I Could Care Less How Hard Your Child Throws!!!!

Hello readers, this topic is one that can really get me heated so bare with me if I go off on the occasional rant today. One of the things most often heard at any youth game from 9U - 18U is "how hard is the pitcher throwing?". America, baseball fans, and parents are infatuated with velocity. Throwing velocity or exit velocity, it's talked about at the ballparks around America on a regular basis. I feel like every coach or parent I talk to must be "Top Gun" junkies that walk around saying "I feel the need, the need for speed". (If you don't know that Tom Cruise movie reference please stop reading my blog - I can't help you. lol). It's also the most LIED about topic at the ballpark as well! I can't tell you how many times I've walked up to a game and heard someone say "check out this 10 year old, he's throwing 69-70 mph", only to pull out my handy pocket radar on his pitches and never record a pitch faster than 61-63 mph. Don't get me wrong, 63 mph for a 10 year old is impressive, but unless you have played baseball or softball you don't really understand the MASSIVE difference between a pitch coming at you 63 mph vs. 70 mph from a distance of 46 feet. One is hard to hit, the other scary.

The point of this entry though isn't the differences between 63 mph and 70 mph or even the people that lie about how hard their kid throws. The point of this post is that as a veteran coach that's been around the game for a long time, I just don't care how hard they throw.

At the end of July, I had the honor for the second year in a row to be selected as a USSSA All-American coach at the All-American games in Vera, Fl. There were 24 players selected from our Mid-west region and then USSSA divided those 24 kids into two teams. We were given a 1 hour 15 min. time slot to practice with our teams before we started playing pool games to seed the double elimination bracket. Now, as even the common fan would know or at least guess, it was important for us to determine which of these 12 boys could pitch and not only who could pitch, but who our best pitchers were going to be for the week as we had not seen the vast majority of them ever play, let alone pitch. Given that pitching is vital to winning baseball games, and lord knows I want to win, it would be reasonable to deduct that I would have spent much of that 1 hour 15 min practice assessing pitchers. WRONG! First off, we were given stat sheets with each pitchers velocity and some other information on it and I can promise you I never looked at it. Secondly, I personally never watched even one of our pitchers throw even one pitch during the practice. I actually assigned two of the four total coaches we had to watch and help catch all 8 of our pitchers as they threw a 20 pitch bullpen session on flat ground. I told them to have them throw 5 fastballs down the middle, 5 on the outside corner, 5 on the inside corner, and then let them show any off-speed or breaking pitches they had with the other 5 pitches.

Do you want to know the one question I asked the coaches that ran the station to report back on? You might have guess it - LOCATION! That's right - I didn't give a flip how hard they threw, if they had a killer curveball, or anything else for that matter. The reason???? Because at any level, 9u thru pro ball" if you can locate a fastball and change speeds you can get people out. Does velocity help? Absolutely, but only if you can control it. It does no one any good if you are in high school and can throw in the 90's but you walk two batters and inning because statistics show that 50% of those walks are going to score once they get on base. That's not something I just made up, it's real life stats from major league baseball and in the youth ranks where errors and wild pitches are far more prevalent my guess is that 50% goes up to closer to 60-65%.

The perfect example of this also came at the All-American games this summer. (Let me preference this by saying this was NOT a player on my team). All I heard leading up to the first pool game was about this big kid who was throwing 69-70 mph as a 10 yr old and how he and his team were going to dominate. I mean people were telling me, coach I've seen it, I've seen the radar guns. So, I thought to myself, awesome I can't wait to see this - really hard to believe given I had not personally seen anyone over 64 mph, so I was chomping at the bit to see who this freak of nature was and watch him dominate. So there we were with his team leading by the run when he entered the game in the 3rd inning of the pool game to I'm sure close out the game. I quickly grabbed my radar gone and registered the warm up pitches - 61 mph, 62 mph for the most part, one got to 63 mph. I thought to myself, he's just warming up and holding back. Nope, wrong again. I watched the kid blow a one run lead as he quickly loaded the bases on walks. First of ally, he never once threw the ball over 63 mph, 6 of his 17 pitches were so wild they went to the backstop 2 of the 6 the catcher didn't even get a glove on and he never recorded an out while surrendering 3 runs. Yeah there was an error in there - see my point above about youth baseball - but the walks were what was costly. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the kid. Pitching is difficult and maybe he was just having a bad day, lord knows I had them when I was pitcher. And 63 mph is awesome for that age. Our team made it to the semi-finals and we probably only saw one other pitcher all weekend throw that hard, so there is some talent there. But the point is, even with all that velocity and the fact that it's extremely rare at that age, didn't mean anything. He couldn't locate and therefore he couldn't get outs and the name of the game is getting outs.

On the flip side of the coin, our coaching staff identified our top pitcher, our game one starter, based on who threw the ball to our catchers gloves the best in their 15 pitch bullpen. Our kid threw it decent, 59-61 mph so nothing to knock by any means, but he came out in our first game and just painted the corners with fastballs both inside and out and then threw maybe three breaking balls in his 33 pitch outing. He allowed zero runs, walked none, allowed one hit, and struck out four. This same kid went on to win another game during the week accounting for 2 of our teams 5 wins on our way to the 3rd place finish in the 16 team field while the big kid that was supposed to be lighting up the radar game went 0-2 on the week and his team dipped out with a 1-4 record on the week. Speed is nice, control is far more important!

I want to share another story real quick about a player who I had the pleasure of coaching, this time in fastpitch softball, who also proved this theory correct. Her name is Kassidy (I hope she doesn't kill me for using her name) and she was probably as good as anyone I coached at drilling her spots. Kassidy wasn't the most athletic kid I ever coached (probably not even in the top 75%), as a matter of fact her previous travel team pretty much gave up on the kid - probably because as she became a 16u player he wasn't lighting up the radar gun as a picher.

I'll never forget the night she came to Scout Indoor Training Facility in Richardson, Tx to do a private tryout. I had never met the kid and she walks in with her mom and you immediately notice, she's not a prototypical 6'0 long lever pitcher, she's also not some little mighty mouse girl that's put together like a brick wall. As a matter of fact, everything about her appearance and her velocity (as she threw me a few pitches to show off her stuff) said average. But what I did take note of was three things. One she worked her butt off during the tryout and she was "coachable" and tried what I asked, two she threw it exactly where I stuck the glove every time, and three she had an above average change up. I've never asked her, but I think even her and her mom were probably shocked when I immediately offered her a spot on our roster.

Kassidy then went on and lead our team as our #1 or #2 pitcher for the next two plus years and honestly she pitched some of the biggest most memorable games we played. The first of which was as a 16U team we played up in a big 18U tournament her first season with us and we went on a winning streak that advanced us to the semi-finals where we took on the nationally ranked Tulsa Elite Gold. These badasses came down from Oklahoma and we knew we would have our hands full. Kassidy started and went the distance, we lost the game 2-1, but she carved up their vaunted line-up by simply spotting her pitches and her 52-54 mph "fastball" and using her change up to keep them off balance. It was a masterpiece that even Greg Maddux would have appreciated! It was right then, as the cocky head coach I was, that we decided to go have t-shirts made that said "Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere" because we knew we had arrived and we were going to be a force to be dealt with. There were two other times she used location to really prove herself and my theory on location over speed. The first was when we took on our organizations "top" team and she completely shut them down again keeping them off balance and making them hit the ball off the handle or the end of the bat, and the day that she pitched in Oklahoma at a tournament that sealed her scholarship as her future college coach was in attendance and came over to me after the game and said "I love how she commands the strike zone, we want her on our roster".

See the thing is, we all love velocity, but what any coach really wants is a pitcher who can get people out and they really don't care how that happens. Does speed help with that? Absolutely, it allows you to make more mistakes over the middle of the plate that you get away with, but if you are putting batters on constantly because you are walking or hitting them then it really doesn't matter how hard you throw.

My advice to fellow coaches or parents. Focus your pitchers on solid mechanics. If you don't know what that looks like, find a pitching coach that does know! Focus your player on first just throwing strikes and then throwing to certain spots. Have them master, in, out, up, down, etc before you ever worry about speed or any off-speed or breaking ball. When they have mastered that (at least 6 or 7 times out of 10 hitting those spots) then you can worry about all the other stuff. With young kids (9-14 year olds), a lot of the velocity increase will just come naturally as they age and mature. I promise the good coaches won't care if your kids lighting up the radar gun and is the talk of the town or tournament when they watch their pitching staff consistently go to the finals!