In this post, I talk about some of the basic pitch design concepts. These concepts are great at applying to training early high school (14u-16u) pitchers as they start to learn and refine their pitch arsenal. However, the concepts explained in this article apply to any pitcher but above the high school level, you may want to consider a higher budget for your pitch design technology. Using an upgraded camera like a Sony RX 100 to shoot at 1000fps or access to a Rapsodo unit compared to an iPhone and a Diamond Kinetics ball will give you a lot more detail.
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Introduction
It seems like some people misinterpret pitch design and think that you need really expensive technology to accomplish it - while that may be true at the professional level where guys are trying to squeeze out every last bit of nastiness with their pitches - at the youth level that is not the case!
With a setup as simple as a Diamond Kinetics Pitch Tracker ball and your smartphone camera you can start to get an idea of the way their pitches move and how well they play off one another.
Diamond Kinetics Pitch Metrics
The Diamond Kinetics Pitch Tracker ball has unbelievable bang for your buck. Costing around $100 US, it is well worth the price in my opinion. The ball tracks a lot of metrics but there are only three that I bother using most times. The three metrics that matter most are Velocity, Spin Rate, and Spin Direction. Lets quickly go over the two spin metrics that the Pitch Tracker Ball collects.
If you are looking to purchase a Pitch Tracker ball follow this link. And no, this is not an affiliate link and Diamond Kinetics did not ask me to promote their product.
Spin Rate:
This is the measurement of revolutions per minute of the baseball as it travels to the plate. I am sure most have heard of this measurement as it has become a highly talked about measurement on TV when watching baseball games these days.
The challenge with this measurement at the youth level is that it is hard to conceptualize what a good spin rate is vs a bad one because of the velocity fluctuations.
Thankfully, Driveline Baseball created a solution called Bauer Units.
Bauers Units = Spin Rate / Velocity
This formula allows us to isolate the raw spin of the baseball without the varying velocities. We can then compare the Bauer Units of an MLB pitcher to the Bauer Units of a High School Freshmen who throws 70mph.
For quick reference here are some of the most common pitches thrown and their average velocity, spin rate, and of course Bauer Units.
So while the Diamond Kinetics Pitch Tracker ball does not collect this measurement itself - it gives you all the data required to measure it. For an easy way to get the Bauer Units of each pitch thrown throughout your bullpen, I created a Bullpen Charting Program that has that feature built in - you can download the program for free here.
If you want more information on Bauer Units you can read Driveline's blog Bauer Units and Pitch Comparison
Spin Direction:
Spin Direction is not as commonly talked about as spin rate but it is equally if not more important when teaching younger players how their pitches play off one another.
Not to be confused with Spin Axis, this measurement shows the direction the ball spins (basically the direction of break from the Pitcher's point of view).
In the Pitch Tracker App, this measurement is displayed as time (for example 12:41). The app will also display the spin direction as a visual with a clock - the arrow will either indicate backspin, topspin (only curveballs typically have topspin), or Gyro spin (which is the ball moving in a sideways manner forming a circle).
In a perfect model, a 4-seam would have a spin direction of 12:00 and a curveball would have a spin direction of 6:00. But with the variance to arm slot, grip, etc - this is hardly the case.
Based on my experience and seeing others use the ball in the community the common spin direction for RHP's will look something like this:
4-Seam = around 12:30-1:00
2-Seam = around 1:00-2:00
Change-Up = around 1:30-2:30
Curveball = around 7:00 (top spun)
Sliders = varies drastically from pitcher to pitcher.
Overlooked Fundamentals of Pitch Design
Now that we have covered these two metrics let's talk about the two things that are often overlooked when working with youth athletes on their pitch arsenal.
Pitch Grips.
The first and often overlooked (at least at the youth level) is pitch grips.
This past off-season while working with the Guelph Royals Elite 15u pitching staff you would not believe how many guys had funky grips on their pitches that results in an inefficient spin rate and or spin direction.
This is where the Diamond Kinetics ball or something more expensive like Rapsodo can give you a good idea of how their ball is moving and if they are getting good spin on the ball.
The big thing I have been noticing this off-season is how ineffective most guys fastballs are. Some have very inefficient grips on their 4-seam which throws off the spin direction (and probably spin efficiency, which is unfortunately not measured by the Diamond Kinetics ball).
I had a great conversation the other day on Instagram spit-balling ideas on why inefficient fastball grips can go unnoticed and unchanged by the athlete. My hypothesis - at a young age they gripped the ball oddly because of their small hand size relative to the baseball. You'll often hear coaches instruct players to use 3-fingers (I advocate this as well) with young players. Regardless of the reason, here are some things to look out for with an athlete's fastball grip.
The two most common things I see with the Fastball grip is 1: not hooking the seams with their fingertips, and 2: positioning their thumb either too far into the middle of the ball, or on the side of the ball.
The first picture here shows an example of what a good grip looks like - notice how the fingertips are placed on the seams.
This allows us to get a good pull down on seams at release and feel like the ball is "ripping" out of our hand.
The second picture is what it looks like when the athlete starts sliding the fingers down onto the leather - this may cause the ball to start sliding out at release and decrease spin rate.
These pictures showcase a good and bad thumb positioning on the ball.
The first picture is how a lot of guys will position their thumb, by tucking it in and on the seam, positioned in the center of their two fingers above. In the second picture you will see the same grip but from a different angle - this time showcasing both the thumb positioning and the fingertips hooking the seams.
The third picture shows the thumb positioning more on the side of the ball and the fingertips hanging down onto the leather. When we combine these two issues we can also see how much I am choking the ball in the grip. This starts to resemble more of a curveball grip than a fastball at that point and can not only cut spin rate but velocity as well.
As coaches or players we want to make sure to look at our grip to ensure we are setting ourselves up for the best spin and velocity - often times a simple grip adjustment can increase velocity by a couple of mph or spin rate by a few hundred.
A good case study for us to look at is an athlete I have been working with to adjust his fastball grip.
In prior years I have always noticed that his ball doesn't move like a traditional 4-seam and there certainly seemed like a lot of deception with it considering he got plenty of swings and misses despite throwing with below average velocity for our age group.
Once I got my hands on the Diamond Kinetics ball I wanted to see how exactly his ball was moving. And to my amazement, he was practically throwing sliders instead of fastballs. In his first bullpen with the pitch tracker ball, he threw nothing but fastballs with "Gyro" spin direction - meaning the ball was spinning in an almost perfect circle motion (see picture 1 below).
We talked about his grip, how the ball was spinning and played with some grip adjustments. After throwing a couple with regular balls we finished with one on the Pitch Tracker ball and long and behold - he PR'ed at 68mph with a much better spin direction (picture 2).
We can clearly see that the ball spinning with backspin vs gyro spin can have a significant effect on velocity.
Here is the bullpen chart from his short pitch design pen that day (we threw pitches with regular balls before pitch 18 to work on his grip).
The grip on off-speed pitches are equally important but guys often have a pretty good feel for their off-speed early on because of how much they are coached on it.
I will, however, touch on a few points for each pitch.
Curveballs:
The biggest thing we want to work on with the curve is putting as little pressure on the index finger as possible, this will help to ensure we get topspin on the ball and a closer 12-6 break (depending on your arm slot of course) - next we want to ensure our wrist is in a supinated position.
The pictures below show two different wrist positioning's. The less supinated grip will result in a more slider-like pitch.
Change-ups:
For change-ups, I find that coaches really over teach the circle change grip. I find that this causes a lot of athletes to have a poor feel for the pitch and end up having the ball slide out at release and get a less than ideal spin direction on the pic.
I simply encourage guys to drop their thumb down and position it where they normally position it for the fastball grip.
There is obviously a lot of variance in pitch grips in little league players all the way up to the Big Leagues - but these are just some quick tips to try before moving onto more experimentation.
If you want to dive deeper into pitch grips and gain some perspective from professional players I recommend following Rob Friedman aka the Pitching Ninja on Twitter. Additionally, Trevor Bauer put out a phenomenal video on his pitch grips years ago - I still refer back to this video often - you can watch that video here.
Arm Slots:
To create the best tunneling effect between two pitches it is important that each pitch an athlete throws comes out of an almost identical arm slot.
Pitch tunneling is when two different pitches travel through the same "tunnel" ie. path/trajectory towards the plate until one or both split away from the other pitch. It is ideal for this split-off to happen as late as possible to give the hitter little time to decipher the two pitches from one another until he has to commit to the act of swinging or not. Pitch tunnels are often shown with a fastball and offspeed overlay.
Pitching Ninja has an extensive library of overlay videos and many more pitching clips that he generously shares in this Dropbox folder here.
For younger players, keeping their arm slot consistent can be a real challenge. And worst, many have no idea how much they either drop or raise their arm slot on their off-speed pitches. This is where some simple camera work can pay huge dividends before moving into more advanced pitch design work.
The Curveball is the most common culprit for this. Depending on the way they are taught the curve and what type of ideal break they have been told to look for, guys can end up raising their arm slot on the curve a lot. This is all in an effort to create a 12-6 break.
For guys that throw 3/4 and especially low 3/4, this can be disastrous for the effectiveness of their pitch arsenal.
There are also instances where guys will drop their arm slot when throwing the curve for whatever reason.
Here is an example of where the two arm slots don't coincide:
It's a little hard to see, but, the curveball slot is clearly lower than the fastball.
For a hitter with good vision, this can be a cake walk to determine which pitch type is coming.
The picture on the right is an example of the two slots aligning better - creating a much tighter tunnel as the two pitches travel towards the plate.
Pitch Overlays:
Now that we have addressed some overlooked fundamentals to pitch design lets talk about piecing all of this together with pitch overlays.
With a smartphone camera and a tripod, you can start to take video of your athletes throwing to get a deeper understanding of how they throw their pitches and how well they tunnel.
Making Overlays
To begin your setup place the tripod approximately 5 feet away from the mound and off-set to the athlete's release point.
Sometimes 5 feet is not possible, just do the best you can with it. If you are too close to the mound you will end up missing some of the shot and the ball flight of the pitch might get cut off.
Do a couple of test pitches to make sure you can see the release point and ball flight fine and then start recording.
Record different pitches from the same tripod setup. If you end up moving the tripod even slightly it will throw off the overlay effect and you won't get as clear of an idea of how two pitches interact.
Make sure to take enough video so that you can get different pitch types with a similar location. You can run into this a lot when comparing high curve-balls to low fastballs for instance. The tunneling effect of those two pitches will not be very good just because of the trajectory of the ball. A better comparison would be a high fastball to a low curveball.
In terms of editing the clips together, there are some apps that I have heard do it well. Hudl Technique seems to be one people use a lot - I believe they record the videos inside of the app.
The method I use is just on a Windows computer with a free video editing software called Lightworks. You can download the program for free here. The free version only allows you to export at 720p so the overlay can be a bit hard to see depending on the backdrop. If you are on a Mac, iMovie will work perfectly.
Learning how to cut the clips and apply the overlay can be a bit tedious but Taiki Green (former Driveline employee now co-founder of Watch Momentum) did a demonstrative video on his Twitter explaining how to do it in iMovie, click here to watch. The same concepts apply across all software.
Overlays are the best way at beginning to understand how a pitchers arsenal plays off each other and how they should go about attacking hitters. It also can give you visual evidence of the fundamentals mentioned above.
Examples:
This video shows an example of an overlay taken from too far back and not off-set enough.
You can see the ball flight - but you cannot hone in on the release of each pitch from this view.
This overlay shows a loopy curveball with a visible "hump" to it where it pops up from the trajectory of the fastball despite similar locations.
Here's an example of an overlay with two different locations.
You cannot tell much about the interaction between the two pitches - except at release.
This video was used to show the athlete the difference between the previous loopy curveball and this sharper (ie. harder) thrown curve and his fastball.
There is not as much of a "hump" with the harder thrown curve as there was when he babied it.
I figure the GIF above is a good place to end on. Literally un-hittable. With just introducing some basic pitch design concepts and with a little help from budget-friendly technology like the Diamond Kinetics Pitch Tracker even young pitcher's can start to refine their craft and dominate hitters all season long.