THROWING HEAT
The fastball is baseball’s glamour pitch. Teaching pitchers to throw it more effectively takes careful planning and a comprehensive approach to player development.
By Abigail Funk
Abigail Funk is an Assistant Editor at Coaching Management. She can be reached at: afunk@MomentumMedia.com
It used to be that Major League scouts were the only people at baseball games holding radar guns. But not anymore. Now, radar devices are found in the hands of college pitching coaches during bullpen sessions and high school head coaches at practice—even Little League coaches have them. So it’s hard to blame pitchers for focusing on what speed they just clocked: After all, they’re just trying to keep up.
“There is an obsession with velocity,” says Vanderbilt University Pitching Coach Derek Johnson. “Last year there were more 100 mile per hour pitches thrown in the big leagues than in any year prior. And the up-and-coming generation of pitchers have better arms than their predecessors from 10 years ago. The expectation of having a faster fastball is a big part of the reason young pitchers are feeling pressure to throw harder and throw harder earlier in their careers.”
Billy Milos, a Midwest scout for the Minnesota Twins, agrees the public has a fascination with high velocity pitches. “It’s become all about power,” he says. “What do people want to see in baseball? They want to see homeruns and triple-digit pitches. Fans are certainly enamored with the ‘wow’ factor of the fastball.”
But the fastball’s appeal is more than seam deep. “A pitcher must have a fastball that’s at least good enough to set up his other pitches,” says Mitch Pruemer, Pitching Coach at Hoopeston (Ill.) High School and a former NCAA Division I pitcher. “I don’t think a college player has to necessarily be able to go out and throw 90 or 95 miles per hour on every pitch, but he can’t expect to get by throwing fastballs that are 75 to 80 miles an hour either.”
So how do you keep your pitchers’ fastballs up to speed? Is it a stronger arm? Accelerating their delivery? Perhaps a longer stride? And how do you work with your pitchers to optimize their pitching performances? These are questions pitching coaches, a strength and conditioning coach, and a Major League scout help answer here.
Speed Matters
The simple definition of velocity is distance divided by time—on a radar gun, miles per hour. But a great fastball isn’t just a high speed pitch. Several factors make for an effective fastball, including how and where it is released from the pitcher’s hand and how fast it appears to be traveling. However, just like in real estate, the most important factors are location, location, location.
“A well-spotted fastball is the best pitch in baseball,” says Brent Kemnitz, who has spent nearly three decades as Pitching Coach at Wichita State University. “I want all of our pitchers first and foremost to have a two- and a four-seam fastball they can spot anywhere they want. And we work from there, adding a straight changeup, then a slider or a curveball. But we always work from the fastball. It’s the platform for all the other pitches.”
Dick Mills, a former MLB pitcher, private pitching coach, and co-author of The Science and Art of Baseball Pitching, agrees that a fastball is the most important pitch in a pitcher’s repertoire. “However,” he says, “if he can’t put it where he wants in the strike zone and instead just throws it right over the plate, batters will eventually catch up to it—even if the pitch comes in at 100 miles an hour. You want your pitchers throwing as hard as they possibly can, but they have to be able to locate it, too.”
University of Tennessee Pitching Coach Mike Bell trains pitchers for greater velocity by telling them to ignore everything else—including accuracy—at least at first. “I’ll say, ‘Okay, this is a velocity bullpen today. When we’re warming up, I don’t care where you throw the ball, but you have to speed it up,’” he explains. “I’m not worried about hitting an exact spot—I may split the plate in half and ask him to hit the inner or outer half, but we’re teaching the arm to be quick, not precise at this point.”
Likewise, for pitchers whose fastball has velocity but lacks command, he’ll ask them to focus on placement alone. “If a guy is having problems hitting the corners, I’ll have him slow down his pitches and put the ball exactly where I tell him, not worrying about how hard he’s throwing,” Bell says. “Once he can do that, we’ll add more velocity little by little until he’s back up to his previous speed.”
At Vanderbilt, Johnson worked with closer Casey Weathers—a former outfielder who started pitching after his first season of junior college ball—in 2006 to speed up his fastball. After working with Johnson, Weathers went from throwing in the mid 80s the previous year to the mid to upper 90s this past season. The added velocity definitely helped his stock rise: An unsigned 25th-round draft choice of the Detroit Tigers in 2006, Weathers was selected in the first round (eighth overall) this June by the Colorado Rockies.
“Casey had a good arm, but he wasn’t very aware of what his body was doing,” Johnson says. “He knew he needed to make some changes, and that’s a critical first step. A guy has to really want to throw the ball harder. Casey was very methodical in his delivery and that’s why he had good command of his pitches, but he needed to alter his style to be more athletic.”
Milos agrees, saying that it may sound silly at first, but a pitcher absolutely has to want to throw harder. “It’s having a throw-hard mentality,” he says. “There are ‘finesse pitchers’ out there who just try to mix up their pitches and locate them well, but they lack a certain amount of aggressiveness, and that usually hurts them. One of the first things I suggest discussing is your pitchers’ mental approach to throwing the baseball harder.”
Developing The Tools
A desire to change is so important because for most pitchers, building a better fastball will require adjustments both on and off the mound. There are many different philosophies on improving a pitcher’s fastball, but most include some form of strength and conditioning. Mike Joseph,
Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach for baseball at the University of Notre Dame, centers his training philosophy for pitchers on full-body workouts rather than focusing on just building a stronger throwing arm.
"As a rule, pitchers are not as athletic as position players or athletes in other sports because often all they’ve ever done since they were kids is pitch,” Joseph says. “Their agility, movement, balance, and coordination may not be on par with the rest of the team. Their arms may be in great shape, but developing lower-body and core strength will help them improve their fastball because that’s where a pitcher’s force and momentum come from.
“The athletic trainer and I look at our pitchers’ mechanics and combine our observations with the pitching coach’s to create individualized programs for each pitcher,” Joseph continues. “If we know someone should be able to throw harder, but he exhibits poor flexibility in the low back and hamstrings, that’s probably preventing him from coming straight down the mound in his delivery. He’s probably falling off to the side of the mound, which causes his fastball to lose momentum before he even lets go of the ball.”
Improved back and hip flexibility allows for faster hip rotation, which helps build momentum before the release. Joseph isn’t a fan of static stretching to improve flexibility, so he has his pitchers do a lot of dynamic stretching work instead. The pitching staff performs medicine ball work in warmups, and uses hurdles and hip rotations for hip mobility improvement. For upper-body and back flexibility, stick stretches are common in the Notre Dame weightroom.
The Fighting Irish pitchers do weight training year-round, but much less of it during the season. “Our in-season lifting program has a lot to do with regeneration,” Joseph says. “The day after a live bullpen session or a game, our pitchers work with light plates and use tubing for shoulder prehab work, just to get the blood flowing. We place more emphasis on lower-body work for power and explosion from the whole body, not just the arms and the core.”
Kemnitz has his pitchers play catch and do long toss drills during practice to improve strength. “I believe that throwing a baseball the right way is the best way to improve,” he says. “I think it builds up the arm. I know there is some dispute on whether or not long catch will help improve velocity, but it at least builds arm strength, and there are certainly benefits to that.”
Master Mechanics
Mills feels that strength training and long toss drills, while helpful in strengthening the arm, shouldn’t be the only weapons in a pitching coach’s arsenal. In his view, it’s much more important to address a pitcher’s mechanics on the mound than his performance in the weightroom. “A pitcher’s body is like a big rubber band,” Mills says. “To throw a maximum speed fastball, he has to be able to stretch as many muscles as he can, as quickly as possible.
“Another key part of the pitching motion is stride length,” he continues. “The longer his stride, the more of a rubber band effect he’s creating. Look at the explosiveness Nolan Ryan had as a pitcher—he moved his body very quickly into an exceptionally long stride. His stride length even exceeded his height. The further a pitcher can extend his body before putting his front foot down, the greater the momentum he creates.”
So what should you focus on when evaluating a pitcher’s delivery? A smooth motion with no hesitation is an ideal starting point. “There are certain standards we look for,” Bell explains. “Having a leg draw, pelvic tilt, or scapula load in a pitcher’s upper body are all problems. The legs, trunk, and torso are the strongest parts of the body, so I want to make sure they’re being utilized to the fullest extent possible. Pitchers who can use their whole body effectively, not just their arm, will throw harder and last longer.”
Mills says that power is only effective when pointed in the right direction. “One of my top priorities when I’m evaluating a pitcher is seeing whether he develops forward momentum,” Mills says. “When a pitcher is on the rubber, you want him to always be moving toward the plate, never sideways. Why go in any direction other than toward your intended target?”
Kemnitz places a lot of emphasis on how the ball leaves a pitcher’s hand. “I want to see a clean ball rotation coming out of the hand,” he says. “If the ball jumps or hops out because the hand is on top of the ball instead of behind it, he’s interrupting a clean path to the strike zone and losing velocity.”
It’s no secret that every pitcher’s body and delivery are different, so some aspects of coaching the fastball are more art than science—such as figuring out what needs fixing and when it’s best to let a pitcher stick with what’s working. “I’ve heard of coaches cloning their pitchers so their deliveries look exactly the same, and I don’t think that’s right,” Kemnitz says. “You have to work with each one to figure out what his strengths are. You may not be able to figure that out right away, but eventually you’ll see it.”
Milos, who has seen pitchers of every size, shape, and delivery style, agrees. “Even the arm slot a pitcher uses shows tremendous variety,” he says. “The conventional wisdom is that the hard throwers come from the high three-quarter slot, yet there are pitchers—like Jake Peavy of the San Diego Padres—who throw from the mid to low three-quarter slot and have just as much velocity. If something works for a pitcher, and he still has velocity and control, don’t make him change his style.”
Roll The Tape
When it comes to teaching proper mechanics for an effective fastball, most coaches agree that a picture, or a series of pictures actually, is worth a thousand words and then some. “Most kids are visual learners,” Bell says. “I could talk to my pitchers about technique all day, but when they actually see themselves, it’s much easier for them to understand what is and is not working.”
At Wichita State, Kemnitz videotapes all of his incoming pitchers, then puts the film away until the pitcher comes to him for help. “If you try to change them right away and tinker with their delivery and they don’t have immediate success, they’ll think, ‘My way was better’ and revert back to their original form,” he says. “If they come to me asking for my help, I have a much better time working with them because that’s when they’re really open to my suggestions.”
Bullpen practice sessions can differ from game performances, so it’s important to look at video from both settings. Gameday nerves can be a big part of the equation because they can influence a pitcher’s mechanics, but if you can show your pitcher exactly what his ideal delivery looks like during bullpen sessions, he’ll have a better chance of duplicating those mechanics in a game.
“Sometimes, guys exhibit different habits in their bullpen sessions than on the mound,” Milos says. “It’s great to have your kids practicing indoors during the winter, but you also need to see them outside and in game situations. It’s like trying to fix them without really seeing what their flaws are. You need to scout them first.”
“However you get your pitchers to develop, you have to make a constant effort to do it,” Kemnitz says. “My philosophy for teaching pitching is based on three things—movement, control, and velocity. Movement comes first, then control, and velocity last, but certainly not least. My pitchers and I don’t have a say in how baseball has developed. Velocity has become a major part of the game, and we have to keep up.”
