Total Reading Time: 6 minutes

Happy Monday! This week we’re looking at 2 great stats to help determine your Ps effectiveness along with a super simple and powerful pitching chart. Oh, and we’ve got a cool Zoom coming up!

So Let’s Go!

Table of Contents

• A Powerful Pitching Chart

• 2 Zooms Down - 1 to Go!

• 2 Great Pitching Stats for Fall Ball & Recruiting

A Powerful Pitching Chart

Charting is something we all do and something that can not only get complicated, but often we don’t do anything with it all.

Years ago I learned an amazingly simple and visually powerful pitching chart from Missy Lombardi - now Head Coach at Oregon - and I still love it today. We call it Above the Line because the goal for a pitcher is to keep her dots “above the line”.

First, let’s look at the chart:

The concept is simple:

• Strikes go UP

• Balls go Down

You can go crazy and make it as complicated as you want to, but the whole point is to keep it simple so you, and your pitcher can get a quick look at how much your pitcher is staying ahead of the hitters.

A quick glimpse at this chart and you can see that this pitcher mostly stays “above the line”, and when she does, she dominates the hitter.

Here’s a Blank Above the Line Chart that you can print out if you need it.

2 Zooms Down - 1 to Go!

Last night we watched as Megan Rhodes Smith (Tennessee) schooled us on a Pitcher’s Mental Game. So many great nuggets that can be immediately applied to help our pitchers thrive mentally.

Next up in our Zoom Series is National Champion, Patti Ruth Taylor from Texas showing us how she plans and manages her bullpens. The date for that is TBD - but you’ll get advanced notice!

REMINDER FOR ZOOM MEMBERS: Recordings available for all Zoom Members

2 Great Pitching Stats for Fall Ball & Recruiting

Fall is a great time to make tweaks and advancements with your pitchers. We tackle things like pitch design, pitch movement, cleanup any issues with their motions and track progress.

Tracking and measuring progress is vital in order to see if what you’re doing is working and if progress is really happening.

During your fall ball games, here are 2 great stats to start tracking your pitchers effectiveness:

• Called Strikes + Whiffs %

• Early & Ahead %

(1) Early + Ahead Percentage

While this is a re-release from an article I wrote a while back, I feel like now’s a great time to revisit this stat as we all head deeper into our Fall ball games.

Early & Ahead Percentage is a great way to help your walk rate drop and focus on throwing your pitches into the zone.

(2) Called Strikes + Whiffs Percentage

This is a relatively simple stat (at least to configure) that determines a pitcher’s effectiveness to: Get a Hitter to Freeze on a Pitch, or getting her to Swing and Miss.

Luck, bad defense and bloop singles don’t factor in or impact this stat.

What I like about this stat is that it doesn’t need a lot of data to determine a pitchers effectiveness - you can use it to look clearly at 1 outing. Plus, the amount of innings a pitcher throws isn’t a factor in the stat, so it works with both openers, bridge pitchers and closers.

To know where your pitchers rank, based on their CSW% here’s a measuring stick from MLB pitchers. Once you start getting your data, please share it with me so we can create our own college softball CSW% ranking chart.

CSW% is a GREAT stat to use when looking at pitchers in the portal, or sitting at a travelball game. Grading pitchers out by their CSW% per pitch-type lets you see which pitches are effective and need to be thrown more.

Here’s a great video from Simple Sabermetrics detailing the CSW%:

Thanks for reading this week’s Curveball Chronicles. I hope it helped give you some insight to help your pitchers, and to give yourself some encouragement, knowledge and grace.

Go make this a Great week!

Missed some previous issues? Don’t worry, I’ve got them all on my website: https://pitchingcoachcentral.com/curveball-newsletter/