Control is crucial for pitchers so grab a batting T and start getting better.
Throwing fatties is never helpful so here’s a drill to help prevent them.
Pitching is a difficult thing. You’ve got to make sure you hit the strike zone without throwing too much of the ball into the middle of the zone. And while we can tell our players this until we’re blue in the face, we all know that telling is different from doing.
Occasionally we have that problem at UCR, so we’ve started doing something that’s really simple, and yet very effective.
We simply started doing our pitching workouts with a batting T placed in the middle of homeplate, just like the one to the left circled in blue. At first, our pitchers felt uncomfortable and hit it repeatedly, but mainly because they were too busy focusing on it.
We added a layer of difficulty and reference by placing the plastic batter – our pitchers call Chase – in the batter’s box. This gives our pitchers a very game-like reference for making their pitches within the slim space between the middle of the plate (where the batting T now sits) and the batter (which Chase imitates).
As even more reference, we’ve painted the 3 inside zones to righty’s on the side of Chase when he’s hitting right handed, and the 3 lefty zones when he’s turned around to be a left handed hitter.
For more help with your pitchers, and for the best and most durable batting T on the market (although you may want to use an old batting T when working with your pitchers):
