How Stats Are Changing How We Treat Teams

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The Practice Pro coaches and I worked with 13 teams in Pitching School this preseason. That means an organization reserves an entire class time, once per week for the entire session. What I like about this is that we have closer relationships with their team coaches, helping them progress faster. There is less confusion on 'my one coach said this, and my other coach said that, so now I'm confused and starting to get irritated.'

One of the team coaches wanted some information from me. She asked which pitchers had pitches that were...

  1. Game ready

  2. Game dependent (depends on the day)

  3. Not ready, but working on it

My initial reaction was to start guessing based on my feelings and gut reactions, but then I remembered our charts. Team coaches don't have the time to watch their pitchers for 20-30 minutes per practice like we do, and often don't have recorded data on pitch accuracy other than game states. We have about 6 charts we use during the preseason, all serving different purposes.

Each team coach needs to define "game ready" for themselves. I work with the raw data and can easily give that to the coaches. If you are a coach and have a Practice Pro pitcher, you can ask her for a chart to see her progress over time.

In pitching school, "having" a pitch means that a pitcher can hit 40% of her spots with a ball that moves in a game. The bad misses, or pitches a catcher can't handle, should be at a minimum (10% or less for 7th grade and up). 0% would be great, but is unrealistic for the most part for anyone developing movement.

I gave team coaches the stats from THIS chart we tracked over the last 10 weeks, some having data from up to a year ago.

At game time, if your team has not developed a system for the catcher to relay "spots hit/not hit" back to the coach, recruit a parent to sit behind home and record. Team coaches need to use all the time they can in practice to work on things other than pitching. That's why it's great to have an in-house pitching coach. It made me excited to be so involved!