What's up! coach Dan Blewett here so one of the biggest things about being a
successful pitcher is choosing intelligent pitches to throw and this
seems extremely fundamental extremely obvious like why have a video on this
but here's the thing most pitchers when they're out there on the mound they're
not paying as much attention to what hitters are doing and how they're
swinging against them as they should be it seems really obvious but even for me
I didn't learn to really focus on what clues hitters were giving me and so that
was a lot older like in my mid-20s obviously everyone develops and sort of
balloons with their baseball IQ at a different time but I had to have people
like really pointed out to me and the higher level you go the more these clues
get very very subtle they're very hard to pick up unless you know what you're
looking for so one of the things is how does a hitter foul the ball off so I've
got a bunch of videos I'm going to overlay here but let's talk about the
first one which is fouling the ball straight back when you foul this ball
straight back as a hitter it means you're pretty much on time with the
pitch right I think everyone sort of knows that now there's some reason that
their barrel wasn't as accurate as it should be right they missed like why
they missed the ball if they're on time and mostly on playing why didn't they
hit a line drive right back at the pitcher
well it's a good question but sometimes hitters because hitting is just not that
easy they just miss a little bit with their barrel so when they follow up foul
the ball straight back as a pitcher you should be like okay he's pretty much on
time with that pitch it's probably time to move on now that's assuming that the
pitch is down the middle if they fought foul a ball straight back and it's in on
them or maybe it's on the outside corner which is going to be very very difficult
and there's gonna be more like barrel error involved then you have to take
that with a little more of a grain of salt so if you throw on it on the guy's
fists and he fouls it straight back that doesn't mean he's on your pitch
if you throw on the outside corner and he fouls it straight back for some
reason I'm not exactly sure what that means but usually when we foul a ball
straight back as a hitter it's pretty much a center cut pitch down the middle
and we just miss a little bit low with our barrel
that's what send us straight back so assuming if that picks in the middle
plate we can assume as pitchers it's time to move on and change speeds and/or
change locations second type of foul ball is when they spray it off late now
this is gonna mean the most for you as a pitcher when the pitch is down the
middle because if the ball is down the middle and I'm not getting my bat head
out as a hitter on time to hit it back up the middle then either I have to slow
bat speed for your fastball which means you throw it too hard as a pitcher for
him to catch up or maybe I was looking for something else maybe I was looking
for a changeup or looking for an off-speed pitch and I guessed wrong and
now I'm trying to catch up and I can't but either way if we spray a ball foul
as hitters as pitchers we need to say okay I've got a little more velocity
than this guy can handle I should probably stick with my fastball and
bring the ball in which is gonna be even tougher for him to then get around on
the last type of foul ball is when a hitter pulls something really really far
foul he pulls it down you have your right-hander pulls down the third-base
line left hander pulls in the first base line now if this is an off-speed pitch
it does not tell you that much except maybe your Aussie pitch wasn't as well
located as it could be so if you throw a guy a changeup any Yanks down the line
foul that's the right thing that you should do with that pitch because he
should be early on it considering his timing should be sort of defaulted to
set to a fastball so if a guy you know doesn't pull that ball foul then then
there's another question like why was he on that changeup so easily Ethan's got
slow bat speed or he was looking for or you telegraphed it or religious tin a
terrible location and one of those things but in general when a hitter
hooks a a changeup slide or curveball something off-speed foul and that's
telling you as a pitcher that that's maybe the right pitch and we maybe need
to locate a little bit better so maybe if you balance that curveball he doesn't
hook it foul he swings and misses alright now if you throw your fastball
and they yank that ball foul that's gonna tell you one of two things
typically either he's just got more bat speed than you do velocity or he was
anticipating your fastball and ambushing and really
ready to hit that pitch he was ready and like alright fast balls coming I'm gonna
get going too soon just like if you were to face whoever you are out there in
YouTube land if you're to face her honest Chapman you would be ambushing
him as much as you could to try to catch up with his hundred mile per hour
fastball you would have to get started super early to try to get your bath
razón hitters do this so sometimes like I was a hard thrower back when you know
92 94 was hard and if it hit her hooked my fastball foul in the first pitch I
didn't believe that it was because he had like 98 mile-per-hour bat speed
really it was probably because he was just cheating on the fastball and it's
like just getting a head start to hit it and so then I'm like okay if he does a
rifle that ball foul he's probably just looking for a fastball so I either need
to be more careful about where I throw it or maybe I change pitch you know
change speeds and maybe go to changeup for the breaking ball because he's
looking for a fast when he's antsy and jumping and hand bushing it okay so
hopefully this video helped interpreting hitter foul balls is extremely important
and making good decisions about what pitch to throw next is always gonna be
based on what you just threw you can't plan out your pitch sequence before you
go out there you can't plan it solely based on the theory of effective
velocity or theories of something else those are all really good insightful
things to think about to understand but you still need to take the clues that
the hitters give you based on how they swing on a given pitch because it's not
just their bat speed it's their mindset their approach all these are the things
which again their foul balls will tell you if you're looking hard enough
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