Assume you have a very young, inexperienced HS team that has lots of problems. The pitching has an overall strike percentage of 51.9 and 1st pitch strike percentage of 49. In 58 innings they’ve walked 54, hit 20, had 35 wild pitches, and given up 47 SBs in 52 attempts.
Obviously there’s more than 1 problem, and obviously each pitcher has different problems or different degrees of the same problem. Right now the games are all little more than scrimmage games, so the only thing really being played for is experience and the opportunity to get better. Here’s my question.
Why continue messing with signals and trying to hit spots that aren’t going to be hit? Why not just have the pitchers try to throw the ball right down the middle? That way the “pace” of the game will get a little faster, there’s no thinking about how to execute a certain pitch or worries about whether a pitch or location is the right one, even though the chances are pretty slim either one will be achieved.
Yes, I understand there are certain things a good PC can do to help this pitching staff, but the truth is we don’t have a good PC, and even if we did, while one practice a week will of course help, it isn’t gonna help a whole lot. My thinking is, get rid of as many of the ancillary BS things that pitchers think about, and boil it all down to one simple thing. “Throw the ball over the plate and make the batters hit their way on!”
Ordinarily that’s not something I’d suggest with much sincerity, but ordinarily I’ve never seen the staff as a whole having so much difficulty. Also, I’ve been around the block a whole lot of times and ask a lot of people of varying abilities how to teach a pitcher control, but no one seems to care. The overriding thought is, “Learn to throw it hard and worry about control later on.” That may be an ok philosophy for little kids, but now we’re talking about HS aged kids who very likely don’t have any more than 2 years at most before the game drives them out.