This past year I learned quite a bit about pitch design, and it was through the lens of a catcher. It was an interesting perspective and it has had me thinking, “why do we not teach the basics to the catchers?” I will first go into the basics of pitch design that I have learned over the past year. The reason for pitch design is to maximize each pitch to compliment all the other pitches in your arsenal. With the help of products such as Rapsodo, Trackman and other services we can get, use numbers to make sure the pitches are doing exactly what we want them to do. Not all programs are fortunate enough to have these devices, so we need to have our catchers tell us what our pitchers are looking like on any given day. With programs that are lucky enough to have these technologies, it could be a great asset to know what their attack plan will be like on that day. A good amount of this information can be seen by the eye, but to really make significant changes these devices are needed. With what the catcher can see, we can dive into what the pitches are supposed to look like- and then also how to properly sequence the pitches based off of the pitch shape.

From my days calling pitches behind the plate, I can remember that I only thought about, “How am I going to get the hitter off balance?” After learning about pitch design this past year, I found that I was missing an important part of calling pitches. After my newfound knowledge of this process of pitch design, I thought this all makes sense after hearing about tunneling previously. Pitching Ninja has done a great job of familiarizing what we want as coaches when it comes to pitch shape and tunneling. “Tunneling” is having your pitches stay on the same plane as long as possible and then breaking off. Having catchers understand this is a huge part of them understanding how to call a game, and helping their pitchers make in-game adjustments as needed. It is one thing to say that we want to pair a rising four-seam fastball with a 12-6 breaking ball. When you have an overlaying video of this combo, it takes on an entirely different meaning. Explaining this portion of pitch design and then showing video to your group of catchers can give them added confidence when throwing down signs in a game. It takes a catchers thought process from “Oh, this pitch looks good today” to “His curveball has a little more lateral movement today, I should talk to him and our pitching coach bout this.”  Seeing these videos on social media is a great way for players to think about the game in their down time. A complaint that I often hear is that today’s players do not watch the game of baseball often enough. Social Media is here to stay, so using pages such as the Pitching Ninja and other resources can only help both players and coaches. Now that we’ve found the benefits from these platforms, let’s start conveying it to our players.

I saw the visual changes that were made in these pitch design bullpens and you can see shape change. We’ve all had pitchers whose fastball will cut one day and the tail the next day. We also have had pitchers whose breaking ball will act as a slider one day and the curveball the next. We don’t need to explain the metrics such as spin direction, spin efficiency and spin rate. I am the hitting coach for our program, so it goes along the lines of not talking about anatomy when we are talking hitting mechanics. I’m not going to tell my hitter that his top hand needs to supinate while entering the hitting zone. I would just say that top hand needs to be facing up through the zone. It is the same when communicating pitch design metrics to a catcher. Instead of saying that we always want this pitcher to have a high spin efficiency on his fastball, we would say that we want his fastball to be straighter than have tail. This talks to the shape of the pitch. As I mentioned above there are many amateur pitchers who do not know how to control the shape of their pitches. Pitchers and catchers often judge the quality of the pitch by how much movement it has on it. Now with the knowledge of new pitch metrics, this is not always the case. Having video of exactly how you want each pitch to look like is a great tool so the catcher has this knowledge. If we have this video we can make adjustments much quicker…and by quicker I mean almost instantly. An example of this would be if a pitcher has a cutter and a slider. During a bullpen, the pitcher’s cutter starts to look more like his slider. The catcher can now point this out and they can try to make an adjustment before the game. If the adjustment cannot be made, we now know that the cutter is not on the table at the beginning of the game. If a catcher or pitching coach does not catch this, then it could lead to multiple hits during a game. This is not so much a problem at the professional level because pitching coaches are paid to pinpoint these problems. Now at the amateur level, there are times where the pitching coach will not always be able to watch every pitch of a bullpen. In these cases, it is vital that the catcher knows what to look for and try to make adjustments.

Pitch Design can be a scary topic because many people like to use big words before breaking it down into digestible information. I have been lucky enough to be around coaches who can explain the process in an easy to understand manner. I felt the need to write this blog not only to have coaches teach this information to their catchers, but also to make pitch design an easier task to tackle. If you can take a few days to truly understand how all the metrics of ball flight work, then you’ll be able to hit the ground running. I’m not saying you’ll be an expert after a couple of days but you’ll be able to start developing the skill of pitch design. Like many of the technological advancements, pitch design is making observations even more clear than before.