Dominating The American Pastime
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There are very few moments in ones life where his very soul is lit on fire. These special moments arent planned, and dont occur every day. One of these soul-shaking experiences for me is pitching in baseball. The anxiety of standing alone on the pitching mound is rivaled only by the greatest moments in my baseball career.
If you have every played a wide variety of organized sports, then you will undoubtedly agree that hitting a baseball is one of the hardest aspects of the sports world. It tends to be extremely frustrating, because most major league players cant get an official hit one out of three times. Anyone who could ever succeed half the time would go down in the Hall of Fame as the greatest baseball player of all time! With batting being this hard on its own, having a good pitcher throwing the ball to the batter can make it many times harder.
Batting is one of the most important parts of baseball, but its equal nemesis is pitching. A pitcher can single handedly dominate a game, while no other positions in baseball offer this amazing ability. In order to understand the vast capacity of pitching, you must first become familiar with what is commonly referred to as the American Pastime; Baseball.
The modern version on the game was developed in the United States towards the eighteenth century. It quickly grew on American citizens, and by the mid nineteenth century, became known as the American pastime, and the national sport of the United States of America.
In order to understand the fundamentals of pitching, we must first get familiar with the game of baseball as a whole. The sport is played with two teams engaging in an offense against defense scenario. Each team must have at least nine players, but usually more are submitted on the roster. The team on offense sends one man at a time to stand at a marker called home plate. This man is known as the batter. The defending team spreads out 9 players and attempt to thwart the batters attempts to place the ball where the players arent standing. The defending team relies heavily on their pitcher to keep the batter from hitting the ball. In this way, a good pitcher can entirely take over a baseball game. The game is played with a bat and a ball, in which the pitcher will throw a hard, spherical, leather-covered, fist size ball at the batter. The batter then proceeds to hit the thrown ball with a long cylinder bat, made of either wood or aluminum. A team scores runs only while at bat by advancing the previous batters in a counterclockwise rotation around three “checkpoints” called bases, and finally coming around to the original batting position and touching a fourth final base known as home plate. The game is played with no time limit, resulting in some games lasting up to four or five hours. This can be extremely hard on a pitcher, especially if he intends to last for every inning. In some games, I have been forced to throw over a hundred and fifty pitches in a single game!
Baseball is an unusual sport compared to the world famed soccer or basketball, and while many athletes thrive on being able to simply try harder and perform at a more competitive level with a sport, baseball is quite different. Baseball differs in that you have to relax in order to throw, hit, or catch a baseball. One of my dads many quotes towards baseball that I have heard literally a thousand times is “be quick, but dont hurry”. I simply thought of it as normal non-important “crazy talk”, as we all think our parents speak, but the older I got, the more I learned that this held true in most sports techniques, but it wasnt until I applied it to pitching that I could grasp the full meaning of his message.
In pitching, accuracy thrives over working hard, and without having certain precise motions while also being able to hurl the ball, you wont even be able to make it over the plate for a strike! The more patience that we can muster, the more accuracy we will have while pitching. Pitchers often find themselves speeding up their delivery, which can cause many mishaps. The key to being an effective pitcher is to slow down, take your time, and most importantly, take control of the game.
Although pitching sounds like it shouldnt be that hard, I assure you, it is. Imagine throwing a crumpled piece of paper across a relatively large room at a small trashcan. Chances are you wont hit it very often. This is similar to throwing the baseball at the catchers mitt, except you must throw the ball at speeds of over eighty miles per hour to avoid from it getting hit.
Ever since I was young, I have lived, breathed, and eaten pitching. Naturally when I started playing baseball, I wanted to be able to take over the game. After several years of playing, however, I found that the only true way I could achieve this was by becoming a pitcher, and mastering the art of throwing fast. When little league players start out, all they want to do is throw fast. I had fallen into this blinding trap as well, based on that the only way to succeed in pitching was to be able to overpower the opposing batter with undeniable speed.
I focused on this for several years, until I came upon a young pitcher one day, who struck out (that is, retired the batter without him even touching the ball) every player on my team before I got to the plate to hit. When I approached, I saw that he wasnt even throwing fast! I thought to myself that it would be a piece of cake to hit this guy, but was easily fooled, because as soon as he threw the ball, I clinched my teeth, drew back my bat, and swung with power in the calibers of John Henry, that would surely send my ball two field lengths over the fence. To my incredible dismay, the ball bounced in the dirt at my feet as I swung, although I had just seconds before seen the ball about waist high. This seemed like witchcraft! I continued to take the same approach, only this time, with even more confidence. I swung twice as hard as before, yet the same result forcing a second strike was placed in the count. As I started doubting my own eye-sight, I decided to simply watch the third pitch, and see what magic powers he was putting on the ball. Sure enough, he threw the third pitch, more than a foot too high, but as the ball came to the plate, it suddenly, almost as if gravity increased tenfold, dropped to a perfect strike. This was my first encounter with the world famous curve ball.
Taking what I had learned from batting, I worked on many varieties of pitches. With help from coaches and players, it doesnt take long to come up with a vast arsenal of pitches. Perfecting these pitches though, can take multiple lifetimes. A fastball is the most basic of pitches, one that will go straight or cut slightly either way, but a pitch