Off Speed Recognition Drills

We do this in the cage while short tossing. We make the thrower throw 2 seam and 4 seam fastballs. The hitter has to call out "2" or "4" before the ball gets to him.

Coaching point, gets kids to pick up the ball right out of the pitchers hands and to read rotation and laces.

i just always tell them to look for spin and loft right away after the pitcher releases the ball, but not all kids can see the spin as effectively, so i say if the balls coming at you, theres a good chance its going to curve

quote:

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if the balls coming at you, theres a good chance its going to curve

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And if its a wild fastball there's a good chance you're about to get drilled!

then you get drilled and go to first

Or to the hospital to find the rest of your teeth

Not if you teach the players to get hit properly. We teach all of our kids to turn inward to stay in on the breaking ball, while protecting all of the vital parts.

tiger3boy,

I teach them same thing.

Any new responses?

Would love to hear about some drills/tips for hitting curveballs...our program struggles top to bottom recognizing and hitting curveballs hard.

 

Love the call it out drill for 2 or 4 seam fastball...simply for stressing picking up the release point...you can even do this while playing catch...thrower picks one and receiver calls it out...progress into the calling and hitting

 

 

A few colleges I'm familiar with just set up 2-wheel Jugs machines and feed a steady diet of hard curves as the primary on-field hitting drill for some days.  They try to build in muscle memory and confidence barreling up that pitch.  Then on subsequent days, coach will throw and mix.  We do something similar with our HS program.  We have a coach that can spin it pretty well.  With on-field hitting on some days, he'll throw and hitters will go in rounds... may be all FB's first round, all CB's second round, mix third round and back to straight to finish. 

 

For recognition, besides spin and hump, we'll talk about pitcher hand position at release point.  Some players are capable of seeing/recognizing the hand on the outside of the ball (CB) vs hand straight behind the ball (FB) and some are not.  It is a peripheral view when picking up the ball at release.  This works for some types of CB's and not others.

 

Of course, recognition is also learning to pick up pitcher's patterns and sequences and learning to better understand patterns related to count, position in the lineup, historical success/failure (earlier that game or previous matchups), etc..  So, we'll have a lot of discussions and situational cage drills that help improve awareness of likelihood of pitch types. 

 

After "recognizing spin" it's cage time with a good BP coach and working on "see it up, hit it out; see it down, let it go".

Check out Dr. Peter Fadde's book "The Sixth Tool".