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Just Hit The Ball
by Dave
Friday, June 15, 2007
This one is meant especially for parents of fastpitch softball players who themselves never played the game. By never played the game, I mean fathers who, though they may have played some youth baseball, never faced pitching over say 70-75 mph, and/or mothers who never faced a windmiller throwing in excess of 50 mph. I know the world is full of these folks. I see them all the time at tournaments. I've met many on teams I've been involved with. And I want to give them a special message to contemplate when they sit there angry with their child because she just struck out, maybe even looking. You parents have good reason to calm down and my objective with this pieceis to clarify that point.
Let's break this down. I know I've done this plenty before but the point is so important, I feel it needs to be driven home as often as possible. I just checked a conversion chart and one mile per hour converts to 1.467 feet per second. If your darling daughter just rose up to 12U ball and is now facing pitchers throwing in excess of 50 mph, she has approximately four tenths of a second to see the release, determine if it is going to be a ball or strike, decide to swing and then execute a swing.
A world class athlete is able to make a decision to act and then initiate that act in about .15 seconds. The average human reacts somewhere between .2 and .25 seconds. That's simple reaction time but when the action in response is more complicated, the total time of decision making is longer. For example, when automobile experts examine accidents, they use a reaction time of somewhere around 1 to 1.5 seconds. When they look at the fender bender you were in last year, they assume it took you 1.5 seconds to step on the brakes. That's why tailgating laws generally require you to stay back one full car length or more for every ten miles per hour you are driving. In the UK and some other places, they prefer you to keep a car and a half length behind the next car per 10 mph speed.
So where does this leave your daughter? She uses a little more than half her allotted time - after the pitcher releases the ball - to decide whether she should swing or not. After she has decided to swing, she gets a whopping additional .2 seconds to execute the swing! That includes deciding where to swing in order to hit the ball.
In order to demonstrate this fraction of second concept, I'd like you to borrow a stopwatch. All I want you to do with this is start and stop the watch repeatedly until you can get the thing to read .4 seconds and then try to reach .2 seconds. Go ahead. I'll wait. This is important stuff.
It isn't quite as easy as you thought, is it? I can get the stopwatch to stop about a hundredth or two on either side of .4 and .2 but it takes me a lot of tries. And pushing a button is a heck of a lot easier than swinging a stick. Add location to the mix and it is near impossible. Yet they do it, don't they? Remember that weak groundball your daughter hit to second the other day? She DID hit the ball. That should amaze you! You should be in awe of her.
But she was a great 10U hitter!?
I've gone over this before but, again, I think it is necessary to state it again in this context. Girls change a lot both physically and mentally between the ages of roughly 9 and 14. The body grows and then the nerves race to catch up. Add the raging hormones of puberty into the picture and what you've got is one big mess. Now add the advancement which pitchers make in this age span and I think you'll see that you've just got to calm down.
I may be off a bit here but my observations of top notch 9 - 14 year old pitchers go like this: A good 9 year-old will throw around 40-45. A stellar 10 year-old will probably be around 50 but that's with the 11 inch ball. A very good 11 year old is most likely in the neighborhood of 50 with the 12 inch ball. Top 12 year olds throw in the near 55, the best 13s are 2 - 5 mph higher than that, and 14s add a few mph. I've seen 12s who can throw 60. I;ve seen decent 14s live around 53. There are a wide range of speeds at the various ages. But when you look at average pitch speed in the various age classes, I think what you're left with is the realization that the biggest jump occurrs between the 10U and 12U categories. 14Us generally improve just as much as 12Us but their improvement is often more about location, pitch selection, and movement.
Just because your superstar hit great at 10U does not mean she's going to knock the world over at 11 in 12U ball. It will take her significant time, lots of at-bats, to make the necessary adjustment to the increased speed. And just when she begins making the adjustment and hitting the ball, she'll undoubtedly face some kid with a great change-up or one with better than average control who knows how to throw the ball just out of reach of your daughter's bat. It is an intensely frustrating game. And there's good reason why many claim that batting the pitched ball is the most complicated act in sport.
She hits the ball but she swings or hits it so weakly
We've gone over the amount of time needed to decide to swing and execute it. We've been over the fact that pitchers improve a lot during this 9-14 age span. You understand all that but you just can't come to grips with why your daughter swings so weakly. She's hitting the ball now that she's been in 12U for half a season but everytime she hits it, it's an easy grounder to second. Why doesn't she hit it harder? She was a homerun hitter (get back, get back, get back) just last year. Why isn't she hitting with more authority?
Well, first off, if she's jumped from 10U to 12U, the 12 inch ball is quite a bit heavier than the 11. It's a bigger target but when you make contact, it feels like a bowling ball. That has to do with both the weight and the speed at which it is pitched.
An 11 inch softball weighs around 6 ounces. An official 12 inch softball weighs in at around 6.8 ounces. If you pick up something which weighs 8 tenths of an ounce, you will notice that it seems very light. But the percentage increase from one ball to the other is almost 15 percent. That's significant and more so when it's weight is being moved at, say, a 20% greater speed. So, while making contact is enough of a chore, actually driving the thing is even more difficult.
Also, consider that you got upset when she swung and missed so many times early in the year. Her reaction to that was to try to just hit the darn ball and get mom or dad off my back. Maybe if I hit it, they'll stop bugging me. If you are having trouble hitting something because it is moving too darn hard, your first reaction is to swing less hard. To demonstrate, go to your local carnival and pony up a couple bucks to play "whack-a-mole." What I want you to do is swing your absolute hardest every time one of those moles sticks his head up. After you have done this once or twice swinging as hard as humanly possible, I want you to try it again a few times, this time trying to hit as many moles as you can. I'll wait. I;ve got nothing better to do.
OK, so how was the carnival? Was it more crowded than you expected? You shouldn't go on bracelet days. Everybody goes then. Did you find a "whack-a-mole" game? Good. How many did you hit with your hardest swings? I see. No, I didn;t think you'd hit many. How did you do the other times? Oh, you won a prize? Good for you. That's what you really need in your house, isn't it, more junk.
Anyways, if you did my experiment, I think you'll see that when you want to hit a fast moving object and you experience some difficulty, your first reaction is to shorten your stroke - to make it weaker, more under control. This happens a lot at 11 years old. The emphasis is placed first on just making contact. That's why so many 11 year-olds ground out to second when they first start making contact against 12 year-old pitchers.
This problem of the weak swing will be overcome through experience. The more pitching one faces at fast speeds, the more quickly the good swing will come back. It is, after all, the good swing that we're after more than anything else. That's where your emphasis should be placed rather than on your daughter making contact or driving the ball.
If you examine the top hitters in sport, I believe what you will see that they all have in common is a very good swing. They also possess excellent reaction speeds but this is less evident as the only way to measure that is which testing. They may possess fast hands too but that's more a gift than it is something which can be developed. The only thing you can really work on via repetition in practice is a good swing. The other elements of successful hitting are more reliant on experience, lots of experience. So when you work with yourdaughter to try to help her hit better, what you must focus on is a good swing. You can also9 try to get her out to the batting cages where you'll have her face the fastest pitching available but the emphasis must be on a good swing.
Why can't she hit the change-ups?
For some reason, folks get it into their heads that if a kid is having trouble hitting fast pitching, she should at least be able to get a good hack at a change. I don't see why that should logically follow. She's up there tense, getting herself ready to pull the trigger on a 55 mph fastball, and when the thing comes hurling at her at 40, she acts as if she cannot even see the ball. That's pretty natural. It is difficult to hit a good change-up. Unfortunately, I do not have a handy experiment to demonstrate this to you but if you watched the Women's College World Series, you already know how difficult it is to hit that pitch.
I've talked about Arizona ace Taryne Mowatt's change-up in a number of columns recently. Her best fast pitches clock in at about 65-68. Her change-up is closer to 45-50. She had blister problems and had to throw the change far more than anyone ever imagined. And the Tennesse hitters were unable to hit it even when they should have known it was coming. That's a bunch of world class hitters unable to meet a 50 mph pitch with no particular movement on it! If that doesn't tell you everything you need to know, I really suggest you pick up a bat and take your best shot before you get mad at your daughter for striking out on a change-up.
In closing, I want to leave you with a picture. In a championship tournament in my state, there was a girl pitching who is headed for a top division one program. She brings it in as high as 67, some claim she hits 70 occassionally. She also has several very good movement pitches, changes speed extremely well, and hits her spots on almost every pitch. This girl threw a perfect game against an otherwise good hitting club. But that's not the amazing thing. The amazing thing is in a top level game, against a good hitting club, she struck out 20 of the 21 batters she faced. No ball was hit into fair territory until the final batter who grounded weakly to an infielder and was put out at first. Something like 10-11 kids who have all played fastpitch softball for the better part of ten years and found decent success were unable to touch this pitcher. That happens more frequently in this game than it does in baseball. The deck is stacked against your softball-playing daughter. Give her some support rather than grief. Be amazed on the few occassions she hits the ball at all, let alone drives it hard into the outfield.Labels: hitting, parenting
Permanent Link: Just Hit The Ball
 
Personal Responsibility
by Dave
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Let's do some simple math. Your travel team practices 3 times each week for 2 hours or a total of 6 hours (360 minutes). Let's assume there are 12 kids on the roster and 3 or 4 coaches. Let's also assume that the practice is broken down into one-third game situational defense like outfield cutoffs and infield practice; one-third batting; and the remainder for defensive drill stations. What are the results on a per kid basis?
If batting practice is conducted in two stations, there are a total of 240 minutes of batting practice and, with 12 kids, that means each one gets 20 minutes per week. The same is true for defensive drilling stations. Team situation defense involves everyone and is probably the most important part of the process but dividing the thing evenly for simplicity sake yields 10 minutes per week per player. Your travel softball playing kid, if her only practice is the team practice, gets 50 minutes per week to play the most complex game on the planet.
Maybe your team practices more than 3 times per week or for longer than 2 hours. If they practice for double the 6 hours I am using, you get a grand total of a little over an hour and a half. That's per week! If a girl practices like that year round, she gets essentially the equivalent of one or two "work weeks" each year to perfect all her hitting, fielding, baserunning and batting skills.
Well, there are also all those games which fill your entire schedule of free time, aren't there? Let's assume that in addition to the practices, your team plays 10 tournaments with an average of 5 games each. That's 50 games, each lasting an hour and a half. Each game probably involves 3 at-bats, a single at-bat lasting 4 pitches or so for about a minute, minute and a half. If you get three balls hit to you in the field per game, that's a lot. Each fielding experience lasts seconds. So if we tally up the total time used actually in action during games, we get about 5 minutes per game times 5 games per tournament times 10 tournaments, or another 4 hours per year. If you double the number of games due to some leagues and/or scrimmages, you still only get a grand total of 8 hours and adding that to the practices doesn't really make a dent in the overall figure.
So where am I going with this silly calculation about the amount of time spent in action on the softball diamond? My point is this amount of time is just not enough. You cannot get good at something by working really hard at it for one or two weeks per year. Children work at fundamental mathematical skills for an hour a day, 200 days per year for years and years before they are able to start approaching simple algebra problems. Times tables alone take half a year of working an hour a day in school and about the same afterwards. School is certainly more important than softball but playing softball well is probably as hard as algebra.
If we take a glance at pitchers, we see that at the lowest levels of travel ball, they practice at least 2 hours per week and then get another 2 to 3 hours of game time, if they pitch a lot. A few aces on teams otherwise without pitchers get more. Many get less. As you climb the ranks and view top level pitchers, they practice their craft far more than that and they do this year round. But we're not talking about pitchers today. We're talking about infielders and outfielders, the third baseman or shortstop, the catcher, centerfielder or anyone else who ventures onto the diamond. These players get to practice their craft just a couple weeks per year unless they find ways outside of team practice to work on skills. And, again, that's just not enough to really excel.
So what's a girl to do if she isn't the pitcher or doesn't get to go away to softball camp? How can she separate herself from the pack and be all that she can be?
If I were to try to figure out the one skill which is most important to a young softball player's success, I think I'd settle on throwing. The first thing anyone notices about a girl in tryouts is the strength and accuracy of her arm. That may not be the element of a particular player's game which makes the difference between being cut or making the team, playing or sitting the bench, but it is probably the first thing anyone notices. And if you do the things needed to really strengthen the throwing arm, other skills seem to follow.
Playing catch in the yard 4 times a week for half an hour is not very much work. Yet if you do just that for the six months of the year which are warm enough to throw without a winter coat in most of this country, that adds almost 50% to your annual practice regimen. Half of that time, strictly speaking, involves the exercise of throwing and the other half is a hand-eye coordination drill. This sport is hand-eye coordination driven. Anything you can do to improve your hand-eye coordination has immediate benefits.
The next most important skill is probably hitting. If you can hit, I mean really hit, any team is going to find a place for you to play. Using a hitting stick or a batting tee with whiffle balls for 15 minutes yields about 100 swings. If you get 100 swings in during the course of a batting practice, that's probably a lot. If a girl plays 50 games where she gets up to bat 3 times and swings twice in each at-bat, that yields 150 swings. Do I need to say more? 15 minutes in your yard with a batting tee can approximately simulate the experience of an entire batting practice or a season's worth of swings. Now there is no question that an actual at-bat is an entirely different experience than taking hacks at the tee. Yet swinging is a motor memory skill and you cannot just walk up to the plate with two on and two out and learn to hit. You've got to develop your swing before you take real at-bats. It has to be automatic. The more automatic it is, the more likely you'll succeed in real at-bats.
The mechanics of fielding a ground ball or pop-up, or just making a catch of the thrown ball are fairly simple. Yet everytime I see a girl go to field a grounder in practice, I see the same mistakes made over and over again. I correct them and try to get the right moves performed. Usually a player will listen intently and then perform the skill the right way for about 3 tries. Then we move on to something else. A few days later, we're in practice again and the same girls are making the same mistake. That's understandable since motor memory takes thousands of repetitions to grab hold, but what did this girl do in the two days between practice? Did she play catch for a half hour on either or both of the days? Probably not. Did she even pick up a ball? Probably not.
The reason I'm writing this piece today is we had practice last night. Only a few girls showed because there are school graduations, the practice was thrown together at the last minute, and because these kids just have other things they have to do. I understand that and I'm not upset about turnout. But what upsets me is the few kids who were in practice, the ones who made an effort to come out against all the odds, these few dedicated souls, showed signs of not having picked up a ball since our last practice. And this made me wonder about those kids who couldn't fit a practice into their busy schedules. How much did they work on their softball skills during the off days? The thing that realy gets under my skin is the player who wants to ..., yet is completely unwilling to play a simple game of catch in the yard for a couple minutes each day in order to improve herself enough to earn it.
In a completely unrelated yet somehow amazingly similar matter, I have often heard the same kind of comments I hear as a softball coach in regards to my means of earning a living. A long time ago, I started a hobby. That hobby involved a pursuit which lent itself to internet publishing. I had a full time job of 50+ hours per week and a daily 4 hours spent commuting. Somehow I learned to create a web site about this hobby. I would get up around 5 in the morning to work on my site. I would then shower and head off to work but my commute was made aboard a train so I figured out how I could continue to work on the web site during that time. I could have slept like many of my fellow commuters. I could have gotten involved with the card game in the back of my train. I could have engaged in pleasant conversation or called every human being I know via the cellphone like the guy sitting next to me. Instead I chose to work on my web site until I had to disembark.
After my commute, I would work at my job until noon or one. Then I would eat lunch at my desk and have almost an entire hour to spend on my hobby. The work day would end, I'd board the train, and voila, I had an another hour or two to work on the site. I'd come home, eat dinner with my family, play with the kids, and do all those other ordinary things. After that, I'd usually get another two hours or so to work on the site. By the end of your typical day I would have spent 7 hours working on the darned web site. I'd sometimes work the entire weekend on it. I had two fulltime jobs! I did this for years just for fun until one day I learned I could make money from that site.
It wasn't easy to make money via this web site I had built from the ground up. But as I worked on the thing and people came and visited the site in greater and greater numbers, my earnings increased. I made a few friends along the way who taught me some things. I picked up a little here and a little there until I knew how to manage a server and write some code to do the things I wanted the site to do. Prior to this time I had never had a decent computer course. My college days were one step ahead of the computer revolution. Every time I took a class, the next year it was offered in a different format - one involving automation! But I found I could learn HTML and Javascript by self-teaching, by looking behind the curtain and emulating what other people had done. I learned how to place ads in certain ways to get more people to click them.
One day I turned around to find I was making more money from the web site than I was earning from my full time job. So I quit the day job and went to work for myself. Every time I am at a picnic or some other get together, somebody learns what I do for a living and then makes a comment like, "I have this really great idea for a web site and I'm just wondering what it will take for me to develop it. I don't know anything about web sites but, to be honest, I'd like to do what you're doing. It must be great to not have to work for a living!"
Usually I don't let such ignorant comments ruin my mood. Most often I reply with something like, "It only took me ten years of working like a dog during all my free time to make this happen. You can do it too. Anyone can." As an aside, this softball site is not a money maker for me. I do it because I love it. We couldn't pay our Applebees-after-tournament bill with the amount I make from this site. My real site is much larger and time consuming than this one.
That's probably too much information. My point is, anyone can do just about anything in life including learning algebra, playing softball, or making their living from home on a laptop. It just requires a little persistence and the willingness to work at something long enough to get proficient. Softball is as complicated and difficult as any pursuit. It takes a lot of time but that time can be split up over a long period so as not to cut into other things. Still, one must practice in order to be proficient. One must take personal responsibility for one's skills.
There are a lot of kids out there playing this sport. Some are pretty good at it. A few are outstanding. If you go to a tournament this weekend and take a look around at all the players, chances are decent that you'll only see a couple dozen who are actually better than you. A very small portion of the kids in your age group will be significantly better than you. You can easily make yourself stick out as one of the real players by taking some steps today. But you'll have to take those same steps tomorrow and the day after that. You'll have to be willing to find time to practice the things needed to improve your game. But, if you want to be good at this, it is entirely worth the effort. Now go outside and play catch for a half hour. Then do it again tomorrow. The next day you can do 15 minutes worth of batting practice and then find someone to throw or hit you some grounders. Take some responsibility for yourself now and learn how much fun that can be.Labels: batting practice, hitting mechanics, instruction, lessons, parenting, practice, throwing
Permanent Link: Personal Responsibility
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
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