Alright let's talk about how to fix it if you're hanging your curveball so
number one mental factors are huge and most young pitchers I mean even old
pictures myself included when you are overthinking the curveball and you're
thinking about trying to make it break better trying to locate it perfectly
you're afraid of hanging at all that sort of stuff
you end up just hanging whenever you get tension flows through your arm so you're
you're nervous you're overthinking it you're trying to make it happen you tend
to tense up just ever so slightly not like this but you'll just tense up just
enough to sort of slow your arm down in its arm path and then you tend to get
around it or you just sort of muscle through it and it just hangs the best
curveballs that I've ever thrown in my entire life are the ones where I wasn't
thinking about it was just when I was relaxed and fluid didn't try to do
anything and they just come out because everything's got to happen in its own
proper place it's got to be fluid your hands got to explode over the ball your
arms got to be fast but it's got to be loose there's it's just such a the
pitching motion in general is just kind of miraculous anytime we think ourselves
through it and we tense up and we try to go through the delivery mentally it ends
up tensing us up and then the ball comes out too early so number one is mental
factors take a deep breath and relax you'd be surprised at how much that
helps and how much you can be just screwing up you're breaking stuff
because of mental factors so you've got to be clear number two is the front
shoulder so if your front shoulder is yanking out like this my arm is always
going to sort of oppose my front shoulder does so if my glove arm stays
compact and helps my chest go towards the plate my arm is gonna get to the
front of the ball a lot easier when my arm Yanks out my hand is gonna go around
it and if this happens before I land my arm is gonna be trying to catch up it's
gonna be lagging as my hips open too soon and then the ball is gonna come out
too soon it's not gonna be a break back over the plate so that's another common
one number three if you're striding across your body now if you're starting
off your chances are you're not doing this just like hey I've been pitching
and now suddenly I'm strutting across my body in the seventh inning this is less
of like a troubleshooting fix we're just in general kind of fix if your way
across your body it's really tough to then get
all the way back around and then on top of the pitch so you're typically gonna
have a tougher time getting it down the zone if you step across your body too
much and then number three sinking on your back leg this is one where we've
taught about rushing and bouncing it if you rush too quick you'll balance your
breaking ball a lot but the converse is also true so if you stay back here and
you sink too much then you sort of get stuck down here and then you kind of
have to try to get all the way up over top of it and it becomes a very
difficult thing to do so if you sink and you get stuck back in your back leg
which is very subtle your coaches will use a five to help to tell you if you're
doing this but you still need to keep a good pace towards the mount so if you
start to sink and get stuck then the curveball tends to come up and it won't
make it down in time so those are the typical hanging your curveball
troubleshooting spots and to get back from that we just need to stay down our
shoulder move our chest towards the plate we need to make sure we have
enough pace towards the plate so we don't get stuck on our back leg we need
to relax not stride across our body and we also just need to keep our arm speed
up that's probably the last thing I'd mention is sometimes pitcher will just
sort of baby it and if you don't really finish it you're gonna just leave a
little bit of spin on the table and it'll just kind of stay and hang up in
the in the zone make sure you're always finishing your curveball with really
good arm speed and that last a little bit you've got to hit it really really
hard to get as much spin that's where you really add and you apply all that
spin but also to pull it down the zone a lot better so don't ease off at the last
minute finish it throw really aggressively I know that can be hard and
scary at times when you're a young player especially because you for your
freighters gonna yank into the dirt but you've really got to finish it the arm
speed increases deception it increases the spin rate increases the speed of it
obviously but it also helps pull it and keep it into the strike zone where this
is not gonna do the job all right so there's a couple troubleshooting tips
for hanging your curveball
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