Don’t think I’ve blogged about this, but if I have it’s always a good topic. I really like calling pitches when the kids are in the “majors” or 11-12 year old league. I do it in the 9-10 all stars as well. I remember asking high school coaches at a coaching clinic what their thoughts were on calling pitches. Well most of them say “if my livelihood is on the line by winning and losing, I want to be responsible for it and not have it happen because some catcher makes a mistake.” I kind of like to teach catchers how to call pitches and I like to talk to them between innings and some innings I just tell the catcher, YOU CALL THEM and then we can talk about it. I work hard in practice to get pitchers to hit inside vs outside corner and I work with catchers to really set up on the inside or outside corner. I also work with pitchers on really changing speeds.
Tom Seaver’s book “The Art of Pitching” is cool as it has a pitch by pitch rendition of a game where he talks about every single pitch he threw in a game. You can see him moving inside / outside and changing speeds. A lot of it is knowledge of the batter. If you see a batter struggle with a particular pitch, well keep that in mind as the game progresses.
Anyway it’s much fun if pitchers really hit spots. I find teaching young kids to throw inside is hard as they really don’t want to hit batters. I worked on it by putting a live batter or even a parent at the plate and telling the pitcher and the batter they won’t swing but it at least gets the idea into the head of the pitcher of what it’s like to really face a batter and what it feels like and looks like to throw an inside strike.
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