Total Reading Time: 6 minutes

Happy Monday, and it’s already JUNE! It’s the week we crown a National Champion, and what a WCWS it’s been so far!! Packed with suspense, skill and crazy plays off the charts!

In this issue we’ll look at how the Rule of 68 can help us pitch and call better games, along with my favorite meditation app to help relieve the post-season crazies.

Let’s Go!

Not a subscriber, let’s solve that…

How the Rule of 68 Impacts Your Pitchers

In a recent post on X by former MLB coach Jerrry Weinstein (@JWonCATCHING), he talks about a study done by Major League Baseball (over 500,00 innings) on the scoring impact of the leadoff batter:

• When the leadoff hitter GETS ON base, the team scores at least 1 run 37.8% of the time.

• When the leadoff hitter DOES NOT get on base, the chance of scoring that inning drops to around 19%.

Nothing mindboggling there.

But what’s more important for our mindsets as pitch callers, and our pitcher’s courage to throw their movement into the zone, is the “Rule of 68”:

• 68% of the time a fair ball is an out!!!

Not a double, not a homerun - an OUT!! When Fall comes let’s all start getting our pitchers (and ourselves) to remember this, and to stop avoiding letting the ball get hit.

Give Yourself a Break with The Smiling Mind

No matter how your season ended, we’ve all got the post-season crazies.

Recently I’ve started meditating to help with some of own life’s anxiety. It’s the first time I’ve done this, I guess because I didn’t know how to start.

But I found a great app that focuses on all types of mental needs from relaxation, to breathing to being more present to compassion to releaving tension and more. All have varying lengths of meditations and are super easy to do. And it’s free!

They say they’re a mental wellbeing app focused on helping minds thrive.

Plus, it’s Australian so the voices are super cool and relaxing to me. Check it out, I’m sure it’ll help you:

A Performance Newsletter I Like

The goal of this newsletter is to share cool things with other curious pitching coaches, and one of those “things” is a newsletter called The Growth Equation. Its written by two PhD’s who’ve written some great books (Peak Performance, Win the Inside Game, Do Hard Things)…

Their latest issue was particularly good - check it out: https://thegrowtheq.com/forget-too-cool-to-care-aim-to-be-great/

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 grace.

Have a Great week!