circle, had she been successful getting the out at second. Taking the easier out at first would have left the defense only slightly disadvantaged with runners at second and third, one out and the tying run still in the on-deck circle. The throw to second was not a very good one and it was mishandled. This allowed the batting team to score a run and bring the tying run to the plate with runners on first and third.
I forget exactly what happened next but ther next play worth mentioning had the situatuion at runners on second and third, score 5-2, and I think just one out. The next batter lined a single to right which was not hit directly at the rightfielder but she did get over and field the ball pretty cleanly. The rightfielder hesitated for a moment as she thought through what to do next and then fired the ball over the cutoff's head toward home. The throw was offline but the catcher came out and handled it. Even a perfect throw would not have nailed the girl from second who scored easily, well ahead of the errant throw. But during the play, the batter easily moved to second on the throw home. This put the defense in a very bad position, tying run at second, winning run coming to the plate, just one out.
I can't leave you hanging so I'll tell you that the pitcher starting breathing heavy. There were actual flames coming from her nostrils as she struck out the next batter, two gone, tying run still at second. The next hitter grouded out to an infielder who made a good play but not great throw. The throw pulled the first baseman slightly off the bag. Initially, the ump called the batter out at first but after some discussion, they ruled her safe and the situation was 2 out, top of the last, 5-4, runners on first and third. The next batter grounded out and the home team won.
To sum up, I've been busy but there's still a lot I would write if I had more time. Even when I haven't been legitimately busy, I've chosen to go watch games instead of writing. Those games have demonstrated a few things I just had to write about. The first couple involve pitchers. The others were about bad or questionable decisions on defense. Pitchers need to keep straight arms inside their perfect circle. Defenses need to know the situation in terms of both the inning and game circumstances which dictate certain responses. Defensive decisions can snowball and cost you a game. Before a ball is pitched, every fielder, including the pitcher, needs to reason things out a bit and decide what she's going to do if X happens. Coaches need to tailor their most aggressive tactics to the situation though I can understand when they sometimes play it a bit more aggressively. It doesn't matter how great of an athlete you are if you allow bad motor memory to invade your technique or you allow the stress of the situation to cause you to make bad play decisions.
Follow-up PostingBrad writes in to say:
"A drill I like that helps correct bending of the elbow and warped circles, is to have the pitcher stand feet slightly wider than shoulder width, toes on her power line. Place a short, light weight bat such as a Tee ball bat, in her pitching hand and have her do arm circles. 5 - 10 reps as many times as desired. Make sure the bat head stays on the power line. The weight of the bat doesn't allow for deviation of a straight, a long arm and a consistent circle. It also helps add strength to the throwing arm and adds speed to the arm circle."Labels: defense, high school, pitching
Permanent Link: Random Observations
Je t'adore (Shut The Door)
by Dave
Friday, March 14, 2008
Jenny writes in to say/ask:I recently read an article you had written back in 2006 and loved it! I agree with you and in the town I live in they believe they should keep their hips open upon release. I had pitching lessons when I was younger (20+ years ago), that is not how I was taught. Now that my daughter is pitching I don't want her to learn the open hip style. Here is the quote from your arcticle that I love:
"Michele Smith while broadcasting on national TV tells pitchers to leave their hips open at a 45 degree angle. I've yet to find anyone who agrees with that but I'm sure A) it worked for her and B) there are coaches out there teaching it who are very successful but who I haven't heard speak. But I am at least ready to be suspicious of any coach who expresses this approach. If I come across such a coach, I'll ask her or him the key question "Why?" in order to judge for myself."
Now I found a man with a very different opinion, I would love for you to read it and tell me what you think.
OK, Jenny, I'm going to bite because I enjoy the topic. Before I begin, let me say that I am a blogger with a passion for the sport. I'm no pitching coach. I'm a consumer, not a supplier. It is my understanding that Bill Hillhouse is a windmill pitching expert of fairly high stature. As such, all I can do is respond to what he writes and let you decide for yourself whether you agree or not. I have heard many discussions about the topic and remain convinced that "leaving the door open" does not accomplish what the proponents of this "style" claim it does, while closing it does not, at least in my experience, seem to cause the problems they identify. I want to respond to the specific article you cite in pieces because I believe this is the best way for me to break down the argument.
For readers' reference, here is the article: "The Big Lies" Actually, the part of interest is just a piece of the overall article. You can find the relevant portion under number 2
Bill says:
"I'm willing to bet, if your pitcher was taught this method she either did or does the following: Right handed pitchers throwing INSIDE to right handed batters a lot. (Lefties would be the opposite, away from right handed batters). If this fits you, then you've fallen into the same category as 99% of the pitchers who've been taught this method."
Actually, in my experience, the opposite is true. Girls who do not "close the door" end up throwing the ball inside too far. I've seen this happen hundreds of times and each one of the pitchers who began closing the door had better control - stopped throwing the ball inside (righty pitcher to righty batter). My own kids had this problem initially but they corrected it and stopped hitting batters!
The problem to me is,when you leave the door open, this is not a natural motion - I'll address that momentarily. The end result is the pitcher ends up with her weight distributed mostly to her landing foot and she must to some degree hold back her body's natural momentum on the pivot foot side. The failure to close the door stops the motion before it is completed and results in leaving the ball outside.
Pitchers at higher levels do not experience the problems associated with closing or leaving open the door because they compensate for their particular motion. They do this in subtle ways which are not readily apparent but I think what is most important is, you can't win or lose this argument based exclusively on control issues. Younger pitchers will demonstrate a wildness one way or the other but this doesn;t answer the essential question of which mechanics are right. The premise that Bill offers up is a moot point.
There are a couple levers at work when you perform the windmill motion. Too often I think we consider only the arm lever. Of course, we include the legs in our consideration of the motion but we forget about the one lever which is relevant to this particular discussion.
At the beginning of the windmill motion, the body generates kinetic force from its inertia by driving the legs. The pivot foot-leg push the body's mass forward about the time the arm reaches the top of the circle. The body's weight-in-motion gives an added force to that generated exclusively by the arm in its circle. The windmill circle is the key lever in pitching the ball fast - the arm's speed is what is directly converted to the ball as it is released - but there is more going on than that.
As the landing foot comes to ground, a sideways body lever also occurs. The landing foot's contact with the Earth is a resistance point the same way a batter's front foot creates a resistance against the bodies forward momentum caused via the legs and hips. That resistance converts energy from the body's forward motion to the ball side since the landing foot is glove side. This is why you sometimes feel pain in the glove side knee and legs after throwing a lot. You expend energy creating that resistance as your foot comes to ground and your landing leg bends and flexes. The result is your ball side of the the body swings like a door on a hinge. That lever is important because, while it is not moving as fast as the arm, it contains more kinetic energy due to its greater mass - the mass of the body.
If you doubt this, consider that pitchers never throw with their "landing foot" in the air even though the body does have more forward momentum before the landing foot lands. In other words, your body contains more forward energy in the form of its mass and the speed it is moving when your pivot foot has just completed its push off - the pivot foot has just begun dragging. That is before the landing foot has landed. When your landing foot comes to ground, that resistance slows the body's overall speed and, therefore, kinetic force. Yet it is a necessary step in order to focus the kinetic energy to the throwing side via the landing side resistance and the sideways lever necessary for throwing.
I am of the opinion that deliberately leaving the door open is unnatural because after you create the landing leg resistance, your body wants to swing the door shut. In my opinion, to leave the door open, you have to make a conscious effort to stop the throwing hand side. But I want to address another of Bill's points in order to make that argument.
Bill says:
"Bringing the hip and hand through together (slamming the door) takes the arm off line of the catcher and into the pitchers side. This tends to send the ball in the direction of the pitcher's throwing side. If power is REALLY generated this way, I'd like someone to explain to me why, in overhand throwing, we don't step with our right leg at the same time as we throw with our right hand. It's because POWER is lost this way. When we throw overhand, our arm goes first, then the leg."
I agree that when we throw overhand, the arm goes first and then the leg. But this is something which occurs within a millisecond. The legs push, the throwing arm brings the ball and then the leg and hip follows right behind. I do mean right behind. A fielder turns 90 degrees to his/her target while pulling the ball back, throws the ball and "follows through." The "follow through" involves everything on the throwing side half of the body and it very much closes.
If you watch baseball pitchers closely, the very best have drastic follow throughs. The end result has the pitcher turned beyond square (over-rotated) with his throwing hand shoulder forward of the other shoulder, the hand down by the landing leg knee or even past it, and the pivot leg in the air with hips over-rotated beyond square too. Many right handed fastballers finish their motion with the right shouolder poiting at home and the overall body position open 45 degrees to first base. This is why, in baseball, you teach players to bunt to the pitching arm side of fastballers beyond the reach of the third baseman. Fireballers generally "fall off" to the glove hand side which provides the bunter with an advantage.
When you throw overhand without going through the full pitching motion, you don't follow through quite as drastically but your body does end up being slightly over-rotated. You do not end up being open 45 degrees to the target or you haven't gotten anything on the ball - you failed to avail yourself of the sideways lever, to use your body's kinetic energy created by footwork. Don;t take my word for it as I almost did after reading Bill's discussion. Go out and play a brief game of catch. If you are a righty, you end your throwing motion almost falling over to your right hand side. I guarantee you that you will end up over-rotated. I'd be winning to bet a lot on that one!
I think Bill believes that close-the-door windmill instruction involves closing the hip at precisely the same moment with the release of the ball. Heck I might have even said something like that here or there. I'd be surprised if some pitching coach didn't use that language but I don't believe that is what is intended. It just isn't possible.
You can only shut a door before or after you walk through it. Two objects cannot occupy the same identical space simultaneously. The pitching hand and hip go through about the same space when using the close the door "style." It stands to reason that the hip must come after or go before the pitching hand. It cannot go at the same moment. And if you try to close the door before bringing the ball, you are going to experience pain like you won't believe, not to mention some nasty bruises on your leg!
I don't necessarily believe that an examination of overhand throwing is relevant to a full discussion of windmill beyond the recognition that the sideways lever - the one caused by resistance of your landing leg - requires a closing of the door. It isn't possible to stop the door from closing without making an effort to do it. And if you want to test this out, try going back to your game of catch and forcing yourself to end up open to your throwing hand side by 45 degrees after every throw. You will end up doing exactly what Bill seems to be trying to avoid.
As a final point to this specific part, Bill seems to feel as if the open 45 degrees approach ends right at ball release. He doesn't proceed to the half second after the ball is released. He stops looking at the hips once the ball has been released. I know this because he also says, "Ever see still photos of your pitching heroes ... Where is their hand/ball at the release ... It's under their stomach or in front of their body." I beg to differ. But before I do, I MUST consider what pitch my favorite star has thrown for the camera before I examine where her hand is.
The fact is when we talk about closing the door or not, we aren't getting very specific. We must be talking about a plain vanilla fastball since each pitch has a different follow through. And my favorite pitchers do not throw many fastballs. That's clear to you'all isn't it? If it isn't, let me state it clearly. Big time female windmillers do not throw a lot of fastballs. I would be surprised if they represented ten percent of the mix in anyone beyond maybe high school JV. Even that's a stretch. My 13 year old doesn't throw that many fastballs anymore. She did in 12U but after that, it's the movement pitches which dominate the way the four seamer does in baseball.
And each pitch requires different follow throughs. But I want to get into this below because of something else Bill talks about. And I think Bill's understanding of what the open-door folks are saying is different than my own.
Michele Smith doesn't simply say that your hips should be open at ball release, she says they should remain that way. In other words, after the ball has been released and before the pitcher makes any additional motion, as she would if she were trying to field a grounder, her hips remain open that same 45 degrees. Put another way, if she freezes after the pitch and just stays there, watching the batter swing and miss, her hips will remain open 45 degrees. I said it before but I'll repeat myself. That means she must make a conscious effort to maintain her openness since the body wants to close the door due to the force caused by the landing leg's resistance. She must expend energy to stop her body's momentum by flexing back and abdominal muscles. I just don;t see how that can possibly help a pitcher's speed.
Finally, Bill says:
"This also ties into the riseball, which is the most misunderstood and controversial pitch in the game. Because so many people share this mechanical philosophy of "slam the door", it's physically impossible to get back spin on the ball."
As I began to say above, the type of pitch dictates a lot including the follow through. The riseball and screw are open-hip pitches. There's no way to get spin on the ball and bring the hip. But your whole body's mechanics are different on rises and screws than they would be for a fastball. The same is true for curves which absolutely require a door closed beyond its frame - over-rotated hips. The flip drop needs open hip. Your change depends on the variety you throw - I think a closed door works best for backhand and reach-and-turn changes but an open hip is better for the old stop your arm in your armpit change. I don;t know about knuckle changes - I haven't seen them used much. You want your change to look like other pitches and that probably dictates whether you close or leav open the door. If you're a riseball pitcher, chances are pretty good you leave your hip open on your changes too.
Let me wrap this up by saying that I'm not sure I completely disagree with Bill Hillhouse. The differences between our approaches might be extremely slight. I believe the pitching mechanics Michelle Smith talks about are more drastically differentand those are the ones I disagree with most. The again, maybe I'm not understanding her.
With respect to what Bill wrote as a refutation of closed-door mechanics, I think he is exactly wrong in his understanding of overhand throwing. It's clear to me that overhand pitchers over-rotate and that any overhand thrower will close the door right behind them. That may not be entirely relevant to an examination of windmill but it does say something about the sideways lever we absolutely do use when throwing both underhand and overhand. The door can never close simultaneously with the ball release. It must happen afterwards. And the pitch variety has a huge impact on pitching mechanics. Nobody is advocating a closed door on a riseball. For that matter, nobody is advocating a closed door on very many pitches. But try to throw a drop curve with your hips remaing open 45 degrees. Now that would be a cute trick but don't try it - you'll hurt yourself.
Follow-up:
A number of folks have written in to advocate for open hips. I cannot publish them all. Here is the most concise one and my reply:
Patrick writes in to say:
Dave,
Regarding your recent entry on "Closing the Door." I went back and viewed video of Smith, Finch, and Fernandez on YouTube and it seems to me they all use an open hips/ no closing style. Now I think it is arguable that these are 3 of the best women's fastpitch pitchers to play the game. Isn't that strong evidence of the strength of that style? Please feel free to correct me if I have mischaracterized their style and it is not what you were referring to in your entry.
Patrick,
You forgot Cat Osterman, Taryne Mowatt, Monica Abbott, and several others! But, no, that doesn't convince me that their style is the most correct one, the most efficient movement possible. Take a look at Yukiko Ueno (http://youtube.com/watch?v=GX9Ss0jtGso). Now this, is a relatively short pitcher (about 5 foot 6?) and she has been recorded at 73 miles per hour (perhaps higher?). She is a closed hip pitcher. I consider that strong evidence that closing the hip is more efficient.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Je t'adore (Shut The Door)
Training Your Pitcher
by Dave
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Whenever you train for an activity as demanding as windmill pitching, there are a couple of truths about which you should be mindful. For example, some of these are: 1) mechanics are king; 2) you always want to over prepare for the real situation; 3) you want practices to as closely resemble game conditions as possible; 4) the athlete will usually seek the level of exertion which is suited to the total, overall task; and 5) improvement usually comes in leaps not in tiny consistent steps. These truths must color the way we design the individual workout as well as the overall plan of workouts or practices will result in less benefit than we had hoped for.
I don't think there is anyone who would give me an argument that mechanics are absolutely the most important element of pitching. Mechanics are responsible for speed. Given a specific level of physical capability, the only way to increase speed is to use more optimal mechanics. Mechanics are an integral element of control and command. If a pitcher begins missing her mark, usually that is traceable to some sort of breakdown in her pitching mechanics. Ultimately mechanics are the key to better ball movement. Better mechanics are the source of better spin and, therefore, more and more controlled movement. You may be able to generate better speed occassionally by over-exerting. You may be able to occassionally throw a needed strike by abandoning basic mechanics as when a pitcher bends her able and places the ball rather than throwing it. You may get more spin occassionally by altering your mechanics. But in the long run, proper mechanics will give you more speed, better control and better ball movement.
The rigors of an intense practice can cause an athlete to use whatever mechanics make it easier to get through the workout. Early on, proper mechanics are easy to follow as the pitcher is not physically stressed. But as she begins to get more tired, as she sweats hard and the acid builds up in muscles, certain bad habits can emerge as her body naturally tries to seek out an apparently more efficient way in which to complete the workout. This has to be avoided at all costs because the last thing you want to result from a workout is broken mechanics. It will cost you more time and effort to break out of bad habits than it will to establish and maintain them from the get go. Bad mechanics lead to everything from failure to progress to actual injury. The 10U superstar pitcher with poor mechanics will find her speed not moving up along with her peers. A constant use of improper mechanics will lead to shoulder, arm and possibly knee or other injuries from repetitive motion and stress. These sorts of habits are what lead to most non-traumatic sports surgeries. Baseball pitchers generally see a more immediate feedback from improper mechanics because the throwing motion causes more immediate stress to the joints. But softball windmillers need to be just as mindful since they tend to throw longer and more often than their baseball counterparts.
Also, it occurs to me that when a pitcher loses control and begins "walking the world," most often the only way for her to get back in the groove is to get her mechanics back in order. Recently I observed a very good pitcher who lost her control at a national tournament. Ultimately the coach had to pull her for the remainder of the tournament because she just "could not get the ball over." There were wispers that perhaps she just couldn't handle the stress of a national tournament. But this was a big tough, both physically and mentally, kid. She usually thrived in stressful tournament conditions. I just could not imagine her breaking down due to stress. As soon as she went back to her pitching coach, the problem was clearly diagnosed. She was not paying attention to her feet. She was stepping in the wrong place and as soon as that was fixed, she was ready for action again.
Little things can mean a whole lot in this sport especially when we talk about hitters and pitchers. The slightest mechanical breakdown can bring a kid down and completely submerge her confidence. When a windmiller practices, she wants to imrpove her strength and endurance but we need to always remember that mechanics are king. There is no point in practicing if mechanics are put in second or third place behind strength and endurance.
Assuming you have your head in the right place, you have put mechanics first, the next item about which you need to be mindful is you want to over-prepare for the task at hand. If a pitcher wants to be able to do a complete 7 inning game, she needs to prepare to do that by pitching longer than 7 innings.
I was once amazed to discover a pitcher whose practice sessions were generally about half of a game in duration. She began fine enough but as fatigue set in, she did what anyone would do. She began adjusting her mechanics to make it easier to complete the task. As soon as she reached the level of pitches she had prepared for, perhaps a little before that, she began throwing differently. Her control went out the window and the speed dropped. She got through the game but that was primarily driven by the quality (or lack thereof) of the opponent. After several games like this, you could see her mechanics beginning to almost completely break down. It was a sure-fire path to catastrophe.
I am aware that marathon runners cannot prepare to run their distance by running say 30 miles every time out. That is one example, perhaps, where an athlete cannot over-prepare and experience success. But marathons are unique. And whatever a four or five game tournament day feels like, it most certainly is not a marathon. Pitching and playing ball are more like a series of sprints than they are a long-distance run. Sprinters, of course, over-prepare for their races.
The typical quarter mile runner will train by performing a series of quarter mile runs with timed intervals. Then he or she might do a set of longer distances. Perhaps a set of short sprints for explosiveness will be worked in. And the other advanced training techniques will find their way into the workout. But it is important to note that such a runner does not simply limber up, stretch out, run a quarter mile and hit the showers. That's obvious to anyone. But the same principles apply to pitching. You need to figure out how many pitches you need to simulate a warm-up and game, or whatever number of innings you want to pitch is. Then you need to design the practice sessions to address that.
Let's assume that you: 1) throw about 50 pitches (including various drills) in a warm-up; 2) usually throw 15 pitches an inning; and 3) want to be prepared to pitch a complete game of 7 innings. When you practice, you need to start with the notion that the workout should be at least 50 + 7 times 15 or 155 pitches in length. The best approach is to take this 155 pitch example and prepare for real games by doing more than that.
There are a mutitude of reasons a pitcher should over-prepare for the real situation. One important and obvious reason is conditioning. If the pitcher can maintain her peak speed and accuracy through 200 pitches, it stands to reason she should have no trouble maintaining them through 155.
Another important reason a pitcher should over-prepare is what we commonly refer to as mental toughness. Physical toughness often breaks down when we are physically taxed. The super-tough individual who is filled with all sorts of bravado when well rested often experiences a complete breakdown when pushed "to the limits of endurance." We can see many examples of this in many settings. I suppose I see it most often towards the end of a particularly long stretch of tournament games. For example, when I took a team to their first championship final, the team was completely taxed and unable to perform because they had never played that much before. The most they had ever played was 5 games on a cool weekend and that was only once. Having to go 6 games on a very hot weekend turned good ballplayers into an almost completely incompetent team by game 6. The result was a poor showing which belied their true ability.
This brings me to the issue of game situations. It is almost impossible to emulate real game conditions in any sort of practice. There are stresses which come with batting in the last inning when down by a run and the bases loaded with two outs that cannot be simulated. There are other game conditions which must be experienced in games. With pitchers this is more so. For one thing, pitchers usually throw without real batters being present. For another, most pitching sessions are conducted indoors with a moderate temperature, in sneakers, on a smooth mat, etc. There is a need to perform this kind of practice because pitchers need to work on mechanics without other distractions. You can't learn new pitches with real batters trying to hit the ball off you. Indoor facilities are usually more readily available and convenient, especially through the winter months. Indoors usually equates to controlled environment including temperature and lighting - no softball facilities I know of put the temperature to 95 degrees in February in order to simulate real conditions. You can't wear your spikes indoors and most indoor facilities do not have dirt pitching areas.
Whenever possible, what you want to do is put on your spikes and trek out to a real field with all its bumps and holes during the heat of the mid-summer day. That;s not to say you won't benefit from all that time you spend indoors with your pitching instructor but you do need to do some preparation in more realistic conditions or suffer the consequences of an unforseen breakdown brought on by fatigue.
What any pitcher needs to develop is the ability to self-correct mechanical issues during real live situations while physically and mentally fatigued. This can only happen for most individuals once they have already done it. Pitchers and other athletes do a better and better job of self-correcting as they experience more and more actual game situations in which self-correction is needed. We often speak of the need of pitchers to pitch in real games in order to improve. This is an acknowledgement of the exact point I am trying to make. You can practice all you want in a clean, cool, smooth, and friendly environment but as soon as you get out on a hot, bumpy field with nasty hitters who want to win the game coming up against you, things may change quite a bit.
The best analogies I can think of to demonstrate this phenomenon involve public speaking and / or anything else you have to do in front of a crowd. You can practice the speech you have to make to the church group all you want in front of the mirror or to your family. Yet once you get up there and start to speak in front of the real deal, you won't know what to expect. All of a sudden, the blood rushes to your head. You lose your place and can't remember what you said five seconds ago. Everything has changed. You are almost completely uncapable of saying something about which you are expert and which you have said several times every day for the past three weeks while practicing.
I have been told many times by people who earn their living speaking in public that the only way to learn to control yourself when speaking is to do it a lot. I believe the same is true of pitching and all sorts of other athletic endeavors. But we're talking about practice here. The point is practice must as closely resemble the real deal as it possibly can as often as it possibly can.
Another point about this is, if we are talking about pitchers who may have already pitched more than 100 games, is it really necessary for them to worry about game-like situations when they practice. The answer is yes because the more advanced the athlete is, the easier it is for her to develop two personas, one for games and another for practices. We want her to get the most out of practices and the development of a practice persona or a practice approach to practice, the less she'll get out of her non-game throwing sessions. This leads me into my next overall point which is "the athlete will usually seek the level of exertion which is suited to the total, overall task."
There are indicuals out there, I think, who are able to drive themselves more than the rest of us. Maybe that is what differentiates the world class athlete from the rest of us but I doubt it. The reason I doubt this theory is because there are tons of examples of top athletes whose work ethics are challeneged by their teammates, friends, and sports journalists. Not every champion works like a demon. Most have to find motivation to drive themselves in their workouts. Part of the human condition is to seek out less effort for the desired level of return. Because of this natural tendency to find the right level of effort, athletes who engage on a training program need to be pushed to higher and higher levels of physical stress.
Prize fighters often train by themselves. It is an individual sport so they do not have the benefit of a bunch of teammates pushing them as they work their way through some of the best workouts in sport. What they do to address this shortcoming is they hire trainers whose job it is not only to design the progressively harder workouts but also to push the fighter through them. Whole teams are often assembled to keep the fighter motivated. If such teams are not assembled, the fighter looks at his list of "chores" and adjusts his level to complete it. We often refer to such an approach as "dogging it" but it is as natural a phenomenon as any.
Even if an athlete is maybe able to push herself to a level higher than most of us would ever do, she still is not pushing herself as hard as she might. The best swimmers and track stars often train with other athletes in their caliber because they need some sort of competition to push themselves even harder. That doesn't work with pitching because the nature of it is so different than the other sports. But the pitcher needs to be pushed as much as any other atholete to drive herself through workouts.
One of the best ways to motivate a pitcher is through the use of goals. A complete set of goals for anyone should consist of short, medium and long-term goals which are attainable yet require the athlete to reach a bit. Let's say you've got an 11 year old who is currently throwing 40 mph, has decent control, and is working on a change-up. To put a dose of reality into the equation, let's say it is early October and the ultimate goals have to do with the next spring tournament season. The short-term goal might be to reach 150 pitches by December so she'll be able to pitch whole games next season. Medium range goals might be to get the speed to 45, the control 25% better, and the change-up to be a reliable pitch. You can craft whatever metrics you like but the point is, you ought to have something fairly objective which you can measure and present to the young pitcher to show her that her hard work is indeed paying off.
Longer term goals should not be ignored because presumably, even the medium range ones will be attained and then the motivation will quickly evaporate. Say you set your goals on reaching 45 mph, what are you going to do for the rest of the winter if something happens which makes you attain that level in December? That brings up another issue which is that the complete goal set needs to be somewhat flexible. You really do not want to set your goals to high because there is nothing which breaks down motivation as much as the realization that you will never do what it is you set out to do. Similarly, the goals should not be set to low because once the goals are acheived, there's no reason to continue working hard. If the pitcher reaches one of her important goals, another needs to be identified quickly. And that new goal should fit into the structure of the longer-term goals.
Within this goal directed approach to motivation, success can be a decent motivator but failure handled properly can be an even better one. I say "can be" because sometimes it doesn't work that way. It really depends on the age, maturity and personality of the athlete in question. There are no easy answers or guidelines I can give you here. In my personal experience, I have two kids who are apparently very similar. Yet one goes to sleep once a goal has been achieved while the other moves immediately to setting a new goal. The first one is satisfied far too easily. The second probably has personal private goals which she is too embarrassed to tell me about. She may be harboring an eventual bid to try out for TEAM USA and yet recognize that I migyht not believe that is attainable. So she doesn;t share the goal with me and instead sets new, higher goals every time she achieves one of the lower ones. The other kid maybe just wants to do enough to stand out in the short-term. I really can't say what drives these two. But as the key motivator, I have to at least try to push both of them. I need to make sure they always have goals right in front of their face, around the corner and over the big hill looming off in the distance.
These two kids react to success and failure differently. The one who seems to have longer-term aspirations reacts more positively to defeat. She takes it in stride, resets her short-term goals and goes about her business. The less mnotivated one reacts somewhat less positively to failure. Yet she uses success as a majopr driver. More often than not, a very successful outing causes her to want to practice more frequently. A bad outing makes her react by wanting to quit - why practice, what's the use, I'm not very good.
Interstingly, both kids need defeat to motivate them but the amounnt and intensity of defeat have to be managed in order to get them to work at peak effort. As I said, there are no easy answers on this point but you must have goals, you must work to be motivated, and you have to learn to manage defeat and success while adjusting your goals accordingly.
This brings me to my final point concerning approaches to training the pitcher. That point is improvements usually comes in leaps, not in little consistent steps. I think that's true of almost any human endeavor. You study, study, study for the big exam and test yourself over and over. You fail consistently for hours on end. Then, all of a sudden, the stuff begins to stick in your puny little head. Once it begins to stick, learning is easy and you complete your study effort quickly thereafter. The same is true of a young kid learning to ride a bicycle. It is usually 3 feet, fall; 4 feet, fall; 3 feet, fall; 6 feet fall; then ride until the sun sets on the teenage years.
Human beings learn by trying and failing until they attain success. The success at the activity lasts on and on. This is as true for the windmill pitcher as it is for anyone on the fields or sidelines. We've all seen the kid who works like a demon on her hitting but fails every time for games and games, perhaps season after season, until one day she gets a clean, sharp hit. After that initial success, watch out. She'll become the best hitter on the team, the league, or in the universe before long. We've also seen the infielder who struggles to get balls to her right or left. She consistently works drills on this exact problem for weeks on end until one day something clicks and all of a sudden she just gets it. That phenomenon is easy to see in beginners of any sort of activity. It is less easy to discern in more advanced players but it happens nonetheless.
I recall my early days as a swimmer. I swam 100 yards in a pretty slow minute and 13 seconds the first time I raced. I worked hard in practice and the next race saw my time drop to somewhere around a minute 7. That's a six second improvement! There were a couple minor setbacks and then I started to approach 1 minute flat, a seven second jump! When I reached that level I plateaued and stayed there for too long. It became difficult to work hard at practice because payback seemed as if it would never materialize. Then, all of a sudden, one day I burst through the minute mark and found myself around 59 and one tenths seconds. Shortly thereafter, I apporached 58 seconds and hit another plateau. Other advances and plateaus would fill my swimming future and each time I plateaued, I thought maybe this was it, I had reached my limit. In truth, that never happened to me. What I did experience was imcreasingly smaller improvements which occurred suddenly after weeks and weeks of work. As I got better, paybacks were smaller and less frequent but occurred after a lot of effort.
I expect the same is true of world class athletes because, for example, world record holder Michael Phelps continues to set new standards for himself and the rest of the swimming world this year despite having set his first record many years ago. I imagine over the past several years he plateaued and then improved, plateaued then improved. It should have been difficult for him to continue to work since at any time he might have reached a plateau over which he never will triumph. After all, being the fastest person in the world at a particular event is hard to beat. Yet somehow he has worked hard enough to go even faster than that.
I think it is important for pitchers to be aware of the fact that two months of working as hard as you possibly can may not yield a single measurable improvement. Then all of a sudden, a uick jump forward with speed or some other goal is attained and it knocks everyone's socks off. Pitchers of whatever level can often see marked improvements which appear to be the result of a few practices and then not see any benefit to the succeeding 100 workouts. It is difficult to keep oneself motivated in that plateau stretch. Yet, if one is able to maintain the motivation and continue to work hard, the benefits will most likely be there eventually. The ability to embark on a practice plan while not seeing immediate improvement is, I believe, the ultimate mark of the real champion. The best athletes I have known over the years are those who continue to drive themselves despite no obvious benefit.
So, to sum up this little diatribe, pitchers should always concentrate of mechanics, mechanics, mechanics. They should over prepare so the game is actually easier than the practice. In order to accomplish this, real game conditions should be simulated whenever possible. Those relate to being on the field, in cleats, facing real batters, in the midday heat as much as possible. Pitchers and their helpers must drive the pitcher to work harder than she would otherwise, if left to her own natural devices. Goals are an excellent means of motivating the athlete and must be short, medium, and long-term. While in training, the pitcher must be mindful of the fact that improvement will not occur in a smooth, orderly fashion. Sometimes there is no immediate payback for hard work. Yet at these times, the most important improvements are often underway provided that she continues to work hard. Keep these facts of trainign in mind as you proceed along a path of improvement and remember them when you bump into hard times. The measure of the champion has more to do with learning to deal with adversity than it does with success.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Training Your Pitcher
5 Pitches = Adequate Warm-up?
by Dave
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Diana writes to ask:
"What is the proper about of warming up a pitcher should have before a game? My daughter is in high school and her coach doesn't believe pitchers need any warm up at all - only the 5 pitches the umpire gives them when they first get on the mound."
Hmmmm, Diana, you're saying that you believe the 5 pre-game pitches is inadequate warm-up for a pitcher? I'm pretty sure I agree with you! I'll go out on a limb and say that 5 pitches before a game is a recipe almost guaranteed to deliver disaster!!
After pondering this question for some time, I wonder if it isn't a bit of a hoax. I just cannot fathom a coach limiting his or her pitcher to that unless they were deliberately trying to lose a game or had no other choice because the bus pulled up too late for warm-ups. There's no way I can see any reasonable coach limiting their pitcher to that kind of non-warm-up. Still, I'll use the question as a jumping off point to discuss a proper pitcher warm-up.
For openers, the right amount of pitcher warm-up varies by individual. That's not to say that a 10 year old, first year pitcher should be allowed to decide for herself than 10 pitches along the sidelines is enough. But certainly a high school girl with a lot of experience can handle deciding when she is warmed. I have observed high level high school pitchers who throw for almost an hour before a big game and others who need no more than ten to twenty minutes (50 or so pitches). It really depends on the kid. An experienced pitcher knows how much warm-up she needs because she's gone through this process perhaps hundreds of times.
Another issue which needs to be considered when discussing warm-ups is the nature of play. The question involved high school players but if this were, instead, a tournament setting, my answer would be different. Tournaments can vary quite a bit but typically you sometimes have a large chunk of time between games and sometimes you have barely enough time to take a drink of water or visit the restrooms. Usually what we try to do for tournaments is have all the pitchers warm-up initially before the first game and then get in just a brief warming before games in which there is no time to do a thorough one.
Also, I have been told that sometimes in high school ball, the bus gets lost or hits traffic in which case there is not much time for warm-ups once the team arrives at its destination. I have some thoughts about this circumstance. My first thought is to get the pitcher and catcher (in full gear) off the bus first and start throwing immediately. Then the coach should approach the opposition and umpires and tell them the team will not be prepared to play for X number of minutes. If the opposition or umps disagree, I suggest to you that you raise the spector of injuries caused by their haste. I wouldn't want to be responsible for any girl suffering an injury due to no opportunity to warm-up. Pitchers need time to warm-up and so does the rest of the team. If the opposition and/or umpires cannot afford you at least ten minutes, there is something wrong. You, the coach, must insist that your girls get at least that long to loosen up before playing.
Now to the issue of an appropriate pitcher warm-up. As I said, this varies by individual but here is a general approach I like to use. My pitchers start with isolation drills. They perform wrist snaps followed by arm-only pitching. Usually they do ten to twenty wrist snaps for the fastball and whatever they need to loosen their wrist for other pitches. The arm-only pitching is sometimes done on one knee, sometimes done while standing, depending on the girl and her personal regimen.
Next, she gets her legs and back involved with one or two drills. Some pitchers do a slingshot-type pitch with an almost full step. Some pitch a full windmill with a simple step forwards. Some push off an imaginary pitcher's plate sideways with a full windmill. It depends on the girl and the drills her pitching coach has her doing. My daughter does most of these drills and then moves into a full windmill motion. Some girls like to do slingshot pitching with a weighted ball. Some like to perform extended arm-only pitches.
The bottom line is to get all the muscles, tendons and ligaments involved heated up and then do some stretching. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you have to get warm before stretching. Cold stretching does nothing. A pitcher should break a sweat before starting to stretch.
After some warm-up drills and a good stretch, the pitcher should begin to work through her pitches. I like my pitchers to get as close to a game time speed fastball as they can before moving through the other pitches. Once that has been achieved, we usually move to change-ups.
Every pitcher has a different number of change-ups needed to get her to where she needs to be. I know of one pitcher who needs to throw just 5 and as long as they are under control, she moves to the next pitch. Another girl needs to do 10-20 change-up wrist snaps before she is ready to throw any change-up pitches. Then she throws 5 before she can even remotely control it, after which she throws another 5 and is ready to go. I've observed a girl throw as many as 25-50 changes before a game because the pitch was extremely important to her repertoire, it was a very big game, and she was one of those kids who warmed up a lot before games.
After the fastball and change, we usually move on to the most important pitch. In my daughters' cases, that is the screwball, drop or drop-curve. One kid uses the drop as her most frequent pitch. Another goes with a mix predominantly made up of screws and drop-curves. Whatever is most important ought to command the most attention. Also, every girl has something different working on any given day. One day it might be the rise, another the screw, curve, or whatever. During warm-ups, she ought to try to figure out what is working for her best on that day.
After the fastball, change and best pitch have been warmed up, all of a girl's other pitches should at least be addressed to some degree. I get anxious if my own daughters don't throw each secondary pitch until it is at least under control. That's a minimum of 5 (rarely) and a maximum of 20 (hopefully) for each pitch. Once they have thrown everything and gotten important pitches down, I usually encourage a little cool down period. You know, get out of the sun, get a drink, towel off. Once a girl has warmed properly and hopefully cooled down, I like to encourage her to throw lightly along the sidelines before going into a game and getting "her 5."
Typically, I like my pitchers to warm-up about 45 minutes before a game, longer if a longer warm-up is needed. 45 minutes gives a kid 25 - 30 minutes of warm-up, 5 - 10 minutes to cool down, and another 5 to throw lightly before the game begins. That is my ideal warm-up.
Just to address the "late high school bus syndrome," I believe pitchers can warm sufficiently in this circumstance, assuming they get themselves in the right frame of mind on the bus, get off the bus first, and get right down to business. This requires wrist and arm motions while riding the bus. For example, the pitcher ought to have a ball in her hand and perform the basic wrist snap while riding the bus if it seems likely the team will arrive after the scheduled game time. A pitcher can flex and stretch her muscles some while just sitting if she is sufficiently warm to begin with - early spring east coast games are not the right situation for this. As I said, you really cannot stretch without being warm but if you sit there flexing your muscles well enough, you can warm up a bit and begin stretching some.
The coach should make sure the warm-up catcher has her gear on before the bus arrives and get her off the bus immediately upon arrival. The pitcher gets off the bus next! She should rush through the basic isolation drills with a sense of urgency and begin real throwing as soon as possible, but after a couple minutes of stretching.
Also, keep in mind that in the late bus circumstance, usually you are the visiting team. So long as your pitcher is either not hitting or at least not hitting in the 1 - 4 slots, she ought to get in 20 or so throws after the game starts and before you have to take the field. In extreme circumstances, you want to make sure your batters do their best to stall and take a few pitches so your pitcher will be basically ready by the time she has to go out and throw.
As I said earlier, tournament ball can create its own set of strains on your warm-up time. I've been involved with tournament games in which we had fewer than five minutes between one game and the next. On rare occassions, we have been scheduled to play back-to-back-to-back games. In these circumstances, before the first game, all pitchers should be warmed up like they're going to pitch that game. There are advantages to following this practice anyway but when you are playing consecutive games, this allows your starter for games number 2 and 3 to warm-up a lot more quickly than they might otherwise. If you have the luxury of a big lead or the agony of a big deficit, sometimes you can insert the starter for the next game into the last inning or two of the previous one. We've availed ourselves of this practice from time to time with positive results.
Finally, a word about young pitchers. Sometimes pitchers, even girls who should know better, fail to warm-up adequately. If they are left to their own devices, they throw about 20 pitches, don't break a sweat, and claim, "I'm ready to go." Experience will probably tell you and them otherwise. One of my daughters can warm-up pretty quickly though she does better if she preps for a longer period. I'll let her cut her warm-up short if the day is very hot and humid. Another daughter does better the longer she warms up. She likes to cut things short but if I force her to warm to my liking, she invariably does better. The younger the kid, the more likely she is to try to cut her warm-up short. If you allow your kid or the pitchers for the team you coach to get away with this, usually the result will be a tough couple of early innings. In extreme circumstances, the result will be a very poorly pitched game. You just have to take stock of how long each kid needs to really warm-up and then require her to get that much warm-up without any negotiation.
It may take some trial and error to determine exactly how much warm-up a particular pitcher needs. But I sincerely doubt there is any pitcher on the planet who can come out of the box (off the bus) with 5 warm-ups and pitch to an appropriate level in the first inning. I'm almost certain Diana was exaggerating but I can't be sure. We've all seen some pretty bizarre stuff in this game though that one seems extreme. If you know of any coach who thinks a 5 pitch warm-up is sufficient, please disabuse him or her of the notion! Let them know that they may be the primary cause of a serious, perhaps career ending injury, and they may get into a little unwanted legal action as a result.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: 5 Pitches = Adequate Warm-up?
Some Pitching Issues
by Dave
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
I have been away from my computer far too much of late because I have been busy with my own team's practices and tournaments, trying to catch as many high school games in person as I can, and due to some other issues. During this time, I have been contemplating some pitching issues but haven't had time to type them out. So, here goes:
1) Straight Arm
If you've read this blog at all over the past couple of years, you know that I advocate a young pitcher working on speed before location or movement. It isn't so much that I value speed above other considerations as it is that I value good mechanics above everything else. Pitchers, especially young ones, who place location or control above speed often develop bad mechanical habits which hurt their speed and can lead to other problems. So, from my perspective, you work on your mechanics first. This leads to speed. Then you can start worrying about control and then location. After you have good mechanics, some speed, control, and location, then you develop the elements which lead to movement.
Recently I observed a pitcher who is considered to be a pretty good young high school pitcher. I was told she has good control and movement to go with reasonably good speed. But as I sat there watching her, I began to tense up because I noticed right away that her arm was not nearly as straight as it should have been. She was reasonably fast but certainly not over-powering. She hit her spots and, from the point of view I had, her movement looked pretty good. She had good results though some of the opposing batters hit her hard. I couldn't help wondering what kind of results she would get if her arm were straighter and her pitches a bit faster.
After this experience, I watched several additional decent high school pitchers, some of whom had good arm extension and some of whom did not. Invariably the straighter the arm, the better the overall mechanics, the faster the pitch. But more than that, the straight arm pitchers had equal or better movement and none of them had any noticeable control issues. The differences between the straighter armed pitchers and those with bent elbows was not particularly striking since most of these games were regular season and results depended more on the quality of the opponent than anything else.
More recently, I have been observing games in county, conference, and state championship tournaments. As the competition progressed, lesser teams dropped out and pitchers faced better and better batters. In the end, the quarters, semis and finals involved teams which could hit and which had higher quality pitchers. As things moved along I noticed a marked reduction in the number of pitchers with bent arms.
As the high school season wound down, I found myself turning more and more to college ball being broadcast on TV. What struck me while watching these games was that top pitchers invariably had straight arms. This caused me to muse about the high school pitchers I had seen with bent arms. I wondered if these girls would ever find success at higher levels. I doubt they will because they just aren't using all the mechanical tools they could be.
The physics of the straight vs. bent arm are very simple - simple enough for me. The circumference of a circle (the distance around it) increases as the circle gets larger. If you take a penny and draw a line around it, then place a quarter overtop of that circle and do the same, you get a larger circle around a smaller one. The distance around the quarter is greater than the distance around the penny. If you travel the distance around each circle in the same amount of time, your speed is faster when you go around the larger circle.
Another way to measure the size of a circle is via the diameter (a straight line drawn from one part of the circle through the center and continuing until you hit the circle again). The radius of the circle is one half the diameter since the radius runs from a point on the circle to the center without continuing back out.
The circumference and radius of any circle are mathematically related. If circle number 1 is half the size of circle number 2, circle number 2 has double the circumference and radius of circle number 1. If you travel along circle number 2 in the same amount of time as circle number 1, you are travelling twice the distance - your speed is twice as fast.
The radius of a circle made by a windmilling pitcher is about the length of her arm, assuming she has a straight one. If she bends her arm, the radius and therefore the circumference of the circle are shorter. Generally, when you move your arm in a circle as you do when you windmill, bending your arm does not increase the speed with which you make the circle. So in other words, the ball you are holding in your hand is covering greater distance when your arm is straighter. Since that distance is being covered in about the same amount of time, the ball is moving faster at the point of release when your arm is straightest.
The speed at which the ball is moving when you release it is an integral part of the speed of the pitch. There are other elements which effect speed but here we're isolating the ball travelling along the circle of the windmill in order to address one very important aspect of pitching. There are other reasons for having your arm straight but we haven't got time to deal with them today.
So I suppose the questions are why do pitchers develop a tendency to bend their arms and what can be done about it.
First of all, I believe pitchers begin bending their arms in order to control the pitch. If you have never windmilled before and pick up a ball to try it, the first thing you'll probably notice is that your throw is wild. That's because you're not really sure where to release it. You feel sort of out of control. Your arm is so far away from your point of reference - your eyes - that you don't feel like you have any control over where the ball is going. If you repeat this process enough, your brain will learn where to release the ball in order to make it go to the right place but that takes a lot of time and patience. If, instead, you windmill a bit less aggressively, bend your arm and try pushing the ball towards a target, you get the feeling of being more in control. Most likely your pitch will be far more controlled.
Young pitchers do not enjoy the embarrassment of throwing the ball way over the catcher's head, possibly over the backstop. They want to avoid this as much as possible. They also want to avoid the pain of having their fathers or mothers get completely enraged after the tenth consecutive pitch past them and into the neighbor's shrubs. They try to control the ball as much as they can in order to avoid abject embarrassment or parental rage. If they experiment successfully with shortening their arm, they can fall into the trap of always pitching with a slightly bent arm.
My youngest daughter is an aspiring pitcher. She has always had great control and a straight arm. But after layoffs from injuries or brief periods during the winter, she always has trouble getting started again. She freaks out when she picks up a ball for the first time in a month and cannot seem to throw a strike. Her first tendency is to shorten her arm. If I allow this to go on for very long, it can take subsequent months to get her to straighten her arm again. Her speed suffers and then other mechanical things start falling apart. It's a nightmare.
There are several techniques I have seen used to straighten out the arm once it has begun bending. The first of these involves throwing over a greater distance than the usual pitching 35, 40 or 43 feet. If you, the practice catcher, move back five or more feet, the pitcher begins needing to straighten her arm in order to make the distance.
Another technique I have seen used is doing a lot of "walk-ins" where the pitcher takes two or more steps and then windmills the ball. Once the rhythm of the walk-in is established - not a simple task with young girls - the pitcher should be encouraged to step into the pitch faster and faster. The trick is that with all the intertia which results from walking quickly into a pitch, it becomes quite a struggle to pitch with a bent arm. The force of the body makes it difficult to pitch with a bent arm.
Another possible cure for the bent arm pitcher, if you happen to have a video camera, is to record her motion and then show it to her. If she doesn't quite get it, try showing her the motions of top pitchers like Monica Abbott or any of the other NCAA or team USA greats. Once she sees that they are doing something she is not, you may convince her to let the arm hang freely while making the circle.
Finally, I have seen another technique used but I'm not sure whether this one is advisable since it seems to me that it may put too much stress on the shoulder. This one involves throwing a windmill pitch after two to five revolutions of the arm. One pitcher I worked with called out to me during her warm-ups, "double arm circles" like I knew what she was talking about! But, having seen the basic technique used to work on legthening the arm, I figured out in the nick of time what she was up to. She did a regular windmill but did not release the ball until she had passed the usual release point and then come full circle around again. I have seen pitchers perform as many as 5 rotations before releasing the ball as a straight arm drill. I think this can be useful but I do not think very young pitchers should do it. And I think any pitcher who tries it ought to be well warmed up and stretched beforehand since it does put some heavy stress on the rotator cuff.
If you, or the young pitcher you work with is tending to bend her arm, be aware that this should be discouraged. The best pitchers have straight arms. It is better to learn to release the ball at the right point with a straight arm than it is to try to control the pitch by bending the arm. You can try these and other techniques to lengthen the arm. But maintaining a nice, straight arm is integral to proper pitching mechanics.
2) Speed is certainly not enough
I have had the opportunity to watch five 12-14 year-old, bona fide 60 mph throwers over the past two years. I have caught one of these girls in warm-ups. She is very successful in the early rounds of tournaments but as she gets into quarter and semi-final games, she often gets hit quite hard. Before I caught her, I often wondered how these girls in the higher rounds were "getting around" on her. After I caught her, the reasons were self-evident.
The first thing I thought of was it is a small matter to tune the pitching machine up to 60 or 65 mph. Once you've faced a 65 mph pitch, a 60 mph one will not faze you. And once you have hit a 65 mph machine pitched ball, a 60 mph pitch looks kind of ordinary. Most good 14 and up travel batters have faced enough 60+ mph real pitches to deal with them. There is no issue with "getting around" on such a pitch.
Secondly, if a pitch comes in flat, hitting it is easier than if if breaks or darts even a little to one side or the other. The faster the pitch, the less gravitational break there is. If gravity does not have time to cause a pitch to break, you have to do something to make that happen. We're talking about ordinary fastballs here so what can you do to cause a pitch to move?
There are a couple of elements to an ordinary fastball which cause it to dart or pop. For one thing, if you vary your finger pressure, you alter the force vectors on the ball thereby causing movement. For another, the snap of the wrist is what causes spin on the ball and the spin causes friction between the laces on the ball and the air through which the ball is travelling. That is what causes the basic pop players often discuss when talking about pitch movement. Whether one is speaking of baseball or fastpitch softball, the spin of the ball is critical to the movement which fans hitters.
Third, illusion is a key element. When a batter sees a ball coming in at high velocity, she expects the pitch to be flatter. If it has a great deal of spin on it (top spin when talking about a fastball), the ball will generally break more than the batter anticipates causing her to swing and miss over top of the pitch. If in addition to top spin, the pitcher using finger pressure can add some sideways spin, the pitch may break to one side enough to cause the batter to miss hit it or miss it entirely.
Getting back to the 60 mph pitcher I caught in warmups, I watched her throw for quite a while and what struck me was that she didn't really snap her wrist at all. Also, because she was a hard worker who threw a lot, she got into a routine of using the same kind of finger pressure on every pitch. To put it mildly, her pitches came in as flat as flat can be and had no pop on them. It was plainly evident to me that once you had seen her throw a couple times, you were going to tee off on her fastball no matter how hard she threw it.
I observed one other element to this girl's pitching which probably caused her to get hit hard by good batters. While her change-up involved the same arm-slot she used for her fastball and it was indeed much slower than her fastball, she slowed her arm down just enough to make it readable and then because she had no spin on it, the ball's spin or lack of it telegraphed that a change was incoming. If a batter didn't pick up the slower arm motion, she would certainly pick up the slow spin of the ball.
Basically, to sum up, this bona fide 60 mph pitcher had gotten used to being able to strike batters out with her speed when she was very young. As she got older, the batters caught up to her. In response, she developed a change-up but because she neither snapped the ball hard or used finger pressure on her fastball, and because she had no real spin on her change, the skilled batters were able to catch and pass her and turn a good pitcher into a medicore one.
My remedies for this problem are not particularly complicated. I'd like to see pitchers learn to finish their pitches by snapping the wrist on the fastball and put lots of spin on it. As a girl progresses, I want to see her use finger pressure more and more to cause the fastball to dart and jump. And while I will get to the change-up in a seperate section, I want to see a pitcher experiment more with change-ups and pick the one which suits her pitching. If a pitcher relies on her fastball, I'd want to see her develop a change which uses a similar spin as the fastball. If other pitches are more heavily relied upon, the change can mimick them instead. That can take some doing but as I'm about to tell you, it is well worth the effort.
3) The most important pitch in the game
If I ever doubted what exactly the most important pitch in fastpitch softball is, I no longer do. Taryne Mowatt taught me during the WCWS. If you only tuned in to watch Mowatt during the WCWS, you might think she is a 65 mph thrower who has a decent screwball, a mediocre rise, and that nasty change. Having watched her for much of the year, I can tell you that's not the case.
I watched Mowatt pitch several games earlier in the year. Early in the year, she was as good as anyone. She lived up in the upper 60s (often hitting 67 or 68) and threw a very good riseball when I saw her early in the year. She mixed in changes and other pitches but I think she relied upon the rise more than anything else. When she pitched in the WCWS, the announcers told us she was having trouble with a blister on her index finger which apparently caused her to throw less than her best riseball. I saw two of them travel over the fence in game one which Tennessee won 2-0. After that game, I'd have to say that she threw more change-ups than I have ever seen any other college pitcher throw.
While watching one game, I was shocked, more than surprised, to see Mowatt throw, I believe, 6 change-ups in a row. I've never seen anything like that before and was wondering why the hitters weren't just sitting on her change. The answer is, they couldn't see it!
Mowatt uses the backhand change which can be very effective if you learn to throw it well. The ball is thrown while the knuckles are actually facing the batter. The trick to throwing this pitch is to get perfect backspin on it. If you don't get 12 to 6 spin, the batter can figure out the speed much more easily. As you could see from the televised games, the perfect backward spin makes the pitch almost invisible.
Another critical factor to the backhand change is it must come out of the hand and travel at or below the batter's letters and then drop as it progresses towards her. It cannot be blooped. The speed and spin take care of the drop but if it gets up near the hitter's eyes, she can see it too clearly. If she is looking at the top of the ball, the spin creates illusion with respect to speed and it looks like a riseball. Ideally, the thing ought to look like a riseball thrown accidentally down the middle of the strike zone and then the bottom drops out of it suddenly about ten feet from the plate. That's why world class hitters swung and missed at Mowatt's change thrown iun the dirt. The keys to throwing this pitch are the backwards wrist snap which causes the 12-6 spin, the quick arm speed, and the similarity to a riseball.
But so much about Mowatt or her backhanded change. The real point here is the single most important pitch in the game of fastpitch softball is the change-up. I never expected that any pitcher could take one as far as Taryne Mowatt did but having seen that as well as the fact that despite throwing a killer riseball and nasty curves at 69-71 mph, the Arizon hitters did eventually catch up with almost invincible Monica Abbott. Interestingly, Abbott discussed her development as a young pitcher and noted that the biggest part of that development was working on her change-up. She said that when she played youth ball, she was always able to get by with her speed. When she got to college, she had to develop a better change-up and tried as many as 20 different styles before she found one that suited her. The lesson is plain. Do like the big stars do. Try every change you can and develop the one which most suits your pitching. Then, if you can, get it to the point where it is as reliable as your best pitches. Finally, use it as often as you can - it worked for Mowatt!
4) Pre-pitch routines
While watching a high school girl pitch a championship game, I was struck by the routine she performed before every pitch. She did about 5 things between the time she received the ball back from the pitcher, then stepped onto the rubber in the same sequence on each and every pitch. The routine never varied and I began to wonder if she was superstitious. Luckily for my puny brain, there was somebody in the crowd who knew this girl and explained her routine to a friend. Apparently, during youth play, the girl was a good pitcher but she rushed so much and got winded so easily that she just couldn't finish games. It was catch the return from the catcher, step and go. Boom, boom, boom. Her pitching coach decided that she needed to find a routine which would give her a few seconds to catch her breath, focus her brain, and allow her to progress to the next level. I guess it worked because this girl was one of 50 named as a Gatorade player of the year and she's just a sophomore!
In any event, I think it is important for pitchers to develop a routine which allows them to pace their ways through games. It is easy to get into a routine of catching and throwing. I have observed a kid I practiced with who did this quite often. At first she paced herself OK through games but as she developed and practiced countless times, soon she developed a penchant for using the same quick rhythm in games which she used in practice sessions. She got winded fairly often despite being in pretty good shape. Whe could wear herself out in one or two innings. And her focus on each individual pitch started to falter. Soon she found herself down in counts, winded, with runners on base and then a dormant temper began to rage. The solution for her was to make a game out of a few simple pre-pitch steps so she could slow herself down.
Some of the things a pitcher can do after receiving the ball from the catcher are 1) look at each runner, 2) check to see that each defensive players is in position, 3) walk to the back of the circle and maybe touch the ground or straighten one's cap, 4) repeat some sort of affirmation such as I'm going to get this girl out, 5) repeat the count to her infielders, or 6) anything else which suits her personality.
I think it is critical for pitchers to check defensive players to make sure they're in position. This is more important when there is a runner on second or third and the shortstop is running herself ragged to cover third because the third baseman is in for the bunt. And this can cause a pitcher to pause and recover for the 3-5 seconds it takes to do this. Tha little piece of time should give her enough to catch her breath while also composing her.
5) Crow Hopping
There has always been a lot of discussion about crow hopping while I have been involved with this game. According to a couple friends of mine, when the rule first made its way around, all the umpires were calling it all the time. Nowadays it seems like nobody is. As I've said before, many umps do not seem particularly aware of the rules. Even when it is pointed out to them and a pitcher is blatant, it doesn't get enforced much in youth play. Some lone umps have told me that they have to watch the hands of the pitcher and cannot watch the feet while also trying to call the game. They claim that only when there are two umps working the game will crow hopping be called. But we've played plenty of games with two umps while enever hearing anyone call illegal pitch even when a girl was obviously illegal. This is a serious disservice to the players. Some of these girls will undoubtedly want to play college ball. The college crowd won't touch them because college umps do call crow hopping. That's my two cents worth!
Well, I've got more pitching issues than I can possibly write about today. I think I'll stop here. Sometimes this universe of fastpitch softball seems to have more topics for discussion than space exploration. I;ve got about ten subjects I've been trying to get to for over 6 months now. Hopefully you found this piece somewhat interesting. I'll get back to you later. For now, I've got to run to pitching lesson and then team practice before I meet with some people about our next tournament. There isn't enough time in the day for softball let alone everything else.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Some Pitching Issues
Just Tape It And Get Out There
by Dave
Thursday, June 07, 2007
During a preseason practice, my daughter took a bad hop grounder and busted her throwing hand index finger. It didn't cause that much trouble for her in terms of playing the field or batting. Her throwing was a little off, lacking the velocity she usually had but she was still able to get runners out during scrimmages from her normal position at third. Her hitting actually improved since the broken finger caused her to grip the bat less tightly, something I had been trying to get her to do for a while. But the real problem was she was unable to pitch her normal 4 times a week offseason regimen. The finger hurt whenever she tried to throw the fastball and screw. We had an early season tournament in which she was playing up an age group and while she was warming up to pitch, the pain reduced her to tears. We had to figure something out or shut her down for a couple weeks.
We decided to give the kid a break for a week and then give it another try. Her pitching coach came up with the idea of taping the finger for lessons. That seemed to do the trick as she said it still hurt but it didn't get any worse as she went along. The coach suggested just taping the finger for workouts and not pitching any scrimmages or tournaments untilo she could pitch without the tape. "You can't pitch tournaments with anything on your pitching hand," he said. "I know," I agreed. Everybody knows that, right? You know that, don't you? OK then, cite the rule!
The other night while watching the Women's College World Series (WCWS), there was a fair amount of discussion regarding Taryne Mowatt, Arizona's ace and some blister problems she had during this year. It got so bad during the WCWS that she was unable to locate most of her pitches and had to rely on her changeup more than I have ever seen any college pitcher rely on it. I think almost half of her pitches during the final series were changes.
One item that was discussed briefly in this context was the fact that she was wearing white tape on her pitching hand to protect the blister. She said something about the ball getting bloody as a result of the blister during some games - kind of puts the "Curt Schilling bloody sock" thing to shame. In any event, I was surprised to learn that she was allowed to wear the tape on her pitching hand so I looked it up.
According to NCAA rules, "The pitcher chall not wear any item on the pitching fingers, hand, wrist, forearm or thighs that an umpire considers distracting. This includes a batting glove, sweatband and loose lacing on a glove, or ball-colored logos. Exception: The pitcher's fingers, hand, wrist, forearm or elbow may be taped for injury, providing such tape is a neutral color." (Rule 10, section 13(c))
So wearing tape is permitted in NCAA play provided the tape is a "neutral color." Personally, I do not believe white tape is neutral since it contrasts with skin color but the umps didn't make her change it. For your information, I have definitely seen medical tape in skin color available at just about any drug store. I would advice college coaches, trainers, etc. to get some since it is just possible that a particular umpire might not allow a pitcher to use white tape due to the contrast.
This was the first time I had ever seen a pitcher allowed to wear tape while pitching in a game. In tournaments, we've been forced to remove both black and white batting gloves from the glove hand because umpires have objected while claiming that a pitcher isn't allowed to wear anything extraneous. This caused us some trouble as one pitcher's glove had cracked and was digging a sore into her glove hand causing excessive distraction while in the circle. But we didn't dispute it because "everyone knows you can't wear anything while pitching." When I saw Mowatt out there with tape and then checked the NCAA rules, I decided I better check other rules as well.
I can't find an official ASA rulebook on the web and I don't possess one, so I can't check there. I decided to look at the NSA rulebook which states, "During the game, the pitcher may not use tape or other substances on the ball, pitching hand or fingers; nor shall any player apply foreign substance to the ball. With the umpire's approval, powdered resin may be used to dry the hand. The wearing of any item on the pitching hand, wrist, or arm that may be distracting to the batter will not be allowed." (Rule 6, Sec. 8)
I wasn't able to find a current PONY rulebook online, 2005 is available but I couldn't find 2007. However, I possess a hard copy of the current one so I decided to check there as well. PONY says, "The pitcher shall not, at any time during the game, be allowed to use tape or any other foreign substances upon the ball, the pitching hand or fingers nor shall any other player apply a foreign substance to the ball. Under the supervision and control of the umpire, powdered resin may be used to dry the hands ... A pitcher shall not wear any item on the pitching hand, wrist, forearm, elbow or thighs, which may, in the umpire's judgment, be distracting. Batting gloves may not be worn on the pitching hand."
So, there you have it. NCAA rules specifically allow pitchers with injuries to wear tape (neutrally colored tape) on the pitching hand if there is an injury. Youth rules, as far as I can tell, do not allow this. I have no idea, off the top of my head, if high school rules are closer to NCAA rules or the ones applying to youth tournament ball. And this raises an important issue to me.
If you compare the NSA and PONY rulebooks on this issue, the differences are diction-related items. There is a "that" here vs. a "which" there and other such meaningless differences. The differences are almost comical. They imply plagarism which has been adjusted so nobody can claim copyright infringement. That's ridiculous.
We, in youth fastpitch, need one common set of rules across the broad spectrum of rules for at least the elements which are common. I understand that while college uses the 43 foot pitching distance, most high school uses 40. Most youth is changing to 43 feet this year at least at the championship level. Personally, I'd like to see the distances identical across all types of competition based on age category. I watched one high school pitcher bounce back and forth from 40 to 43 during the early part of this year's season. That's a bit much since her movement pitches lacked the pinpoint accuracy required for success. But I'm willing to stand back and watch that happen - I do think the distances will become identical across the different types of play over the next two years.
There are other rules which vary according to the type of plkay one engages in. ASA and NSA play require two feet on the pitching plate. The high school games I have seen do not. PONY doesn't require it either. I have observed so much crow hopping in one sort of play or another that I have begun simply "caw-cawing" at certain games. I have watched pitchers walk into pitches at certain competitions, complained to the umps and been told that this is perfectly legal in this particular kind of competition. I've watched pitchers take the signal from the back of the circle, walk slowly to the rubber, and then, without stopping go directly into their wind-ups. There are a million little things which one day is illegal and another day perfectly fine. It is confusing as heck to me and I wonder what that says about a 10 - 14 year old trying to learn to do things the right way.
Last year at a nationakl competition, my kid was pitching and the coaches from the other team watched her very closely. After a couple of pitches to the first batter, they requested a conference with the plate ump and then discussed what they thought she was doing illegal. After severalo tries for different elements of her wind-up, the coaches got the ump's attention about one thing. They alleged she was bring her hands together twice during the wind-up. I have it on tape and can prove that she really was not but it was close enough for the ump to warn her. This threw her into a state of confusion and her coach could not go out and talk to her without being charged for a conference. I recognize that kids ought to be taught the right way and in a national tournament, there is no room for being nice. But these adults decided to try to get into the pitcher's head so their team could win a game. That's reprehensible. And it didn't work. She shut them down completely!
To conclude this piece and get back to my other more mundane responsibilities, I would just like to put this out there. There ought to be one single set of rules for pitching in fastpitch the way the rules are mostly identical in baseball. All this nonsense we see with varying rules about the whole pitching motion ius counter-productive for our sport. In basketball, we see onbe set of rules for international play and a different set for the American amateur and professional games. In softball at the highest levels we see this too. Just what exactly is the purpose of that? Who is served? In the amateur age-group ranks there are different rules for pitching. Why and who is served by that? Can't we all just get along?Labels: pitching, rules
Permanent Link: Just Tape It And Get Out There
Get Behind Your Fielders
by Dave
Monday, May 07, 2007
Of all the cat-calls from the crowd which really get under my skin here's my least favorite: "Come on girls, get behind her, get behind your pitcher." Almost invariably that one comes from the mother of the pitcher. Usually it means something like, "my darling daughter (aka "DD") is a wonderful pitcher who is working so hard out there and if all you supporting cast members would just perform at half her level, we might win the game." It makes my skin crawl because there are just so many layers to it and because long ago my father installed a button which triggers whenever anybody looks out on the field and says the pitcher is doing the job but nobody else is. I guess I should elaborate.
Long ago and far away I was "the pitcher." This was in very low level youth play. I was smart enough as I aged to graduate to the position of catcher from which I couldn't hear my father. Heck he could have left the game, driven to China and back and I wouldn't have known it. You can't get distracted by the crowd, not even your father, when you've got that heavy mask on ... and some kid throwing 80 mile an hour jumping fastballs at you.
When I was "the pitcher," my father would grow increasingly annoyed as I made generic pitchers mistakes. If I nibbled around the corners or didn't throw strikes when I could, he would begin getting on my case. If I worked too slowly or tried a few too many times to pick the runner off of first, I would hear him raising heck. If I didn't pitch to contact, he would say something like "all of us are out here waiting for you to let the batter hit the ball. If you don't, we're all going home."
And you couldn't in any way let on that he or anybody else had gotten through to you when you pitched. If I reacted even a little to his words or the cat-calls from the opposing team, my father would begin a chorus of "Rabbit Ears, Rabbit Ears, Rabbit Ears!"
I thought my father a bit peculiar when I first heard that one. I wondered what did he mean? After the game he told me that it was what they called kids who were bothered by anything said to them from the crowd or from the opposition's dugout. He said you had rabbit ears if you heard anything like that when you were playing. He said, "ever see a rabbit play baseball? No, of course not, that's because they got rabbit ears. If they even tried to play baseball, they'd never get through the first inning without crying. Rabbits don't play baseball, they hop around and eat the outfield grass when nobody else is on the field. And people with rabbit ears don't play baseball either."
If you were in my family and wanted to be a pitcher, you had to have thick skin. My father coached quite a few youth baseball teams when I was a boy but he never coached any of my teams. He never coached my only brother's teams either. I used to wonder why my dad coached all these other teams and never coached his own kids teams! It didn't make any sense. But after I grew up, I was really happy that it had played out like that. I don't think I could have survived being coached by my father!
My father was exactly right about most of the things he taught me about pitching and pitchers. It was in his genetic make up as well as the upbringing his father had pounded into his head. You see my father's father and his father before him had been pitching coaches. They had worked with kids who were the stars of the county in their Pennsylvania coal mining town. They knew the game from the psychology out. And they understood better than most what was important to pitchers.
My father used to say, "some pitchers always seem to get good fielding behind them and some don't. I wonder why that is? It must have something to do with luck. Some guys are lucky and some aren't, right kid?" If I said yes, my father would go into a little greater detail. He would remind me that luck has nothing to do with anything, least of all baseball.
After shooting down the luck thing, my father would say something like "isn't it funny how the pitchers who get really good fielding behind them often get so confident that they work really fast. They don't dilly-dally on the mound. They get the ball back, check the sign and pitch. They're all business. I guess knowing you have good fielders behind you makes you work fast. It also must give you the confidence to throw strikes because all those pitchers with the fielders behind them don't seem to nibble around the corners. They have the confidence to pitch to contact. They aren't always trying to strike out all the batters by fooling them. They challenge the hitters. They don't seem to walk a lot of people. Funny how that is, isn't it? The best pitchers throw strikes, don't delay the pitch, pitch to contact, and get really good fielding behind them. What a coincidence, right kid?"
If you haven't gotten my father's and my own point yet, it is this, pitchers who want to be successful need to work at a good steady pace, throw strikes, pitch to contact and generally keep things moving along. That keeps the fielders expecting action all the time. If you've ever played behind a pitcher like that, you know what I mean. You stand out there on the balls of your feet ready to jump because you know you are going to have to jump soon. You are not going to be able to sit back on your heels and wait for one or two batters to get walked before you see some action. That steady, quick pace keeps you on your toes and off your heels.
It was always of great interest to me how two innings with different pitchers and the same outcome could vary so much in the way they felt. I'm talking about one of those innings where all 9 players or more come to bat, 4 or 5 runs score, and you get out of the inning because somebody hits into a double play. Behind some pitchers this can feel like an eternity in limbo. With other pitchers you are surprised the other team scored at all since whatever happened, happened fast. In one case you're exhausted and can't hit. It almost seems as if your team gets 3 pitches and you're running back out onto the field again. In the other case, with a rapid pitcher, you feel like you can do some damage and maybe come back with a couple runs of your own.
Let's go back to our softball pitcher whose mom is in the stands yelling encouragement to the girls so they will "get behind" her daughter and get out of the inning. Chances are pretty good that this pitcher is good for 10 or so walks an outing. She may not walk all that many batters but she will go 3-2 on most of them. That's what really cheeses me off.
The pitcher gets up 0-2 and then she throws 3 straight balls which are often not all that close. Then she gets the hitter out one way or another and the next kid steps in. She gets her 0-2 and then throws three straight balls. Maybe this time she walks the number 7, 8 or 9 hitter, bringing up the slapper or drag bunter. She doesn't want to give the dragger anything to put on the ground so she ends up walking her on four pitches. The next girl steps in and squares to bunt and the pitch is way outside. Then the same thing happens again, 2-0, runners on first and second, 1 out. The coach goes out to settle her down. She throws two strikes and now it's 2-2. The batter didn't think she could get one over so she didn't even square to bunt, she just took them. Her next pitch is going to really fool this batter except that it's a drop ball that drops and hits the corner of the plate and bounds away from the catcher, allowing both runners to move up. The next pitch is in the strike zone but the batter gets metal on it and hits a wildly spinning grounder to second. She fields it and throws to home just a half second too late. Now it's first and third, one run in, still just one out, 1-0 in the sceond inning. The next hitter pops a fly to mid right centerfield. The righfielder catches it and throws home where the girl from third has tagged and scores fairly easily. The ball gets away from the catcher and the runner from first advances to third. Now it's two out, 2 runs in, runner on third and the 6 foot 3, 250 pound, county leading homerunner hitter, first baseman / clean-up hitter steps up to the plate. Everyone is getting hot and tired. It's just the second or third inning, nobody really knows for sure. She pitches around the slugger for two or three pitches and then grooves one because she's tired since she's already thrown 50 pitches this inning. The slugger misses it but sends a low pop behind first base where three fielders about collide and the ball hits the chalk and then squirts out of play allowing this kid to move to second or third and another run to score. This is about the point the pitcher's mom says, "come on girls get behind your pitcher."
Later in that same game, everybody is pretty beat up. The score is only 6-3 but everybody feels as if this is the third game on the last day of a four day tournament. It's only the fifth inning but everyone would much rather go home than stand and watch this pitcher "work." They've had it.
Chances are pretty good that when the first baseman lets a dribbler go through her legs, one of the middle infielders bobbles a simple grounder, or somebody else makes some sort of mistake, the pitcher's going to show them up. Heck, she's tired too, having thrown her heart out in 3050 pitches through the first 4 innings! She's had it with her lazy good for nothing fielders. All they have to do is get the outs. They should try pitching some time.
If you don't understand what is meant by a pitcher "showing up" one of her fielders, this can take the form of many different actions. She might throw a "look" at one of the few other good players on the field. She might get really red in the face. She might look at mom and sigh while holding her arms out at her sides. She might actually say something like "Oh come on!" None of these things is good and I'm left wondering where she learned such behavior.
The truth is this sort of behavior must have been learned from the pitcher's parents. Just as my father never missed an opportunity to tell me that it wasn't the fielders' faults if I worked slowly, didn't pitch to contact, etc. and then they made some bad plays on easy balls, it is the parents consoling their poor DD after a loss reminding her that "it wasn't your fault" that sets the stage for future poor pitcher behavior. And the mom who is sitting in her ultra comfortable lawn chair yelling "get behind her girls" who failed to teach her kids proper behavior. Now there's no going back and this kid will be a pitcher for not much longer.
I've seen a few of these situations develop over the years. I can think of one kid in particular who stormed off the field into her daddy's or mommy's arms after a tough inning and cried quietly, "it wasn't my fault." I was really shocked when I heard the parent soothing her by saying, "I know, I know, you did what you could." And this was for a young kid who had left the dugout with a 4-0 lead and then walked in 5 runs before the wheels really came off! What did they think they were teaching her? What was it that they hoped to instill in their DD's developing brain? It's always somebody else's fault, never yours?
I guess I could go on and on about this one but I want to bring it to a close. I think enough has been said. Some will get this little diddy and some will not. If you get it, I hope you no longer play on the same team with that pitcher. If you are a pitcher or related to a pitcher and don't get this, I hope you have a plan B for after the playing career comes to a close. You may need some help adjusting to the way the rest of us work in teams.
Otherwise, try reading it again and this time start with the assumption that it is the pitcher who must get behind the fielders not the fielders who must get behind the pitcher. Picture, if you will, 8 sets of parents standing near the dugout calling in unison the encouraging words, "come on (insert pitchers name), get behind them, get behind your fielders. You can do it. Let's get out of this inning, RABBIT EARS." The last guy to join the chorus, the guy who called out rabbit ears, is the ghost of my father. He's not really there. Or maybe it's me, if one of my pitcher DDs is in the circle.Labels: pitching
Permanent Link: Get Behind Your Fielders
Pitch To Your Heart's Desire
by Dave
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Doreen writes in with a question:"My daughter currently plays for XXX Public High School on the JV Team. They have a girl that pitches every game and sometimes 2 games in a evening or two games in a row. Aren't there any restrictions to how long a pitcher can pitch in any given time, as they do in baseball?"
Doreen, to my knowledge, the only place which restricts a softball pitcher in any way like this are Little League and the town recreational leagues thereunder. Little League essentially applies the same kind of rules to softball that are applied to baseball. Pitcher cannot pitch consecutive games and they are limited in terms of innings. College ball has no such restrictions nor does high school, ASA, Pony, NSA, ISA, or FAST. And there's a pretty good reason these major softball organizing bodies do not restrict innings - there's generally no need to.
The fastpitch softball windmill motion does not nearly put the kinds of stresses on the pitcher that overhand baseball pitching does. Overhand is an unnatural motion. It stresses the shoulder and the elbow to an unbelievable degree. If baseball were to allow pitcher to throw as much as they, their parents, or their coaches wanted, there would be a significant number of injuries resulting from the policy. Even in the professional ranks where pitchers are paid millions of dollars, pitchers seldom stray from a routine of one day pitching, four days off. the same is not true of softball.
The windmill motion does not place anywhere near the same stresses on the body that throwing overhand does. It is relatively common to see even a 9 year old pitcher throw multiple games in a day, perhaps multiple days consecutively. There can be injuries associated with pitching too frequently but these usually involve some other aspect such as landing improperly, throwing too many spin pitches or some other sort of mistake.
Even if you pitch baseball with perfect motion, you cannot do so every day without incurring an injury. In softball, if your windmill motion is correct, you can pitch until the sun goes down and then comes up again. You'll be tired - mot likely your legs will give out before your arm - but you can do it.
My youngest daughter was once on a team with no other pitchers. Her team played a tournament in which the first day they had three games. She pitched two and a half of them and then just couldn't go on so they put in another girl and let her rest - so she could pitch the next day. The next day they played a very poor team in their first game and were able to win without her. She pitched six innings the next game and the team advanced. They went to the semi-final game where the pitcher against them ahd pitched two games that day. Both pitchers were exhausted due to intense heat but the game went to the last inning with no score and very few baserunners - both pitchers were effective. Finally my daughter's will gave out and with the bases loaded and two outs in the last inning, she gave up her first hit of the game. We went home and she went to bed. The next day she suggested that we do a little throwing in the morning so as to avoid the heat.
Now I understand your point of view which is as the parent of the number two pitcher on a team whose ace does all the pitching. You want your daughter to get some opportunity to pitch in a game. That opportunity may present itself sometime soon but it is getting late in the season. But if you're looking to find something in terms of a restriction which will provide you that opportunity, it just doesn't exist - at least not to my knowledge.Labels: pitching
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