Total Reading Time: 7 minutes

Happy Monday and welcome to the Fall! It’s time for most of us to get back to school and back to our teams, so let’s talk about how to simplify and prioritize any changes we make with our pitchers. As well as learning an amazingly powerful analogy from the world’s tallest trees.

So Let’s Go!

Simplify & Prioritize in the Fall

As most of us get ready to head into Fall and meet our team for the first time, we can’t avoid being excited. Too often, this excitement gets carried away and leads to changing our pitchers to mold them into our ideal image.

Instead of making changes for changes sake, I suggest you look at your pitchers through the lens of Simplifying and Prioritizing.

Simplifying can feel like a scary thing when it comes to pitching. We commonly make the mistake of thinking that because pitching is super hard, that it has to also be super complicated.

Below you can see my view of how pitching is ultimately a simple skill (versus complex) that’s performed in a very hard environment:

Let’s consider another example that describes this concept of simple vs hard - the slam dunk. The act of dunking a basketball is pretty simple; jump up, reach above the rim and shove the ball through. But, because the parts are simple doesn’t mean it’s easy. In fact, it’s really hard.

And yet, we don’t tend to make dunking more complicated just because it’s hard. But we do this all the time with pitching. All the time!

If you need one more example about the simplicity of pitching, check out this video overlaying the overhand and the underhand motion:

In pitching, We Create Power in the beginning, We Prepare for the Release in the middle and We Release the ball when we let go. When we boil it down it really is that simple.

If you keep this simplicity in mind, then Prioritizing what adjustments need to be made in the Fall becomes much easier.

A simple way to prioritize what adjustments need to be made is to:

• Make sure you watch them pitch a lot before doing anything. This helps eliminate the outlier pitches as well as giving you a familiarity to their motion.!

• Start with the BALL! The only reason we pitch is to throw the ball. Ultimately to dominate the batter with the ball. Not to have the best mechanics. The ball will talk to you so watch it! Is it going RIGHT, or is HER RELEASE SLOWER THAN HER PHYSICAL STRENGTH looks like it should? Is it going UP constantly, or DOWN?? The ball can only go where our hand tells it to go at the release - so a control problem is a release issue. Investigate with Rapsodo or your iPhone (or whatever technology you have access to).

• Once you notice something - like the ball is constantly going up above the zone - watch until you can see the cause for what you’re seeing. Remember that the ball always goes where and how the hand tells it to, so use some technology to investigate the hand at release.

• Know that the answer to this issue lies before the problem. So in the case of the issue at Release it’s due to an incorrect hand position in the Preparation phase.

• And be sure to explain and show the pitcher why you’re making the adjustment and what’s causing it.

Adjustments take time, commitment and partnership, so limit the number you make, work with your pitcher to create the trustful partnership that will allow her to commit to the change. And lastly, changes take time - so be patient.

Staff Lessons from the World’s Tallest Trees

I know it’s weird to talk about trees in a pitching newsletter never mind thinking they could help our pitchers. But, I found it super helpful in creating a cohesive and supportive culture within the bullpen between our pitchers and catchers - and as we all know, doing so is vital to our team’s success.

Bear with me. One day in the bullpen, watching how hard our catchers were working and how far they’d come in developing their skills to help our pitchers achieve their specific goals - it hit me!

But first, let’s back up a bit. Before I tell you exactly what hit me I need to share something I learned about the world’s biggest tree - the mighty Redwood Tree.

Growing up in California I was very familiar with these giants. In fact, one year we drove through one on a family vacation, which was mind-blowingly cool as a kid.

Quick background - Giant Redwood Trees are the largest trees on earth. They can grow up to over 370 feet tall and tower over a human. To give you an idea how big that is check out the picture below - this is a Giant Sequoia Tree - the second largest tree on the planet! The Giant Redwoods are larger than this!!

OK, one more important fact. While these Redwood trees are almost 400 feet tall, their roots typically only reach 6 to 12 feet deep! So how could they possibly hold up these gigantic trees only going down about 10 feet?

The secret is their strength lies in how they intertwine their roots with their neighboring trees, creating an incredibly strong web of roots. Strong enough to hold up the tallest trees on earth!

I mention all of this because building a cohesive and supportive culture within the bullpen between our pitchers and catchers involves a very visible group (the pitchers) and a very invisible group (the catchers).

Now, flash back to my day in the bullpen watching our catchers work so hard to help our pitchers shine - and the analogy hit me: Catchers are the invisible strength of any good pitching staff. They allow their pitchers to shine while remaining basically out of sight.

Just the way the roots of the Giant Redwoods are completely invisible to people and yet they hold up the tallest trees on earth, allowing them to be the stars of the show! In fact, as large as these Redwoods are, they never blow over in the wind, due to the incredible strength of their interwoven root system!

On that bullpen day, I gathered all the P’s and C’s together and shared this analogy - and they LOVED it! In fact they adopted it to become their cheer when they’d come together at the end of a bullpen. They’d all put their hands together in the circle and when they broke, the catchers would say “roots” moving their hands down while the pitchers said “trees” moving their hands up.

I know this sounds corny, but it really resonated with the catchers to allow them to be recognized for their hidden strength in making our very visible pitching staff successful.

To make it even cornier - I drew the following picture of a Redwood Tree and it’s Roots and put it on the end-of-the-year personalized canvases I gave each pitcher and catcher.

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/