Pitching: Getting a proper follow-through
So yesterday I started with two new pitchers — teammates with little pitching experience. Both had attended a few sessions of a pitching “clinic” in a large group put on by some local instructor or another.
As I always do I asked to see how they pitched before we launched into the lesson. One of the things I saw right away was something called the “hello elbow.”
The “hello elbow” is a form of forced follow-through at the end of the pitch. After you release the pitch, you bend your elbow and bring your hand up to your throwing hand shoulder. You’re supposed to then point your elbow at your catcher.
It may be well-intended, but it actually works against the mechanics that make up a good pitch. A finish should be long, loose and natural.
If you keep your arm loose and focus on whipping the lower arm past the elbow at release, the last thing you’re going to be able to do is touch your throwing-hand shoulder. You would have to stop the arm and change directions to do that.
As I was working with each of the girls, we focused on learning to be long, loose and natural at the finish. They both struggled at first, but I used a drill called the “low five” to help them get the feel. With an empty hand, I had them start with their pitching arms at the 12:00 position, then bring the upper arm down, then bring the hand through and give me a low five with their hands to my hand.
As they focused on slapping my hand, they started to find a new finish. Both wound up with their pitching hand by their glove-side shoulder. Luckily, from there it was an easy transition to throwing the ball that way too.
They weren’t perfect with it — the “hello elbow” showed up from time to time. But they were definitely better. At the end of the lesson I had them throw to their fathers, and the ball was straighter and faster than it had been when they walked in.
Follow-through is important, but you have to be careful not to trade one issue for another. Keep the follow-through long, loose and natural and your pitchers will find their own way.
How to tell it’s time to find a new coach
The short answer: His/her video collection is on VHS.
The longer answer: A lot has changed since the 1980s. High-speed video has given us insight into things we couldn’t see before. But some people still cling to the “old ways,” like the Pagans in medieval times.
Their rationale is that they’ve been doing it that way for X number of years and have had success. Yet it’s likely they had success in spite of what they teach instead of because of it.
There is plenty of good information out there. And tons of video of top-level players out there. The simple test — aka the Hanson Principle — is compare what people tell you to the best players in the sport. If what you’re being told doesn’t match what you see, it’s time to find a new coach. There’s simply no excuse for accepting bad teaching.
Context provides incentive in softball training
One of the interesting phenomena I have observed in my years of teaching lessons is how important context is in really understanding what you’re learning and putting it to use.
That’s kind of a long-winded way of saying it seems like students seem to “get” what we’re trying to do better after they’ve had a season of playing following an off-season of lessons.
You can try to put context around lessons all you want. I know I certainly do. But once students are in the game trying to execute against an opponent, I found most understand better the reasons why we’re doing what we’re doing, and why we’re focusing on certain aspects of their skills.
Take pitchers, for example. They can look like world-beaters in lessons or practice sessions. But once there’s something on the line, i.e. they’re facing live hitters, they seem to get why we focus so much on repeatable mechanics versus the immediate results.
That can be discouraging for some — they’ve worked hard all off-season, but then in the games they’re not see the payoff right away. But for most, it seems they remember us talking about certain things, they remember themselves not putting the effort into it, and they understand that was a mistake.
Has that been your experience? Has your daughter, your students or your players struggled to put lessons into practice the first year but then come back ready to learn more and at a fast pace?
What the wrist really contributes in pitching
I’ve written before about the myth of the wrist in pitching — how coaches and players put so much emphasis on developing a hard wrist snap through drills despite the fact that the wrist actually contributes very little to power. This past weekend I had the opportunity to see a good example of that in action.
Having some free time on my hands, I went to check out a local tournament. I thought I might get an opportunity to see a couple of students or former players playing (which I did).
While I was there, I saw one girl pitching who to me was the epitome of the “snap your wrist honey” school. She would step off the pitching rubber, make her arm circle, then pretty much stop the circle at the bottom and snap her wrist violently.
As you might expect, her pitches were rather slow, and had somewhat of an arc to them. But I’m sure someone, somewhere taught it to her and thought she was doing a great job. Despite the fact that she was getting pounded pretty hard.
The wrist’s main jobs are to transfer power from the rest of the motion to the ball, and to impart spin in the right direction. It is not a power source in and of itself. Think of it like a car.
The body, the arm, the whipping motion are all the things that create power; they are the engine. The wrist is the transmission that delivers that power to the wheels. While both are essential, by itself the transmission doesn’t do diddly. If you have the world’s greatest transmission and a weak engine, your car isn’t going to go very fast.
Performing endless wrist snap drills to develop power is a waste of time. Especially since there are no actual muscles in the wrist; the muscles that move the wrist extend from the forearm to the hand. Keeping the wrist loose and allowing it to snap quickly at the end of the windmill chain will work far better to impart speed to the ball.
But what about all those exercises to develop the wrist, like the forearm curl? They work because they’re building strength in the forearms, not the wrist, which provides greater stability to the wrist and allows more efficient power transfer.
If you want to increase speed, forget the wrist flips. Focus on developing the whip, and allow the wrist to do its thing.
It’s never too late for the fundamentals
First of all, let me assure you that I haven’t abandoned the Life in the Fastpitch Lane blog. I’ve just been taking care of some other stuff.
Anyway, today I heard about a 16U team and its first few practices. Apparently the coach has been running through some scenarios, but has spent no time working on the fundamentals. The speculation is that she assumes by now they should already have them.
If that’s the case it’s a mistake. No player ever has it down so much that she doesn’t need to work on technique and the fundamentals.
Want proof? The top D1 college programs in the country work on the fundamentals constantly. So does the USA National team. Check out this video of former coach Mike Candrea running one of my favorite drills. It’s a few years old, obviously, but it shows the importance he and the other coaches place on fundamentals.
No matter how good you think your team is, remember it always starts with the fundamentals.
Now is a great time to work on pitching speed
There’s a saying I’ve seen on signs that goes “You can never be too rich or too thin.” For fastpitch softball pitchers, I would add “And you can never have too much speed.”
While speed by itself is not the be-all and end-all of pitching, neither is a lack of speed. The faster you throw, the tougher you are to hit. It’s that simple.
So now, as fastpitch players are (or should be) ending their self-imposed shut-downs and getting ready to start working on next season, this is a great time to work on learning to throw faster.
Why now? Very simple — you don’t have to worry about where the ball goes.
Working on speed requires pitchers to get out of their comfort zones. When that happens, there can be a temporary loss of accuracy until the mechanics lock back in and the faster, harder motion becomes the “new normal” as they like to say.
During the season, a loss of accuracy isn’t good for anyone. But now, at this time of the year, accuracy isn’t at such a premium so pitchers are freer to make adjustments that can set them back a bit in the short run but pay off later in the long run.
Now, of course there is fall ball. For pitchers who are new to a team, or trying to prove that they’re ready to take on a larger role on the same team, a loss of accuracy can be counter-productive. For those pitchers, it might be better to wait until fall ball is over.
For everyone else, though, it’s a good time to start pushing the proverbial envelope and seeing just what you can do.
For those in the North (like me) there’s another good reason to do it now. One of the best drills for building pitch speed is long toss. But it’s hard to get enough distance to make long toss pay off indoors, in a batting cage or even a gym. But right now, you can go out onto a field and just keep backing up until the ball doesn’t reach the plate anymore. Do that once or twice a week, and give it all you’ve got, and you’ll start to see that speed go up.
I know the summer of 2012 seems like it’s a long ways away. But for pitchers it’s not. Get after it now so you’re ready when next summer (or spring for you HS pitchers) comes.
Comments reopened
Still having problems with spam, but I think I’ve figured out a strategy to make it manageable. Not going to share it here lest the spammers use it to their advantage, but I’m going to give it a try.
The good news is comments have now been reopened. So as soon as I post something worth commenting on, give it a try. I’d love to see less lecturing and more discussions!
Ken
Tips for better baserunning
Often times when fastpitch softball hitters are having trouble catching up to the ball, a part of the problem can be found in their mental approach. They are watching the pitch to see if it’s a strike and then making a swing decision instead of assuming the pitch is a strike and then holding up if they see it’s not. The process is known as yes-yes-no rather than no-no-yes.
The same kind of thinking needs to apply to baserunners. They need to be looking for opportunities, assuming opportunities are coming, rather than sitting back passively and then trying to react (usually too late) when an opportunity arises.
This problem is actually how I manage to get baserunners thrown out at third or home from time to time. Because I understand baserunning, and was an aggressive runner myself (hard to believe when you see my picture but I wasn’t always old and fat) I assume my runners are looking for the same things I am.
So I see the ball get away from the catcher with a runner on third, and my immediate reaction is “go!” Unfortunately, if the runner isn’t looking for opportunity her first reaction is usually “huh?” followed by “oh maybe I should run now” followed by running, usually into a tag. It isn’t that the decision to send the runner was wrong — it’s sending THAT runner that didn’t work out because she wasn’t looking for the opportunity. While there may have only been a half-second lagtime between me saying “go” and her leaving, it was enough to get her tossed out.
Runners shouldn’t be relying on coaches to send them. They should be looking for opportunities to go. That means watching the ball out of the pitcher’s hand with the assumption that something will go wrong for the defense, then holding up if it doesn’t.
For example, a runner can look for a ball that slips out of the pitcher’s hand, or a drop ball that will obviously hit in front of the plate. Rather than waiting for the ball to hit the ground and then hit the catcher, the runner should be taking off before the ball hits the ground. It’s a pretty safe bet — not many hitters swing at balls that bounce in the dirt — and those extra hundreths of a second might make the difference between getting tagged out (especially with a strong-armed catcher) and cruising in standing up.
A little more difficult is the ball that is partially blocked by the catcher. It takes a little experience to make the judgment, but essentially you want to see how the ball gets away from the catcher. If you can see it going out to the side, that’s the time to take off because the catcher first has to get to the ball, then get control of it, before she can make a throw. If you’re uncertain, learn to recognize a ball moving to the side versus being blocked in front. As long as the catcher can’t just reach down and grab the ball you stand a good chance of making it to second or third.
If you’re on third, you need to be a little more cautious but you can still take advantage of miscues when they occur. You may have to wait a little more to see what the ball does, but the sooner you recognize that the ball is getting away from the catcher and will have to be tossed, the better chance you have of making it home safely.
But it all starts with planning to run. Make that your first priority, to take advantage of opportunities when they occur, and hold up if nothing happens, and you’ll find yourself getting around the bases a whole lot quicker.
Sorry – comments closed temporarily
Sorry to say this, but lately Life in the Fastpitch Lane has been getting inundated with spam comments. Rather than continue to delete them manually — which has gotten very time-consuming — I have chosen to shut down comments for the time being in the hopes that the spammers will move on to someone else.
I will try reopening comments in a week or two. Sorry for the inconvenience. I always appreciate your legitimate comments!
The trouble with tryouts
It’s that time of year in the fastpitch softball world — tryout time. A time of nervousness, hope and frustration.
But today’s post isn’t about the players. It’s actually about the challenges of running tryouts.
I have been a coach with two organizations, and have been able to watch parts of other tryouts, and most of what I’ve seen and experienced has been the same. The focus is primarily on individual skills.
Those are important, but it can penalize the kids who may not quite have the skills but have a lot of game sense or other qualities that make them good players. This is not a complaint — because I don’t have a solution. When you’re looking at a lot of players in a short amount of time it’s tough to do much more.
It’s not like soccer, where you can spend some time looking at skills, then divide the players up and have the scrimmage for an hour. Even if you did that, there’s no guarantee that the ball will be hit to any particular player, or that hitters will face the best pitchers. If the pitching is uneven, certain hitters can look better than others by default.
So I throw the question out: how do you structure your tryouts? Has anyone found an effective way to look beyond skills at soft skills such as game sense, or having a feel for when to steal a base, or other things like that? If so, I’d love to hear about it — and I’m sure everyone else would too.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 