This week I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach. I told him that it was my last week of this project so he said that I could talk about what I did at this practice or how I improved over the course of the project. I think I will just talk about both because what I practiced at this practice does have to do with me improving.
At practice I worked on leaning my head a little farther back when I leap off of the mound. This should help with my balance when dragging up and it should also help me get out farther when I leap off of the mound with my left leg which then would help me with my speed. So there are a lot of effects that could happen if I work on this. I mostly worked on this the entire practice while my pitching coach watched to see if I was doing it right every time because it is definitely not easy to fix right away and it feels weird the first couple times. Overall, I enjoyed doing this project because it was something that I didn't mind working to improve on. Sometimes I get slack on practicing and don't want to do it but this project made me keep working. This project also helped me keep my mind off of not being able to run because of the injury and it kept me something to work on. I have worked on so many parts of pitching that I think I have about worked on all of the aspects of putting a very successful pitch together. I think that my work done for this project will show during softball season. I am very happy that I chose this topic and I hope that everyone enjoyed reading my blog posts.
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It's getting colder and colder and it's harder to practice. I have been practicing a good bit though when the weather is decent outside and I have gotten in a good amount of practice. I have thrown all of my pitches when practicing this week and my change up has become really good. I am becoming more and more confident while throwing it and I think that has to do with being able to throw it better. I am not as nervous to throw it as anymore as I used to be. So I think that I am going to stick with my new grip since I am doing really well with it.
I have also gotten better at spotting my fastball because at the beginning I was struggling with being able to throw my fastballs outside which is the best place to be able to throw it. The reason I have improved on spotting it is because I have been working on making sure when I know to open and close on the pitch. The spotting of this pitch is very important so I'm glad that I got it down for the most part. This week when I was throwing my knuckle ball it was a little off which is very unusual for that pitch. Normally this pitch is spot on and I don't have to worry about it not being a strike but it was off this week. I think that it was off because I was trying to aim it too much instead of just snapping and releasing it. I think that I am trying to aim it because when it is cold, sometimes I can't feel where exactly my fingers are placed on the ball and I get worried about where it is going to go so I am it. To fix this I just worked on making sure to release and not to worry about where it will go. Overall, I think that this week helped my improve a little bit. I hate practicing outside in the cold but it will be worth it in the end because some of our softball games are in freezing weather, so I might as well try to get used to it now. Next week I will be going to pitching practice with my pitching coach so I will keep an update on everything. This week I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach. We worked on getting up and out which is one of my other blogs and we also worked on pushing off the mound. Getting up and out and pushing off have a lot to do with each other dealing with my speed and form. This week I used a hurdle to jump over when I pitched.
I did this for a while just throwing fastballs and trying to get used to raising my leg up to get it over the hurdle. Then I started pitching my other pitches once I got more comfortable. When I started out doing this drill I was so nervous that I was not going to make it over the hurdle or land on it. Once I pitched I realized that it wasn't that far out but it was still a challenge. This drill helps me with my form. If you have ever seen a picture of a pitcher in the middle of a pitch, they are leaping out, if they're right handed then their left leg with be stretching out and their right leg will be pushing off of the mound and their arm will be up by their ear or at around 2:00. This helps me get my leg out farther and get it up so that my speed gets faster and I will most likely close properly. My coach made me work on this drill because sometime I get lazy when it comes to pitching, especially when I am tired. I get lazy with leaping out as far as I can and so he put the hurdle in front of me to make me think about it and make sure that I make myself leap over it. I mostly just focused on this the whole practice and was told to make sure that I work on it at home. I don't go to pitching practice next week but I will keep you updated. This week I did not go to my pitching coach, I just stayed home and practiced. It's getting colder and colder and I hate pitching in the cold because I can't pitch in long sleeves and my fingers sting while pitching. This means that I might not be practicing as much as I would when it is warm.
This week I just pitched my same few pitches over and over. I am really trying to hard to get my new change up down by the time softball season comes but I don't know if it will happen, or at least I don't think I will be fully confident in throwing it. I have started throwing my drop ball more while I practice because I need repetition in throwing it too. My drop ball has always been a good pitch and most of the time is a very accurate pitch. So my main focus of this week was to work hard on my change up and drop ball. I throw a turn over drop ball which really just means that I release it different than other pitches because I turn my hand over really fast and that is how I snap the ball. This pitch has always been really easy and I have never struggled with it, even while beginning to learn it. Yes, sometimes I do struggle but most of the time is because I am tried and I close my body too soon. This pitch is an outside pitch used to trick batters. It curves and drops at the start of home plate so by the time it gets to the batter it is in a different place than when they were looking at it and trying to hit it. Pitchers love using this pitch but batters hate it and that is why it is a good thing to learn how to throw the pitch. Overall, I am pleased with how my practice went this week. I do dread having to go outside in the cold and pitch but if that's what makes me get better than I will do it. Next week I will go to pitching practice with my pitching coach so I will keep you updated on what I do there. This week I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach. I warmed up as usual and when I was ready to start pitching he told me to just throw fastballs and he was going to record me doing it. I really didn't know why all of the sudden he was starting out by recording me but I just did as I was told. He took several videos of me pitching and then when he told me to stop, he told me to come watch myself on the videos. I have always thought that it is weird watching myself pitch on video because I look so different on video than how I feel while pitching.
When he told me to watch myself pitch on the video, he told me to pay attention to the beginning of my pitch. At the beginning of my pitch I bend down to get more power in my legs to push off of the mound. I used to not do this but when I started going to this certain pitching coach he taught me to do it and told me that it will help my speed because it helps my push off the mound harder and get more momentum. Now that I have been doing this technique for a few years and have gotten really comfortable doing it, I have started going really low, so low that sometimes my glove touches the ground. I got told on Wednesday by my pitching coach that I was bending down too low. I'm starting to go so low that he thinks that I am wasting some of my energy because the lower I go, does not mean that my pitch will go faster. It actually means that I am creating more work for myself and it might even be slowing down my pitch because it's more work. Since this might be creating more work for me, whenever I practice I need to focus on how much I bend down to gain momentum. I tried not bending down as far at pitching practice and it felt weird but I definitely think that it will be a decently easy part of my pitch to fix. All I need to really do it just think about not bending down as far before I pitch and that should help me fix it. I will keep focusing on this while pitching even after I fix it because pitching takes a lot of energy and I need as much energy as I can get while pitching, especially in a game. This week I did not go to pitching practice with my pitching coach. I'm taking it a little slower through the fall and winter season so I will be going to him every other week right now and will start going back every week when I get all of my pitches down. I have not been practicing as much as I should so this is also another reason that I am going every other week so that I can get more practices in before I go to pitching every other week.
So since I did not go to pitching practice this week, I practiced more at home. I threw about 4 or 5 times throughout the week. While practicing I practiced my new change up, my fastball(4 seam), and my knuckle ball. I didn't practice my drop ball as much as I should have because I focused more on three pitches. Sometimes when I practice, I am on point with all of my pitches and sometimes I am just not doing good and for this week it was about half and half. On Wednesday I was having an off day and was just not pitching good at all but I think it had a lot to do with how tired I was. My form wasn't correct and my pitches were going everywhere. I was trying to fix whatever I was doing wrong but when I would correct one thing, I would do another thing wrong and the pitch wouldn't be very good. My change up was off too because the more tired I am, the slower my arm speed is which means that the change up will be really really slow and not accurate. On Saturday I pitched and did really well. My speed was good and my pitches were all accurate for the most part. I am still working on my new change up so that wasn't as accurate but I can tell the improvement. It was a decent speed but I just have to work on getting it more accurate. When I practiced on Saturday, the speed was probably the fastest I have seen since I got back into it after being injured. Overall I am very happy with how much practice I got in. I can see my improvement and what I need to still work on. Next week I will be going to pitching practice with my pitching coach so I will give an update on how that went and when I practice at home. This week as normal I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach. This week we worked on something completely different from what I have been working on. In the past few weeks I have worked on different pitches from practicing them to learning a new one. This week I worked on getting myself out as far as I can from the mound.
To work on getting myself out as far as I can from the mound, my coach put a piece of tape down and said that I had to leap out and over that piece of tape every time I pitched. After I had been doing this for a while and showing that I could get up and over the tape he took a piece of plastic and put it down. He moved the piece of plastic farther than the piece of tape so that I had to work harder to get past it. This technique helps with my speed a little bit but it helps a lot with my form. When it comes to pitching most pitchers have a similar form when they are open. If you ever see pictures of them while they're pitching and they are open, they normally all look the same with a few minor differences. All pitchers leap out from the mound and when they do they try to lift their leg up and jump off with their back leg and push off. The stronger a pitcher pushes off, the faster and more open you will be. There are a few more drills that can be done to work on pushing and getting off the mound but we only worked on using an object and making me leap out to it. I definitely need to work on this because this is something could influence my pitching to be better in the long run. I will practice this more because as in my other blogs I have said that I need to work on staying open and this could help me with that. This week I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach as usual. As I always do, I warmed my arm up by throwing overhand and then I did my warm ups. When I was warm and ready to begin pitching, my pitching coach told me to throw my four seam fastball along with my knuckle ball and change up. I seemed very accurate with my fastball and my knuckle ball but I was struggling with my change up. As I have said before in blogs in the past, is that my change up is not my strongest or go to pitch. Yes it is a pitch that I have to throw but I don't always have full confidence in it being a good pitch like I should. My pitching coach knows that I have always struggled with my change up and he decided that we were going to change it up and try something different.
Something that my pitching coach wanted me to try was a new grip for my change up. For my old change up I would grip the ball the same way that I would hold the ball for a fastball, the only difference being the way that I release it. With my new change up I hold it a different way but I release it the same way as my old one. The grip for the new one is that I take my hand and I line it along the seams on the ball and put my hand into the shape of a C. My pitching coach said that he has only taught this grip to two other people but both of them have seemed to really like it and said that it helps them get their hand turned over quicker in order to release the ball. I agree with the two other girls because I do think that one of my struggles with my old change up is that I had trouble getting my hand turned over but now I don't. When I first tried the pitch out at pitching practice, it felt very strange. The first pitch I threw was a strike and so was the second and third. I was shocked at the automatic improvement of this pitch just because of the different grip. I left pitching and told my coach that I definitely wanted to stick with the new way because I definitely seemed to be more accurate with it and also I felt more confident about the pitch. This week I went to pitching practice with my pitching coach. First I warmed up my arm by throwing overhand and then doing my snaps. While I was doing my walk-throughs (which is part of my warm up where I get a walking start and then pitch) and my coach told me that we needed to work on my timing of when to open and close my hips in my pitches. I have had to work on this as long of I have been going to this pitching coach. Opening and closing my hips affects my accuracy, mostly inside and outside. Opening is when I am in mid-pitching position with my right arm pointing upward beside my head and my left arm pointing straight to the catcher. Closing is when I turn my hips so that my bellybutton is facing the catcher. Both of these are a part of pitching because opening is mid-pitch and closing is the position you finish the pitch in.
The relevance of the title and what I did at pitching is that my pitching coach took six pool noddles and stood them up parallel to each other and 3 on each side of me. While I was pitching it looked a little bit like a runway. This drill helped me stay open longer because if I were to close too soon them I would hit the noodle. The purpose of this is to not hit the noodle and for me to visualize in my mind what I need to do in order to do to not hit one of the noodles. When he took the noodles away he told me to just think like they were there so that I would stay open longer. If I do not stay open long enough and close too early it can either go inside or outside but mostly likely it will never be down the middle. For it to go inside, I would most likely hit my hip or bring my arm out farther away from me so that I wouldn't hit my hip resulting in an inside pitch. For it to go outside, I would realize during my pitch that I closed to early and would try to jerk my arm across my body in order to get it to not go inside. Most of the time when I close too early my pitches end up being outside. I have a video of me practicing this drill with the pool noodles and will try to post it in the next week or so. This week I did not get to go to pitching practice with my pitching coach. Since I am only allowed to pitch once a week because we aren't sure how my foot will react to lots of pitching, I had a choice of going to one of Davie's pitcher-catcher workouts or pitching practice. I thought it would be best it I went to one of Davie's workouts just to practice so I did. At the workout we did a couple of things. First we stretched and threw for a little bit to loosen everyone's arms up. Since there was an odd number and we had more pitchers than catchers, everyone got a break every few minutes. For the first couple minutes of pitching I did my snaps and a couple of other warm up strategies. Once I was loose and ready to start pitching my coaches stood behind me and told me what kind of pitch to throw. The pitches that I am mostly focusing on right now are my fastball, knuckle ball, drop ball and I would like to focus a little bit more on my change-up. Me and two other pitchers did this for a while so that the coaches could see if we have improved any or what we need to work on and of course I was not 100% on top of it because I am a little rusty from being out for so long.
After doing repetitions of this our coaches then said that we were going to play a game. The game is called HORSE, people have probably heard of it with basketball, except in softball we play it with pitching. It was played by our coaches standing behind us and calling out a pitch that we had to throw (and they would add in which corner we had to throw it to) and if we missed the pitch we got a letter but it we hit the corner and threw the right pitch then our coach would get a letter. Then whoever lost, had to run to the fence and back. I was actually pretty proud of myself because I did better than I expected I would under pressure since I haven't had much practice. This was the last thing the pitchers did at the workout and I was happy with the way things had gone. I was definitely tired by the end but being tired means that I worked hard and tried my best. |
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