Today, we’re going to go over a handful of baseball pitching tips that will help your pitcher become the best pitcher he can be.
The thing that I like to stress more than anything is that it’s important for us to help these young guys be ready for their transition as they get older. If a pitcher learns how to do this now, then when he turns 13, he will be one of the leaders that can go out and do this the way it should be done. We lose too many guys because they become intimidated from pitching from a stretch.
The Importance of Pausing Before the Pitch
You must understand: You’ve got to work from the stretch. No matter how many times you go to a ball game, inevitably you’re going to have to throw from the stretch position. So every pitch you throw from a wind-up, throw from the stretch.
And it also reminds me that when my pitcher’s in a stretch position, he comes set. What we need to do is we need to have a variance of time. What he’s going to say to his self is 1001, then he’s going to throw home.
The next time, to keep the runner in check, how about he goes for two seconds? Come set. 1001, 1002. Now he throws. He’s messing up the runner’s timing over there.
We don’t want to get in and become a creature of habit. Because as soon as I come set in a crucial point in a game, the runner’s going on first movement and then we can’t do anything about it and we’re basically giving him a bag. So we’ve got to interrupt his timing as well as the hitter’s.
Stepping Off to Keep the Runner in Check
Here’s another baseball pitching tip to keep in mind. Sometimes a good movement to keep him in check is just to step off. The pitcher comes set and then just steps off for the heck of it.
Once he steps off, we don’t want to make a throw over because he knows we’re not going anywhere.
No Locked Legs!
Even if the pitcher comes parallel and he’s set, and say both legs are locked out, what’s going to happen is as soon as he gets ready to go home, he’s got to break the back leg down to be able to get the front leg up and go home.
What we want to do is guard against having your legs locked out is to have a slight bend in them.
If he starts out with an open stance, he’s got a better look at the runner.
What we want to try to do is confuse the runner at first base and make sure that we dictate that he is in our control. That he does not know when we’re coming over. We want to keep him off balance. So we’re going to work on going up, hands coming down, and hands coming set so we can work with the runner.
Long Arm Action
When we decide we’re going to go for our total pick-off move, we’ll set him up with the long arm action. We’re going to try to bait him and see if we can get the runner to get off. And then once we get ready for the kill, we’re just going to pivot, get the arm up, make a snap throw, and if it’s nice and accurate we’re going to get him.
Throwing the Change-Up
You’ve got to understand that hitting is timing; pitching is interrupting timing. To keep a hitter honest, we’ve got to work on our off-speed pitch.
The best pitch in baseball is still the fastball; however, we’ve got to throw the change-up. We’ve got to make them stay back and wait on us. If we don’t, they’ll lock and load on us every time.
To throw the circle change-up, your pitcher will get the grip a little bit deeper in the palm. When he throws this change-up, basically the mechanics are the same. He’s going to take just a tad longer stride.
He’s going to drag the back foot a little bit. That’s going to enable him to slow the arm down and make the pitch die at the plate.
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