Don't Throw Hard

"Don't throw hard. Just throw strikes."

Eek! I cringe when I heard coaches or fathers saying these words to their young (or maybe even not so young) pitchers. I know I'm guilty of it sometimes too. Well, not the "Don't throw hard" part, but the part when I see a pitcher trying to hard to be too "fine" and I just want the ball in the zone because I know the batter isn't going to do much, I catch myself saying something to the effect of just having the pitcher get the ball over the plate.

But I do NOT tell a pitcher to slow down in order to gain more accuracy.

So many times I hear young pitchers being told to slow the ball down and not throw hard in exchange for strikes. More often than not what I end up seeing is this young pitcher begin to throw both slow AND wild. So she just went from having 1 issue (not throwing accurately) to having 2 issues (not throwing accurately AND not throwing with any speed/power).

How often to you hear coaches telling their infielders, "Don't throw hard, just get the ball to the 1st baseman's chest." I don't know, maybe you hear something like that on occasion. I personally can't think of a time I've heard that though. If we don't use this "logic" for throwing overhand, why do so many insist upon using it for throwing underhand, for pitching?

I know some young pitchers try to "aim" the ball on their own. My 8-year-old does this. She starts of throwing nice and strong. Sometimes she's a little off - the ball is the right height, but off left or right OR the ball is straight, but too high or too low. These are very minor "problems." Yet, she will try to slow down to gain more accuracy. It NEVER works. She still throws off the plate, sometimes even worse than when she was going all out, and her ball has very little on it.

So I just remind her that she's not gaining much by trying to go slower. I ask her if the ball was going straighter (where she wanted it to) when she was throwing slow. She always says, "No." So she's beginning to realize that's not the answer. She's starting to correct the part of her motion that IS causing the inaccuracy (releasing too late or too early, not keeping her arm swing close to her body, not stepping toward the target, etc).

The results are much better with those kinds of adjustments than they are with "slowing down" to gain increase accuracy.

I talk a little more about this in the most recent Fastpitch Talk Radio episode. It's just a short episode and you can listen to it HERE.