Learn Movement Pitches Before You are 12 Years Old

As fall ball starts, pitchers everywhere loiter on the mound with a longing stare at the catchers glove, hoping to throw a strike. There is, however, an elite group of pitchers who aren’t doing this. Those are the ones you’ll see in a travel ball championship or the high school playoffs. They are fooling the batter by putting movement on almost every pitch.

We need to be teaching all pitchers how to do this.

As soon as a player is able to perform a good arm circle, decent posture, a changeup, and throw at her fullest effort, she's ready to learn movement pitches.  

Many youth coaches have the philosophy that a girl needs to be able to perfect the fastball and hit spots before she “advances” to learning movement pitches.

I disagree. If we wait until a pitcher “perfects” her fastball in order to teach her a curve ball, we might be waiting until she is in college, or eternity. I know I would have never learned one! Softball is not a game of perfection. It’s a game of repetition. I had little control over the ball until college, believe it or not. It wasn’t until then that I got the real reps necessary to have command. Luckily, at a young age I was taught how to move my wrist and hand in different directions to get multiple spins on the ball. By the time I developed enough discipline to put in the reps, I was able to move the ball better than my counterparts.

Learning movement pitches before a girl achieves a high strike percentage is advantageous because of how the brain develops. Being able to spin the ball should be part of the foundation.

Neural pathways, or neural tracts that connect one part of the nervous system with another, are being built in the brain at an exponential rate until a child reaches the age of about 12. Have you ever heard that kids are like “sponges”? That’s why! Children learn way faster than adults. At the time they reach adolescence, the unused pathways then begin die off. Those that are most frequently used become more efficient (muscle memory) in order to conserve energy.

I understand team coaches have concerns that pitchers too-often think pitches move when they actually don’t. However, it’s more about lack self-awareness than it is about potential. Girls still need to learn movement pitches. Let’s make sure the players and parents understand what breaking balls really look like and what it means to “have” a pitch.

I think terms "perfecting" a pitch and “having” a pitch can be used interchangeably. In games, players should still throw pitches they don’t “have” yet as a way to develop them. Here’s my definition of what it means to “have” a pitch.

1. A player must be able to hit 4 out of 10 spots
2. The pitch must move correctly.
3. She must be able to do this in a game.

When I teach the screwball, even if a young player is unable to make the ball move, she’ll at least learn how to maneuver her wrist differently. She might lack the strength and coordination, but it’s amazing how much a pitcher will learn about her body. Recently, one forth-grader who learned that there are different ways to move her hand around the ball quickly figured out how to actually snap a fastball, resulting in a five-mile-per hour increase in one lesson. Learning how to really pitch excites young girls and motivates them to work at it. We should not hold them back but push them to do exceptional things.

By the time this pitcher matures, movement pitches will be easy.