During CASon's fall ball game this weekend he was consistently up in the zone in his first inning of work against a strong hitting team and was lucky to get out of the inning with allowing only 1 run on no hits. The way he was missing was typical of a pitcher opening early or a pitcher not finishing. His fall ball coach, a current minor league pitcher, got with him between innings and told him to stride more closed during his warm ups before the next inning. Problem is that CASon's stride is just fine. He works off the left side of the mound and that can give the appearance of striding open. He pretty obviously tried to incorporate the closed stride during warmups and all it did was block him up so his arm couldn't get through. He struggled through his second inning despite a first pitch of the inning pop up in front of the plate that nobody went after, but finally with two outs got one down in the zone to a good hitter who launched it. He wasn't throwing a lot of strikes being up in the zone but the pitches were effective when they did get over the plate as they were simply popping them up. IMO, he was simply overthrowing a bit working at 83-84 when his working velocity should be around 81-83 for best location.
I had to bite my tongue while the coach was telling him to change his mechanics between innings. My advice to him would have been to take a little bit off his pitches and find low in the strike zone during warm ups with no talk about mechanics at all.
BTW, I checked his stride the next day and although one can't be certain given that he was only shadowing the pitches he was striding slightly closed and there was no indication of anything otherwise.
I'm going to tell him that if he gets the same advice from the coach again to simply start from around the middle of the rubber instead of the left side and not to change his stride at all. I think that will satisfy the coach without introducing any major changes to his pitching. It'll take a little movement off his fastball and make his curve a little easier to throw for a strike, but that is better than trying to make mechanics changes.
This was probably one of the best teams in the nation they were playing but they didn't get a lot of hits against our pitching with only CASon giving up any significant amount of runs and they only got 2 hits off him with one being a pop up 10' in front of the plate. We only threw one of our two starters against them and he dominated them for his couple innings, working high 80s with good command. They did do a good job of laying off breaking pitches out of the zone and from what people tell me they had a couple very good pitchers throw in the first game and didn't throw a couple of their best pitchers at all.
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