Another cue for the backhand change
I know it seems like I’m obsessed with the change this week. And perhaps I am. But it’s an important pitch and worth focusing on.
Sometimes a pitcher can have trouble getting her hand turned around in time to throw the backhand change. If that happens, try telling her to make sure she brings her thumb to her thigh as she brings the ball through the bottom of the circle. This cue is specific, and helps assure that her hand is coming knuckles first through the release zone.
Tonight was the first time I’ve used the cue, and it worked in the situation where it was needed. It may not work for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a try. The challenge for any coach is to find a way to communicate what the player needs to do in a way that makes sense to her. Thumb to the thigh is part of the rhyme often used for overhand throwing — thumb to the thigh, raise it to the sky, wave bye-bye. Now I know it works for pitching too!
To make the change work, trust it
Have you ever watched a pitcher who generally has a good changeup suddenly start struggling to throw it well? The pitch comes in too fast, or it goes high, or it rolls in — or sometimes all of the above. The pitcher will work diligently to correct it, but it just seems to get worse.
Often there is a simple cure, but one that doesn’t make sense on the surface. What I’ve found works is to tell the pitcher to just throw the heck out of her changeup.
Here’s why it works. The changeup depends on a certain timing. It’s built to look like a fast pitch but come in slower. If the pitcher throws it incorrectly once for whatever reason, often her correction will be to try to slow her arm down a little in order to take off speed. But in doing so, she throws off the timing of her arm with the rest of her body. That leads to another bad changeup and more “corrections” until she’s not throwing the pitch she’s been trained to throw.
Instead of going slower, the pitcher needs to go faster. She needs to trust in the pitch and just let the mechanics work for her. If she has a good change, driving into it and throwing it hard will get her where she needs to be when she releases the ball. Again assuming she has the pitch to begin with.
This idea seems to work no matter what type of change the pitcher is throwing. Have her be confident, and just throw the dang thing. It’s amazing what our bodies can do when we get our brains out of the way.
Half-day college clinics
With winter break fast approaching for the schools, I have started receiving the e-mails offering skills clinics at various local colleges. It’s always interesting to see what they have to say.
First of all, let me say those clinics are a great way to expose your daughter to college coaches, especially if she already knows where she wants to go to school. Attend a few and the coaches will get to know her, and if they think she can help them they’ll give her a good look. They’re also good for getting a “second opinion.” You or a private coach may thing your daughter is on the right track, but a good college coach might differ, or at least offer some suggestions on ways to improve. Of course, if the coach (assuming he/she is there) says you’re looking good, that’s great validation too.
Now on to the real topic. I received a notice recently that included a pitching/catching clinic. Maybe it was just worded poorly, but it said at the pitching clinic you will receive basic instruction on skill development and work on specific pitch development including the drop, rise, screw and curve. To me, that’s a pretty tall order.
I don’t see where much of any of that will really be accomplished in that or any three-hour clinic. I don’t know, but I doubt they’re really looking for raw beginners. They might be able to tweak someone who is already taking lessons or learning to pitch on a regular basis, but they’re not going to “teach” anyone to pitch. Likewise, I question whether they can teach anyone a new pitch in that amount of time. My guess is they don’t think they can either; the best they can do is take something and make it better.
For example, you think you have a curve because you have a “curve ball grip” but it doesn’t spin in the right direction. They can probably help you get the right spin, and maybe start actually seeing a break in the ball.
That’s probably not what people are going to read, though. They may very well assume that sending their daughter to this college clinic means she will learn to throw those pitches from scratch — maybe one of them, maybe even all. I’ve had parents of nine year olds tell me how impressed they were that their daughter was shown how to throw all these different pitches at a HS clinic. No she wasn’t. She was shown there are different pitches, but she didn’t learn a damned thing. Especially when her primary challenge was getting the ball over the plate without any fancy movement.
The truth is pitching is an iterative skill. It takes lots of repetition and tweaking to get any of it right, much less all of it. Even big-time pitchers struggle with it day to day.
So when you see one of those announcements, know what you’re getting into. Go for the right reasons. But don’t expect miracles. If it were really that easy, they’d be charging a lot more than $75 for it. I know I would.
Things that make me go hmmm #1
Thanks to Frank Morelli to sparking this one. He was commenting on my Softball Magazine article “10 Things I Hate About Softball,” saying one of the things he hates is ASA’s instance on the on-deck hitter remaining in front of her dugout. That got me to thinking, and going hmmm.
ASA (and other sanctioning bodies) are fanatical about enforcing the no-jewelry rule. I have actually had a player tossed out of a game for forgetting to remove her Lance Armstrong rubber band, and other players have been admonished because they put their hair tie on their wrist so they wouldn’t lose it when they put their helmet on. I have been told it is a safety issue.
So if ASA is so concerned about safety, why will they insist that the on-deck hitter stand 10-15 feet away from and in front of the current hitter? I mean seriously. Which do YOU think will cause more injury — catching a rubber band or a hair tie on whatever they think it will catch on, or being hit point-blank in the stomach or chest with a line drive off a bat with the technology to allow an average hitter to send a ball flying over a 200 foot fence?
I know what I think. There are rumors that the rules will be changed in the next couple of years to require pitchers and corner infielders to wear safety masks. Maybe even the entire infield. Yet often in the parks we play in, the hitter is standing as close or than most of them. I know that Don Porter Field in Oklahoma City is a spacious park with lots of room up the sidelines, but the average softball diamond for youth play is not. It seems silly to insist that on-deck hitters stand on their own side when the easy solution is to allow them to stand behind the hitter, no matter which dugout that puts them in front of.
While I’m on the subject, I’ll bet more kids are injured sliding on cinder-based infields that would ever get hurt by wearing a rubber band or hair tie on their wrist. If you really want to help the players, require sand- or dirt-based skins.
It’s things like that that make me go hmmmm.
Glove work for catchers
The standard technique used by most catchers (and taught by most coaches) for presenting a target is for the catcher to set up, stick her glove out, and sit there like a statue until the pitcher delivers the ball. This mindset is reinforced by coaches and parents yelling “Give her a bigger target” to the catcher when the pitcher struggles with control. (The problem, incidentally, is rarely with the catcher’s target. Usually it’s the fact that the pitcher couldn’t hit an archery target with the way she’s throwing, but that’s a subject for another day.)
Think about what that set-up means from the umpire’s point of view. The catcher sets up low and in. The pitch goes low and out. The catcher moves her glove across the plate to get the ball, and it looks like a miss. No matter how hard she tries to frame it, there’s a good chance that the pitch will be called a ball.
Now consider this, a technique I saw from Angel Santiago of UNLV at the National Sports Clinics a couple of years ago. Instead of holding a formal, tight target, show the target to the pitcher. Then, as she goes into her windup, relax the arm and the glove. As the pitch comes in, you can move to it easily and frame it toward center.
This technique does two things for you. Number one it smooths out the movement, getting rid of the herky-jerky lunge at the ball. Number two, it trains the umpire that glove movement is normal, not something that happens when a pitch goes wrong.
It can be hard to break old mindsets, but try it. You’ll find it’s a much better way of gaining more strikes for your pitchers.
Bringing pitches back down
Had an interesting one this week. I was working with a pitcher who was just coming back to lessons after a few months layoff. She was throwing hard and looking generally athletic in her movement. But every pitch was high. I don’t mean at the letters. I mean like seven to eight feet high.
We tried a few things but none seemed to work. She was not getting her elbow into the slot as she normally does, and didn’t look like she was going to find it anytime soon. Then I remembered a little something in my bag.
I have a long piece of elastic tape that I usually use for the drop ball. I’ll hook it over two tees and extend it out in front of the plate. The idea is to get the ball to travel over the tape, then drop behind or on the plate. It’s a drill I saw on an Ernie Parker video years ago.
I got the tape, hooked it into the cage where we were working, then stretched it out in front of the pitcher, about nine or 10 feet from the rubber. I told her to throw so the ball went under the tape. Sure enough, she started throwing knee-high strikes. When I took it away she went back to throwing high at first. But then she got the hang of it and didn’t need the tape anymore.
The key was the visual cue. She couldn’t feel the release point, but the visual of the tape helped her understand where it was. She found the path for her hand and arm and made the correction.
That’s the fun of coaching — finding a way to solve a problem. And now I have one more tool to use.
More on personal responsibility
I really like Bobby Simpson at Higher Ground Softball. Not only is he knowledgeable and a very nice human being, he often provides some real food for thought in his regular Tuesday e-mail messages. Every coach should sign up for those e-mail missives.
This week’s was no exception. He told a story about how one of the features of Roman architecture was arches. Here is the full text:
I once read a very interesting item about Roman construction. I knew that one of the features of Roman architecture was the use of arches. I also knew that many of the structures that are over 2000 years old are still standing. What I did not know, until I read that item about fifteen years ago, was why their structures may still be standing. It seems that when the arches of a structure were finished, the engineer in charge was required to stand under the arches until the scaffolding was removed. If it was not built well, he would be the very first one to know and it could be a very painful lesson that would be learned. Talk about emphasizing personal responsibility. Ask yourself if you are willing to stand under your constructions. Are you willing to stand under the teams, businesses, families, friendships, or projects that you have built? Let some roads lead from Rome and stand under the arches of lives that you help to construct with excellence.
Isn’t that a great story? As I’ve said before, so many players (and their parents) seem unwilling to take personal responsibility for their own failings or failures. They’ll blame their teammates, their coaches, the umpires, and just about anyone else they can think of before they’ll think to say “Hey, maybe I should’ve worked a little harder in the off-season” or “I really didn’t bring my A game today.”
Great players evaluate themselves every game, always looking at what they could’ve done better this time and what they could do better the next time. They’re hungry for information and willing to work hard. And most of all, when it’s time to remove the scaffolding, they’re eager to stand under the arch and show the world how well they’ve done. It’s only the not so great players who would rather shove someone else under the arch, lest they themselves get hurt.
Getting the feel of the legs working together
There’s a of talk in the pitching world about the need to get good leg drive in order to get good speed. But I’ve always found the books and videos to be a little lacking on the “how” end of things. They will offer drills and such, which work if the pitcher naturally uses her legs correctly in those drills. But what if she doesn’t?
By that I mean what if she doesn’t use both legs together? Some will push hard off the back side, but won’t necessarily use the front leg efficiently. Others will drive out hard with the front leg, but will allow the back side to lag.
Tonight I was facing the latter with a girl named Justine. Her mom is a reader of this blog so I’m sure she won’t mind her being named, at least by first name. 
Justine was using her front leg to pull, but the back leg was late, and she was not only not throwing as hard as she should, she was also ending up in a forward leaning position. We tried a couple of different things to give her the feel of her legs working together, but it was still a struggle. Then I came upon an idea.
She is right handed, so I had her stand on her right leg, with her left leg slightly up — in what is often called the “stork” position. I then had her move her front knee forward slowly, to see how far she could get it before she lost her balance and wouldn’t be able to push off the back leg. She was surprised to see that she couldn’t get it all that far out. We did it a few times, and I had her push off before she hit the point of no return. Then we went back to pitching full out, with a noticeable jump in speed.
The key to this is the two legs have to work together. If the front leg gets too far away from the back leg it is impossible to get a good drive off the back leg. You need to push off the back foot as the front knee is going forward, not after it’s already as far as it can extend. Doing that moves the whole body together as a unit, which is more powerful than going one piece at a time.
So thanks to Justine I have yet another new drill to bring to my students. I love new stuff!
A common throwing problem — dipping the front shoulder
Maybe I’m just more acutely aware of it now because I’ve been working with a couple of players on this problem. But more and more I’m seeing an oddity in the throwing motion of some female softball players: they dip their front shoulders to initiate the throw.
They start out ok, i.e. they turn their bodies and take the ball back properly. But when it’s time to start moving forward, their first movement is to lower the glove-side shoulder instead of leaving it in place and driving the throwing shoulder through. When that happens, they tend to look like they’re throwing a hand grenade in a WWII movie instead of a softball. The back shoulder gets stuck right about the time they get to square, and the throw is mostly arm.
They may get the ball there, but it’s not very efficient. And it won’t be as hard as they can throw. If you see this, you need to get the player to keep her glove side shoulder to stay in place, then drive the throwing side shoulder through. I refer to it as replacing the front shoulder with the back one. When they’re finished, the throwing shoulder should be lower than the glove side. At minimum, they should be the same height.
Don’t be fooled by looking at videos of MLB pitchers, either. They are throwing off a high mound, and what looks like the front shoulder dropping down is really the whole body going down because of the hill. If they were on flat ground the glove shoulder would remain in place. That’s the way field players throw.
If your player can’t get the hang of leaving the shoulder up, trying having her raise her glove straight up over her head, and leave it there while she throws. You will see an immediate improvement. Then slowly have her lower it until she can make the proper movement with a full throwing motion.
It takes some time and practice to overcome this habit. But in the end it’s worth it.
The state of education in this country
Over the past couple of days I have been trying to explain the effect of doing one thing right and one thing wrong on the drop ball to some of my students. These students have been seventh grade or above, and all seem intelligent, so I had a reasonable expectation that my explanation would work.
The issue, by the way, was body position v. release point. Like most pitching coaches, I like my students to get up and over the drop ball (forward posture), and start the release as they come toward the back of the leg. I would see that sometimes they’d start the release at the right time but not get over the top. Other times they would get over the top but would release too late. Essentially what you had was a correct movement being negated by an incorrect movement, and the pitch was flat.
So, to try to explain the effect I asked several “What do you get when you add -1 and +1 together?” Quick, before you read the answer, see if you can answer it yourself. Play “Are you smarter than a seventh grader?” Look below for the answer.
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Okay, the correct answer is zero. Believe me I was no math whiz, but integers in general were pretty simple.
I think perhaps one student got the answer correct. The rest did their best to guess, but usually came up with “two,” and a couple came up with some really wild answers.
That made me wonder what is going on in the education system. By the age of 12 I would think they would’ve been exposed to integers by now. The question isn’t a hard one — positive and negative of the same number cancel each other out — and I purposely chose the number one to keep it even simpler. Yet they struggled with it.
I dunno. Maybe it was the shock of having to do a math problem in a pitching lesson. But I was surprised it seemed so difficult. Really makes me wonder what that big chunk of my tax bill is going toward. Guess I’ll just have to leave the math example in the discard pile for teaching pitching too!
