Get Off Planet Perfect

Table of Contents

• Tips for More Strikeouts

• Get Off Planet Perfect

Total Reading Time: 4 minutes

This week we’re looking into How to Get More Strikeouts and the Danger of Trying to Be Perfect. Let’s go!

I’d love to have you join our community of curious pitching coaches!

Tips for More Strikeouts

It’s important to know, that depending on how fasst your pitcher is, batters must start their swing at least 9 feet from homeplate.

This means they’re in the prediction business. Hitters are always predicting things like where a pitch will end up, when it will end up there and often, to a greater extent, what pitch they’re likely to see.

While hitters can try and anticipate a pitcher’s tendencies, but they still have to wait until the pitch is in flight to actually start their predicition, not to mention their swing.

As pitching coaches, the more we take advantage of this prediction and manipulate it, the more we stay in charge. We know what we’re throwing and where we’re throwing it - the hitter is only predicting and guessing.

Manipulation this prediction is a huge key to striking out a hitter.

Let’s look at some things to keep in mind when trying to craft a strikeout:

• The longer a pitch stays in a tunnel and ends up outside that tunnel the more likely the hitter misses it. (As long as the original flight path was heading into the zone).

• When a pitches tunnel is too predictable too early, it either triggers a auto-take (if it immediately looks outside the strikezone) or a swing (if it looks inside the strikezone).

• Foulballs get hitters timing in a certain direction – take advantage of that.

• Are you using the middle strike to setup your out?

• Your main pitch type / location is where hitters will be looking. Try to steal strikes early in the count in a totally different location (via fastball is that’s all you can in that zoe).

• 0-2 pitches that aren’t in the zone trigger the hitter to take, creating a non-competitive pitch, an auto-take and adding to the pitch count.

• Balls don’t move a hitter’s timing like they used to.

• If you go with the out pitch too early in the count you can run out of options and flip the advantage to the hitter.

• So know where the out lies for this specific hitter so you don’t box yourself into a corner. Know where you’re going before you start.

Get Off Planet Perfect

It’s really popular right now for pitchers (all players really) to want to be perfect. They’ll throw a really good pitch and be mad about it because “it wasn’t perfect”. Or they’ll be trying really hard when they’re injured, or don’t feel good and get frustrated because they’re not perfect.

Perfect is the enemy of Great!

I read a recent post that drove home the irrelevance of “perfect” and the need to simply “Do Your Frickin Best”:

• Michael Jordan’s “Flu” Game - he’s sick, exhausted, off his game, but manages to score when needed and help his team to victory in the NBA finals.

• Tom Brady’s Super Bowl LI - his team was down 28-3 with only 17 minutes left in the game. He’s clearly not sharpt but keeps trying to execute and rallies his team to win in overtime. He’s named MVP.

• Naomi Osaka’s 2020 US Open - she was trailing by a set and a break and clearly being dominated by the world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka. Osaka keeps competiting and wins 6 of the last 7 games and becomes US Open Champion.

• AND THE BEST SOFTBALL EXAMPLE: Odicci Alexander’s 2021 Women’s College World Series - her unknown and unranked James Madison team has made the World Series only to draw the No.1 seeded Oklahoma Sooners in round 1. On top of that, their bus gets stuck in traffic so it’s clear they won’t make it to the stadium in time to warm up, so Oddici has to warm up in the aisle on the bus, while it’s moving! They pull into the stadium as the National Anthem is playing and have to sprint on to the field to play OU in OKC at the WCWS. It’s not perfect - they win 4-3 in extra innings!!

These are examples of amazing performances, yet all of them would have been shut down if the athlete only judgeed him or herself on being “perfect”. Nobody would grade these performances as perfect, and yet they are something much more important. They are all:

• Successful

• Historic

• Heroic

In a word, they are GREAT.

Yet they aren’t perfect. In fact, they have all gone down in history for that very fact - because they weren’t perfect performances but they overcame anyway! We are all searching for heros. Heros are those people who do what we wish we could do. They seem like us, flawed and normal, and yet they seem to do very un-normal-like things. We don’t like our heros because they’re perfect, we love them because they aren’t.

Perfect is the enemy of great. Perfect is a bar that keeps moving just out of our reach. It’s a game you just can’t throw. It’s a concept that we’ve come to accept as our goal for some insane and ridiculous reason.

Giving Our Best is far more possible, reasonable and more importantly, obtainable.

Giving our Best is something we can control, whether we’re sick, down by a million, being dominated at the time or stuck in traffic for the biggest game of our lives!!

Going for “perfect” sounds good, like you really care. When in reality, it’s an excuse to shut it down when things aren’t going your way because, well. you’re not “perfect.”

It’s also a goal that only leads to so much negative judgement. As in “I suck because that wasn’t perfect.”

Jump off Planet Perfect and simply Do Your Best! Every Play. Every Pitch. Every Practice. Every Exam. Every Day in Life…simply do your best and life will become much more enjoyable, possible, and amazing!

I hope you enjoyed today’s Curveball Chronicles.

See You Next Week!