Confidence is the Key to Speed

A common question I have been receiving lately is parents asking why their child is throwing faster in practices than they are in games. The short and sweet answer to this question is a lack of confidence, especially in younger pitchers.

Girls can be worried about a number of things in games that they aren’t necessarily thinking about in practices. For instance, dealing with the pressure of pitch counts. In most practices, pitchers very rarely work on maintaining acceleration and correct form as they work through pitch counts or practice pitching through an entire inning. Also, another factor is just the batter itself. When pitching in normal practices, girls very rarely throw to batters. Therefore, when game time comes pitchers can become anxious or nervous about hitting a batter. This issue normally naturally improves with age and experience, but in order to speed up the process I’ve listed some tips below.

First, it’s important to practice like you play. Therefore, work on lots of pitch counts during practices, throw in random full count situations and see how they do. You can also make pitchers throw through full innings and get onto them if they slow down. Additionally, if you have the ability to put a batter in the box when working through pitch counts and or innings then do so. This will really help to simulate real life game situations and help pitchers feel more comfortable when they step onto the rubber (brothers and sisters work great!).

Finally, it’s very important that pitchers know hitting batters is just part of the game, even at the elite level, batters will get hit. My very first pitching coach told me that the only time he would be upset with me was if I hit a batter and the batter didn’t cry. Now obviously he didn’t want me to injury my opponents but the idea behind his statement is a great one. He wanted me to throw as hard as I could, every single game, every single batter, and every single pitch, just like I would in practice and not worry about beaming hitters. And if for some reason I did miss and hit the batter at least I only made one mistake and not the “real” offense of slowing down.