There’s a lot that goes into getting the most of out of a high school pitcher. I would know – it wasn’t too long ago that I was one. My coaches knew how to make sure I was maximizing my own potential on the mound, and, spoiler alert: it had nothing to do with how fast I was throwing the baseball. Because they worked on coaching high school pitchers in the right areas, I was able to succeed.
The one thing my coaches drilled into me was that if I wanted to experience prolonged success on the mound, I had to perfect the one thing I could control: the pitch itself. Too often these days we see coaches taking the wrong approach when coaching high school pitchers. There’s too high of an emphasis placed on blowing the fastball by the hitter, as opposed to playing the long game: doing the in-game, on-the-fly analysis of the situation at hand in order to come out on top.
As a pitcher, theoretically, you should get better throughout the game if your endurance holds up. In baseball, the pitcher holds the advantage by default. Believe it or not, it’s not that easy to create contact between a surface that’s 2.75 inches in diameter (the bat) and another that’s 2.94 inches in diameter (the ball), especially when the ball is traveling above 80 mph and often times, not in a straight line.
That means that, in a vacuum, pitchers have an even greater statistical advantage the second or third time they face any given hitter. The advantage only dissipates if the pitcher doesn’t adjust and use the hitter’s weaknesses against him.
Why is this important when coaching high school pitchers? As coaches, we want to teach our pitchers that the advantage isn’t in the stuff, it’s in both the mental makeup and the endurance to last multiple innings. These days it seems like everyone wants to throw 100 mph. And while that’s great, all it really does without the proper coaching is turns pitchers into throwers – guys that rely on one inning of hard stuff and quickly blow out their arms because of it.
When coaching high school pitchers, we want to avoid turning them into closers, and instead lean into the importance of lasting several innings.
