Miss too much on an inside or outside target and it can spell disaster. Learn a great way to practice these locations.
Here’s a simple and yet powerful way for pitchers to practice their inside and outside pitches.
Anytime you can make your words turn into pictures or feelings, the more your pitchers will understand them, and be able to do them.
Take pitching inside and outside – whether you’re talking simply fastballs, or curveballs outside and screwballs inside, hitting these locations is critical to your pitcher’s success.
Miss too much over the plate and you’ve given up a bomb, miss too much off the plate and you’ve just put a runner on 1st, so I was looking for a way to really make these locations more visual for my pitchers at UCR.
That’s when I grabbed the field paint (or white spray paint if you don’t have field paint) and painted one alley for inside pitches and one for outside pitches. I started at the pitching rubber and painted lanes about 10 inches wide, from the pitching rubber down to the plate.
To be that wide they have to intersect near the pitcher, but as the lines get closer to homeplate they spread apart. These lines REALLY helped our pitchers understand how to keep pitches within an alley – or tunnel.
If you look at the Catcher’s View 2 (2nd picture on the right), you can see the Inside and Outside alleys and how they help pitchers and catchers see how to throw pitches on both sides of the plate, on the edge of the plate, as well as off the plate. I’ve also put the pitching strings from the Breaking Pitch Practice Kit to serve as guides for the rise and dropballs thrown inside and outside.
In Catcher’s View (far right), I’ve added pitching sticks from the Pitch-Path Practice Kit to help serve as guides and feedback for this pitcher, who is lefthanded and throwing backdoor curveball.
A simple can of paint can create some very powerful pitch paths for your pitchers. Be brave, get creative and discover ways to turn words into pictures and feelings.
For more help with your pitchers, check out the following:
