Blog Archives
Fastpitch Pitching Advice from Taylor Swift
This week’s topic goes hand-in-hand with last week’s blog post about the art of pitch calling. If you haven’t read that one yet I suggest you do; it’s brilliant.
All too often these days it seems like fastpitch pitchers are treated like a vending machine. Someone puts a pitch call in and pitchers are expected to spit it out with zero thought involved.
To me, and I think to most pitching coaches (PCs chime in here in the comments) that is absolutely the wrong approach. Instead, pitchers need to be playing along in their heads, thinking about what that hitter looks like, what’s worked on her in the past (if she’s faced her before), what pitches are working today (and how well), and what she thinks ought to be the next pitch she throws.
Then, if the pitch call lines up with what she’s thinking (more or less), she throws it. If it doesn’t, she takes the advice of the ubiquitous Ms. Swift to:
I know it can be difficult. Sometimes nigh on impossible if the pitcher has a coach who believes in his/her own omniscience when it comes to pitch calling, whether that opinion is justified of not.
But if the opportunity is there the pitcher really ought to be the final deciding factor on which pitch gets thrown next. Just like a pilot is the ultimate decision-maker when the plane is in the air.
After all, it’s the pitcher who is going to have to live with the consequences of her pitch.
Of course, in order to do that effectively someone has to train the pitcher on how to set up a hitter and keep her off balance. In other words, how to make decisions on which pitches work best in which situations.
I like to do this during lessons. Team coaches can do it during bullpens. Here’s how.
Select a type of hitter and a situation. For example, no one on, no one out, left slapper leading off.
Then ask the pitcher which pitch she wants to throw. If she’s not sure where to start, guide her with some parameters such as whether the slapper is experienced or a newly converted righty, whether she runs toward the pitcher or toward first base as she comes out, if she stands tall or squats down, how good the defense is behind her, etc.
You can also give some general hints, such as slapping is about timing and slapper are usually trying to put the ball on the ground between shortstop and third. All of that will factor into which pitch to throw.
The pitcher then makes the call. If it’s a good one, she throws it and the outcome (ball or strike) leads into the next pitch call. If the pitch decision isn’t so good, the coach talks it through with the pitcher a little more to help guide her.
With some regular training the pitcher can become smarter, and thus an active participant in the pitch calling decision rather than just a robot programmed to follow directions.
I understand that it’s difficult for a player to feel confident enough in her own decisions to try to overrule a coach by shaking off a pitch. Doubly if the coach is a parent or teacher or just someone who has a more authoritarian approach to their coaching.
But it’s a skill worth learning. And not just for softball.
There’s a pretty good chance that at some point in her life, that pitcher will face a non-softball decision that involves some risk, or perhaps even a moral dilemma. The easy thing to do will be to just follow along with whatever the person in charge says.
But the easy thing isn’t always the right thing. Gaining experience in being part of the decision process, and standing up for herself when she feels strongly another way, will help her avoid much more serious issues later in life than whether a particular hitter got on base in that at bat.
Again, I know it isn’t easy. But it’s worth learning.
Knowing when to shake off a pitch call, and having the confidence to actually do it, is an important of growing as a player, and growing up.
Don’t just be a pitching vending machine. When pitchers become an active part of the pitch calling decision they’ll find they have more success – and more fun.
Vending machine photo by Jenna Hamra on Pexels.com
Creating Intelligent Players, Not Robots
Photo by Lenin Estrada on Pexels.com
I once worked with a woman, an older lady we’ll call Katherine, who was hired to be a sort of all-around office assistant. The idea was if you needed a package FedExed, or some repetitive data entered into a spreadsheet, or other time-consuming but not exactly brain-taxing help, you could hand it off to her and she would take care of it.
The problem was Katherine was so timid and afraid of making a mistake, she would ask whoever gave her the assignment to sit with her while she did it to make sure she did it correctly. While you can appreciate her desire to get it right, you can probably also see the flaw in this approach.
If not, it’s this: the whole purpose of her job was for Katherine to take the burden of tedious work off of me and others so we could move on to other, more higher-value assignments. If we were going to sit there while she did it then there was no point in giving it to her because, quite frankly, we could do it better and faster than she could. It’s just not what the company wanted us spending our time on.
So what does all this have to do with fastpitch softball? A lot of times players are like Katherine. They become so reliant on coaches telling them what to do that they quit thinking and learning.
In other words, rather than becoming independent and intelligent, they become more like robots, dutifully doing whatever they’re told to do in practice without understanding the reasoning or strategy behind it. This goes double, by the way, if they have a coach who is constantly in their faces screaming any time they make a mistake, but it’s not exclusive to that scenario.
Then when game time comes and they need to make a quick decision (which is pretty much any time the ball is in play) or correct a problem in their mechanics they’re unprepared to do so. Instead, they get more of the deer in headlights look.
Remember the old computer axiom garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). If you program players like robots they will respond like robots.
Which means they will continue to do the same thing over and over, whether it works or not, because that’s what they’ve been told to do. Anyone who has a watched a Roomba frantically moving back and forth for 10 minutes when it gets stuck under a chair or in a corner knows what I’m talking about.
It isn’t enough to tell players what to do. You also need to give them some context and reasoning behind why they’re doing it so if what they’re doing isn’t working they can think their way out of the situation.
This can be as simple as asking questions. For example, when I’m in a pitching lesson and a pitcher throws three fastballs in the dirt in the right-handed batter’s box, unless she’s new I often won’t tell her how to fix it. Instead I will ask, “What usually causes your pitch to go low and in the dirt?” and she will answer “I’m releasing behind my hip.”
I will then suggest she try fixing that. She does, and she’s back to throwing strikes. Miracle of miracles!
Or one of my favorite questions to ask players who are struggling mechanically, especially the older ones I’ve worked with for a while, is “What would I tell you if I were here right now?” They stop and think, give me an answer (almost always the correct one) and I say ok, try that.
When it works I point out that she didn’t need me to fix the problem. She did all of that on her own – I didn’t give her a single clue. All I did was ask her to tap into the knowledge she already had – in other words, think! – instead of mindlessly going through the motions.
(As a side note, I had a high school-age pitcher this week tell me that “What would Coach Ken tell me if he was here?” is exactly what she thinks about when her mechanics break down. How cool is that?)
This is relatively easy to do for mechanical issues, especially for pitchers and hitters. They have some time to reflect and make corrections, and they know they’re going to have to throw another pitch or swing the bat again.
It’s a little tougher for defensive players and base runners because their skills are largely reactive. If they make a physical or mental mistake that may be the only play like that they have all game. Or even all week or all tournament.
In this case, what’s important is that they learn to think and understand so they don’t continue making the same mistake every time the situation arises, such as a runner on third who continually stands 10 feet off the base on a fly ball to medium left with less than two outs instead of tagging up automatically. Or a fielder who doesn’t set her feet before she throws and sails the ball into the parking lot.
The player who learns to think will understand she did something wrong and make a mental note to avoid having it happen again. The player who always waits for a coach to tell her what she did wrong will likely never really internalize the information – which means there’s a high probability she’s going to do it again.
Don’t just tell your players what to do. Instead, insist they learn what to do and why. Help them gain a better understanding of their skills, and the game, and both you and they will be far more successful.
Life in the Fastpitch Lane 