Blog Archives
Way cool: Slugger lets you customize your bat
Back when the Louisville Slugger Catalyst fastpitch bats first came out and were the hot bats, my daughter Kim had a chance to get one for free, courtesy of my friends at Softball Magazine. But she decided to pass because they were yellow and she just didn’t like the way they looked. I know, right?
While it shouldn’t make a difference – the only measure of a bat should be how well you can hit with it – it actually does seem to matter. Kim’s not the only one to object to a piece of equipment because of its appearance.
Not your mother’s Slugger – you can customize your LXT HYPER fastpitch bat to suit your preferences. and tastes
For those with daughters/players who are fashion-forward, however, there is good news. On June 1 Louisville Slugger announced not only the release of the new LXT HYPER fastpitch bat line, but an amazing feature – you can customize it to suit your tastes by going here.
I tried it out earlier in the week and it’s way cool. Often times when companies say you can customize a product they mean you can change a couple of colors, or a graphic here or there. With the LXT HYPER you essentially start out with a colorless bat, then specify the color of every component, from the knob to the end cap.
(WARNING: If you are graphically challenged you may want to have one of your more artistic friends check your work before you submit, as you can really make it crazy. Unless that’s what you’re going for.)
I tried the site out earlier in the week and it was pretty easy to use. It walks you through the choices, and as you make each one that choice gets added to “your” bat. They have lots of color options, including some fades in certain areas, enabling you to go from subtle and reserved to Fantasia. You’ll be amazed at how many choices you’ll have to make.
Once you get the colors selected, you can also further customize your bat by having your name or nickname imprinted on it. You only get 9 characters, however. Not bad if your name is Sue Rolls but you’ll have some decisions to make if it’s Hyacynth Mickelweed. There are three font selections, from a script type of writing to a blockier style. But no matter what you put, at least there won’t be any more arguments with teammates should you happen to select all the same colors for your bat.
Now, it might be tempting for the whole team to get the same color combination, or you may want to select colors based on your current team. But these things tend to be moving targets. If you change teams, or your school team has a vastly different color scheme than your travel team, it might not work out so well. Just something to keep in mind.
Of course, good looks alone are no reason to select a bat. Ultimately it has to perform. Slugger’s press release says:
“Available in -11, -10, -9 and -8 weight drops, the LXT HYPER’s 100 percent composite design now features the all-new PBF Barrel Technology that doubles the sweet spot for unmatched power. Louisville Slugger has also improved the LXT HYPER’s patented TRU3 Dynamic Socket Connection, allowing for necessary movement between the barrel and handle. This maximizes barrel trampoline effect, while also eliminating negative vibration. The result is the absolute best possible feel when you bring the bat through the zone.”
Understand that all this wonderfulness doesn’t come cheap. The retail price is $479. But if you’re looking for a high-performance bat that lets you express your personality on the way to the plate as well as at it, and you can afford it, the LXT HYPER is definitely worth a look.
About that “hardly ever strikes out”
Last weekend I was watching a college fastpitch softball game on TV (surprise surprise) when one of the announcers started talking about how the current hitter rarely strikes out. This is one of those statements I’ve heard a number of times through the years, and while it seems to impress a lot of people I have to admit I’m not one of them. 
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of or in favor of striking out. But then, I’m not in favor of any type of out, and that’s what a strikeout is – an out.
You can make an argument that it’s better to put the ball in play because something still might happen. You can advance a baserunner, or maybe even get lucky with an error. And all that is true.
But if those things aren’t happening during your at bat then it really doesn’t matter whether the out is a strikeout, a popup, a ground ball or something else.
Here’s how I look at it. If you have a high batting average or OPS and low strikeouts, that’s impressive. But if you have a low batting average or OPS with low strikeouts, it’s not such a big deal. You may not be swinging and missing, but you’re not exactly crushing the ball either.
Not striking out can be accomplished simply by being very conservative with your swings. A slow, careful swing aimed at “just making contact” will help you avoid striking out. But it’s not exactly going to drive the ball into the outfield either.
Sure, you’ll manage a few flairs, a duck snort or two, maybe even a ground ball through a pulled-in infield. But you’re going to make it too easy for your opponents to get you out.
I’d rather see a hitter be aggressive, with an intention of hitting the ball hard, than laying back just trying not to strike out. Sure, you’ll miss a few. But the odds are a lot of good things will happen along the way. Better things, in fact.
In most games you only get a few swings at most. Be sure you’re taking advantage of every one of them. That way, if you’re ever on TV, the announcers will have more to say about the things you do than the things you don’t do.
Why it’s easier to destroy softball skills than build them
Sooner or later in your fastpitch softball coaching career you’re likely to run into this phenomenon: You spend months working with a player, helping her build her skills little by little, working through the kinks until it seems like the skills are locked in come easily to the player.
Then you hand her off to some other coach and in no time she’s struggling. All that hard work seemingly undone in just a few sessions. You wonder how could that possibly happen?
Actually, it’s easy to understand if you take it out of the coaching context and think about building something (a chair, a shed, a house, some crazy contraption to carry all the team equipment at tournaments) in the physical world.
Let’s take a chair. Not one of those slap-it-together Ikea chairs but one you build from raw wood. You carefully cut and/or carve the wood. You sand it, stain it, polish it. You put it together piece by piece, taking care that all the legs are level and every joint fits together tightly. It takes weeks, or even months, to get it all just so.
Then some knucklehead comes along, picks it up and smashes it against the wall because his favorite pro sports team choked in a big game and got eliminated from the playoffs. All that hard work destroyed in seconds.
The same thing happens to players. Complex skills such as pitching and hitting have a lot of moving parts, and they all need to work together in the proper sequence. Throw off just one part of – say insisting a hitter swing down on the ball and then standing there in an intimidating way until she does it – and the whole skill unravels. The player gets confused, loses confidence, and then she doesn’t perform at nearly the level she’s capable of.
Of course, once she’s not performing she gets benched so everyone loses. Especially the team that could’ve used the skills she walked in the door with.
This is something to keep in mind before messing with a player. Someone who has worked hard to get where she is right now is probably best off being left alone, especially if she is performing when it counts. It takes a long time to build those skills. But it just takes a few misguided ideas and a short amount of time to destroy them.
Product Review: Jugs Tee – It’s All About That Base
Batting tees are one of the most important tools a hitter can own. They’re great for working on swing mechanics, pitch locations and other techniques. They’re also great for getting in a few warm-up swings before the game.
There are all types of tees out there – all rubber, all plastic, a combination of the two. Lately, though, the most popular design has been a metal pipe-style with an inverted rubber cone on the top. You’ll typically find them in facilities with batting cages.
They’re not much to look at, and they often have a weight ring at the bottom of them to keep them from getting knocked over, but they get the job done.
The venerable Jugs Sports company is out to change all of that with their new professional style Jugs T. Retailing for $74.95, it improves on previous designs from other manufacturers in several ways, making it a great choice for facilities, coaches and individual hitters.
The first thing you’ll notice is how beautiful it looks. First-generation tee designs looked like they were built with steam fitting pipes and plywood from the local hardware store. The Jugs T appears to be made from highly polished aluminum with a solid metal base (more on the base in a minute). The bottom section is a deep, shiny blue, while the extension section is natural silver in color. You feel good just taking it out of the package.
It assembles in about 30 seconds – just screw the extension section into the base and you’re good to go. The rubber cone also feels thicker and more rigid than earlier tee models.
That comes in handy if you live up north like I do and leave the tee in the car during cold weather. With other tee designs if the cone is bent while it’s sitting in the trunk it takes a while before it holds a ball reliably.
Not the Jugs T. The thicker material bounces right back and is ready to go. I know – I tried it.
All of that is nice. But the real differentiator, in my opinion, is the base. It’s a solid metal plate instead of wood, and it is heavy – 10 lbs. according to the Jugs website. No need to put a 10 lb. barbell weight on this tee. In fact, the first couple of days I had it I kept handing it to people and telling them to feel the heft. It also has a pentagonal design that keeps it from going over the side if someone swings too low, and the entire base is coated in rubber so it won’t scuff gym floors.
Don’t worry about carting it around, however. The base also has a cutout that forms a convenient carrying handle. It’s easy to transport from cage to cage, or from the dugout to a practice area.
Another issue tees can sometimes develop is the inability to keep the ball at the desired height. You set the ball on it and the shaft starts to sink. So far that doesn’t seem like it will be a problem with this tee. It feels very solid when you raise and lower it, a good sign that it will continue to hold its ground even after repeated use. The adjustment range is a standard 23 inches to 46 inches – comparable to other tees I’ve used – making it ideal for your smallest players as well as your tallest ones.
Overall, like everything Jugs produces it’s a high-quality piece of equipment. If you’re looking for a professional style hitting tee that will stand up to tough use year after year, the Jugs T is a great choice.
Congratulations to Emma Bartz for signing with Northwestern
I am very pleased and excited to congratulate Emma Bartz on signing her National Letter of Intent today to play softball at Northwestern University next year. (I never like to post these things until they’re official and the ink is dry.)
Emma Bartz signs her NLI to play softball at Northwestern
Emma is not only an outstanding softball player but an outstanding human being, as evidence in this blog post from about a year ago. She is very kind and polite, and always has a smile on her face. It’s always nice when good things happen to good people.
We started working together almost by accident. She was going to start hitting lessons with someone else, but it just so happened a student of mine at the time, Amy Abel, was at her house and recommended she come and see me instead. How lucky for me!
The great thing about Emma is she gives 100% on every rep, as seen here recently. In fact, that’s been one of the challenges, learning a little plate discipline because she really likes to get after the pitches. While she is not very tall she is quite strong – no doubt in part due to her legacy as a cheerleader.
Closest I could come to Northwestern purple.
She’s also fast. Like lightning fast. Normally I would suggest a kid with her speed turn around and slap. But when I saw the power she had from the right side I thought that would be her best bet, and it turned out to be right.
Congratulations to Emma, and her parents Jean and Keith who raised an incredible daughter. I’m looking forward to watching Emma during her senior season in high school, and then at NU.
Another way to measure bat speed
Developing good bat speed is important to hitting. Because of its significance there are all kinds of ways of measuring it. 
You can use a radar gun. You can use an electronic swing analyzer. There are probably a couple of others that involve advanced technology.
And then there’s what’s depicted here. At the start of this session, this was a fully intact plastic chair. The way it looks now is the result of a line drive off the bat of Emma Bartz.
The chair was about 30 feet away. One second it was fine, the next split second it looked like this.
She hit it so hard that the chair didn’t even move. The ball just went straight on through.
Oh, and by the way, this was off a tee. I can only imagine what would’ve happened if you added the pitch velocity to it.
It was pretty cool to see. On the other hand, I also made sure to tell her the time-honored phrase: No chip-ins.
Drills for the sake of drills
Check out any fastpitch softball flyer or website offering instructional materials and you will find tons of books and DVDs focused on drills, drills, DRILLS! It almost seems like an arms race sometimes to see who knows the most drills.
Don’t get me wrong – drills can be very helpful. But like anything else they need to be used strategically.
Drills are only valuable when they answer an actual need (other than keeping some players occupied while you work with others). Here’s what I mean.
Take a hitting drill that focuses on extension after contact. Seems like a worthwhile way to spend your time. But if the player already has good extension after contact, it can actually be wasting time that would be better spent on another aspect that isn’t as strong.
The same goes for pitching drills focused on the arm circle. While it can always be a little better, players only have so much time to practice. That circle drill might have already hit the point of diminishing returns, where time spent increases sharply while actual gains don’t rise much at all.
The other issue with doing drills for the sake of drills is that softball skills typically require multiple combinations of movements, whereas drills are designed to isolate movements. As such, drills are great for working on isolated issues.
Sooner or later, however, those individual pieces need to be rolled back into the full skill. Spend too much time on the drills and you won’t have enough time to develop the actual skill that’s required. Sort of like spending the bulk of your time cleaning your boat instead of taking it out on the water.
Once the player has learned the basics, my recommendation is to spend as much time as possible practicing the full skill, end-to-end, and then use drills to address problems you’ve identified within them. As opposed to just running through a set of drills because you saw them on the DVD.
It will be a much more efficient use of time, and will help you turn out more game-ready players.
Like Riding A Bike
People often use the phrase “it’s like riding a bike” To refer to how easy it is to pick up a skill again when you’ve been away from it for a while. When it comes to softball training, however, there’s another use.
Players will often get impatient with themselves when they don’t pick up a skill right away. Pitchers will be wild when trying a new pitch). Hitters will swing and miss while working on improving their swings, or hit a popup or soft dribbler. Catchers will go for a block only to have the ball go between their legs. Lots of different things can happen.
When they do, I will often ask if they can ride a bike. I have yet to run into one who can’t. I’ll ask them if they have to think about how to ride a bike. They always respond no.
Then I ask them if it was always that way. What happened when they first took off the training wheels? Usually mom or dad held onto the seat and ran behind them until they were ready to take a few tentative pedals on their own.
Eventually, though, they figured it out. And once they did, they probably never gave it much thought again.
The same goes for softball skills. At first they can be difficult, and require a lot of thought (as well as a lot of trial and error). The success rate may be fairly low. But the more they do it, and really go after it, the less they will have to think (or worry) about it.
It’s a thought that seems to resonate. They know there were scraped knees and elbows at first on the bike, but today the only remarkable thing would be if they fell off.
When players get frustrated, remind them of their experience riding a bike. It might help them get back on track.
How do you help players learn patience while they’re learning a new skill? Any tips or tricks you’ve found helps them understand?
ASA finally eliminates the helmet chin strap
In case you haven’t already heard, the Amateur Softball Association has finally eliminated the rule requiring fastpitch softball players to use a chin strap on their helmets at all levels of Junior Olympic play. If you’re not up on their lingo that basically means everything from 18U on down. The new rule takes effect January 1, 2016.
All I can say is it’s about time. Someone from ASA must have finally gone out to a game or two and seen how silly the rule was. While there probably were a few, I can’t recall ever seeing any player in the last few years who had the chin strap snugged up on her chin in a manner that would keep her helmet on.
Most times, they were sagging well below the chin line, like a bunting on the Fourth of July. If the helmet came off, the player was probably in more danger of being choked by the chin strap than being hit in the head with an errant throw.
Probably wouldn’t hurt to keep the chin strap in your bag just in case you run into a tournament or organization that still requires them. But it’s good that this rule, at least, has finally caught up to reality.
By the way, ASA is also now allowing hitters to use on-deck hitters to use either on-deck circle. That’s great, because it’s always been a safety issue.
Maybe not in Oklahoma City or other areas where big tournaments are held. They have plenty of distance between the on-deck hitter and the plate.
But in community ballparks all across the US, and I’m sure other countries as well, often times the next hitter up is about 10-15 feet away from getting slammed with a foul ball.
Many tournaments already allowed it anyway as a local rule. But now it’s official – on-deck hitters can warm up behind the current batter, no matter which bench their team is occupying.
Glad to see both of these rules enacted, even if it should’ve happened a long time ago. Better late than never.
Helping young hitters with a fear of the ball
Ran into this issue with a 9 year old I recently started working with. She was pretty raw in her fastpitch hitting mechanics when we first started, but with some good tee work (and practice) she was coming along.
Unfortunately, we were started working together at the beginning of the season so there was some urgency to get her game-ready. Which meant moving to front toss to give her some experience with a ball coming at her.
Once we started with that, it became obvious she had some fear of getting hit by the ball since her first move would be to step away and sort of lean away from the pitch. That makes it tough to swing effectively.
(In her defense, given what I’ve heard about the caliber of pitching she’s been facing it’s understandable. Lots of, shall we say, randomly thrown pitches.)
Still, that’s not good. So I started thinking about how to help get her re-focused on attacking the ball rather than being attacked by it. The weather helped me come up with a good answer.
It had rained most of the day when we were getting together for a lesson, so we were stuck using the outfield for front toss. It was pretty soggy out there too, so I thought it might be better to pitch Whiffle balls at her. I figured it would give her less to fear from the pitches as well as prevent my regular softballs from getting waterlogged.
It worked well, and she hit with enthusiasm as I’ve reported previously. She was actually having fun, and seeing that she could hit.
The next step was to mix in the Whiffles with regular softballs at our next lesson. I told her I would throw a Whiffle, then a regular ball, which is what I did. At first she was a little tentative on the regular softballs, but the longer we alternated the more confident she grew.
So much so, in fact, that she nearly took my head off with a couple of line drives with the regular balls, and did nail me in the thigh with one. I hadn’t bothered to set up my Jugs protective screen – I mean, really, she’s nine and just learning to hit. I can handle that, right? But you can bet the next time I met with her the screen was there.
Speaking of the next time, that session was all regular balls. I’m happy to report that the fear was gone (along with the stepping out), replaced by a girl who was looking to do some damage. Hopefully that will carry over into her games too. If it does, I hope that little pitcher she’s facing is wearing a mask.
If you’re working with a hitter who is uncomfortable in the box and afraid of getting hit, give this a try. If you can replace that defensive mindset with one where she is focused on taking aggressive swings it can do wonders.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 