Name Your Brain - and - A Trick to Help Control

Total Reading Time: 5 minutes

Today we’ll look at a very creative way to help your pitchers manage their self-talk along with a trick to help command.

Let’s go!

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Name Your Brain

We’ve all got ‘em. Those thoughts and voices in our head that speak to us and act like both friend and foe.

This internal dialog can either be helpful or harmful, loud or soft, occasional or non-stop.

All of our pitchers have this internal noise machine in some form dive-bombing their brains and you’ve no-doubt tried everything you can to help them control these thoughts. Probably things like “think positive”, “just focus”, “don’t think about it”, all to no avail.

Recently on one of our Pitching Zooms Sam Korn, Head Coach at University of Wisconsin La Crosse, mentioned a tactic that she’s used with great success - and I thought it was brilliant.

She has each pitcher Name Their Brain.

In other words, give this internal voice-machine a name. One pitcher called hers “Becky”. While this might not seem like a life-changing tip, it allowed this particular pitcher to have a conversation with her internal thoughts in almost a comedic, detached way.

Such as “get it together Becky”, or “Not now Becky, I’m trying to pitch”.

It’s so brilliant because by simply naming your brain it makes it much easier not to judge yourself for these thoughts, because after all, it’s “Becky” that’s saying all these things, not you.

This also allows you as the coach (if the pitcher is willing to share) to talk about “Becky” such as, “Hayden, tell Becky we don’t need her right now because we’ll be getting this hitter out without her.”

Give it a try, and let me know how it goes.

Here’s a Trick to Help Control

Control is a HUGE issue with pitchers. Maybe it’s because of the shrinking strike zone, the lack of accountability during bullpens, a fear of the hitter, or using pitches they don’t command yet. Whatever the reason, not having control is a game-breaker.

First, let’s look at some ways we disrupt control without even knowing it.

It’s common that we break the whole strike zone up into smaller parts to better designate exactly where we want the pitch to go. Typically having either a 4 or a 6 zone target like this:

Then to entice a chase, or to pitch around a good hitter, we usually add more zones like 1 ball off (+1 in blue) and 2 balls off (+2 in red). Which now makes our previous 4 or 6 zones look like this:

That’s a LOT of specificity we expect our pitchers to have, and yet we already know they don’t have great control. This is the part where I think we add to their lack of control - we ask them to be so exact knowing they have no chance of that.

We do this out of good intentions. Since we scout our brains out we know SO MUCH about each hitter. We can look at the zones below and see exactly where each hitter’s strengths and weaknesses are, where we have to pitch them and where we absolutely MUST avoid.

Combine all of this together and we end up calling locations for our pitchers that are so small and so exact that they have NO CHANCE of ever hitting them consistently. NONE!

When this happens you’ve got two choices:

1. Keep losing your mind when your pitchers keep missing their locations, or

2. Simplify the locations

This next part might seem over-simplified but trust me, in a lot of cases that’s exactly what our pitchers need. To simplify, eliminate all those zones and instead, split the zone in half - either IN and OUT, or UP and DOWN:

This allows your pitcher to focus on getting her Riseball on the Upper Half or her Dropball on the Lower Half. Her Curveball on the Outer Half and the Fastball or Screwball on the Inner Half.

The easier something is to hit, the more likely they’ll hit it.

While this might not be something that all of your pitchers need, I’ll bet it will definitely help somebody on your staff.

I hope you enjoyed today’s Curveball Chronicles Issue.

Be sure to check out PitchingCoachCentral.com for all past issues as well as upcoming news on this year’s Pitching Summit!

See You Next Week!