At some point in youth baseball it becomes necessary for coaches to call pitches into
the catcher who can then relay them to the pitcher.
Up next the most effective way for a coach to relay signs into the catcher.
As pitchers develop it soon becomes necessary for them to throw more than just fastballs
down the center of the plate.
Typically this begins for a pitcher when they have reasonable control over their location
AND they can throw more than just fastballs.
In this video I want to show an effective method for speeding up the game with quicker
pitch relays and to ensure that your system is never broken by opposing teams.
When coaching our 11U team we had teams pick our sings to the catcher a bit too often and
we needed to make a change.
If you watch a lot of youth baseball you notice coaches doing all sorts of things to call
pitch type and location into their catcher.
From using the face, the body, or even calling fake pitches while another coach is actually
giving subtle signs.
There are many creative ways to relay signs, but all of them are either easily picked by
opposing teams, or they are complicated, slow, mistake pron and limiting in scope
Here is a game I picked out from 2018.
You’ll have to excuse the low quality as I needed to zoom in a lot to see the coach.
The coach sitting on the bucket is calling in signs.
While I have literally never attempted to pick signs from a coach on pitches, it only
took me three batters to crack his system.
His cap, like just about every youth coach for some reason, is the sign indicator.
Then he touches a part of his face for fastball, curve ball or change up.
Location, if he gives it is one of his knees or he indicates low or high.
Now this coach is NOT attempting to be crafty as most 12U teams don’t steal pitch signs.
However, if we had wanted to, by the second inning we’d have his signs down.
I’ve also seen card systems used in college.
Now in college, picking the other teams signs is practically a college course for credit.
So to prevent signs from being picked, they will have multiple cards with 125 different
pitch possibilities for each card.
The problem is for youth players this is simply too much and too complicated.
A college team might use a different card for every inning and for these to work it
requires paying a fee to use computer generated unique cards for every pitcher.
Eventually I came up with my own system that I suggested to the pitching coach.
A system that is very simple and fast and yet still adequate to call any pitch and location
we needed.
It is a modified card system.
Here is the system we used in 2018 for twelve year olds.
It is a single 5x5 grid with 25 possible pitches with location.
It’s 5x5 because the coach will use one hand to give the column & row.
Each square contains the pitch type such as Fastball, and the location.
Using the 9 square grid over the strike zone.
We could call for any of 9 locations.
Since a fastball could be called for any location you will see F1-F9 listed.
The more often we might call a pitch type and location the more often it’s on the
chart.
On this card, the C stands for change up.
Since we had at least one pitcher who could locate the change up we had some locations
for that pitch on the chart, but the C5 would the used most as it’s simply a normal change
up.
CRV - is obviously curve ball.
KB - this is for pitchers with any other type of pitch such as Knuckle Ball, Slider, or
more than one type of curve ball.
We used THIS card and system for every inning of every game in every league we played in
during 2018.
We never changed cards.
It was the same exact grid all year long for about 60 games.
You might ask, how did other teams not figure out that 1,2 and 3,5 were curve balls?
After all, there is only two combinations for a curve ball and surely it was thrown
enough to catch on, right?
That is where the genius of this system comes into play.
We didn’t show just two numbers.
We would show three numbers for every pitch.
So the curve ball could be 1,2,3; 1,2,1; 1,2,5.
Etc…
That means each pitch on the grid could be called using 5 different number combinations.
But it gets even better; because, the coach can always switch to the second two numbers
being the important numbers.
Or the first and third.
He can also swap from using across then down to down then across.
Adding in these variables means every pitch on the grid could be using several 3 digit
combinations and the opposing team would drive themselves nuts trying to figure it out.
In the end we never actually did switch it up.
All year in over 60 games we always used the first two numbers; across then down.
It did not take long for the catcher to have most of the pitches memorized and our pitch
calling was very fast.
We also never had to worry about the opposing team figuring out our system.
They never even tried.
Where as in the past teams would sometimes relay to the hitter what pitch was coming
because they knew our system, this season it did not happen one time.
AND our catcher never got confused about what pitch we wanted him to signal.
I’ll end with a game where you can hear the coach calling out the three numbers as
he was only standing 10 feet from the catcher.
You’ll notice that the catcher rarely looks at his card and when he does it’s for less
then a second.