Small Movements Produce Big Results

In this Guest Blog, Oran Sears, Certified Instructor has some great points about the quality of your practices– I recently received an email from a young pitcher I had worked with some time ago. She said that she couldn’t understand the slump that she was in and that she was frustrated. In her words “I have no idea what I’m doing wrong”. I went out to watch her play a game and it took me all of 1 warm-up pitch to see what the problem was: everything. Don’t get me wrong, she was still doing all the drills we asked her to do – but she wasn’t doing them with a purpose. She was just going through the motions and sadly enough, they just weren’t the correct motions.
After her game she came to me and said “Well?” Well what? Did I see the game? Yes. Do I understand why you are frustrated? Certainly. Would you be pitching on my team? Absolutely not. And the reason has nothing to do with the outcome of the game or with her ability to learn to perfect her pitch. You see, she was pitching exactly the way she did her drills so I knew she had the ability to become an expert at what she was practicing. That was the problem.
I agreed to do 1 lesson with her and with that lesson we would determine if she has what it takes to continue pitching. She agreed and we set a date. When she showed up for her lesson I asked her to go through her warm up and I just sat and watched. She looked over at me a few times expecting feedback as the ball was going all over the place. I just nodded my head and told her to keep throwing.
After about 10 minutes I got up and asked her: “what are the rules of the pitch?” Without missing a beat she was able to tell me exactly what the body should look like, and do, during the pitch. I asked her to start over and to let me guide her this time. After a few minutes of calling out queues she started throwing like the kid I remembered, but she began growing frustrated that I was picking apart every little detail “as if they all really matter”.
Finally I sat down on my bucket, asked her to take a knee, and we had a heart to heart. My question to her was simple: “Is it fair to say that when you do all the little things I ask you to do, your pitches are successful??” She thought about it and started “Yes, but…” I cut her off. “Then why do you get on the rubber and ignore all the things that you know will make your pitches work properly??” Her response? “I just don’t think about it”.
Her reply is exactly why some pitchers rise above the rest, and others stay behind. Great pitchers think about it. Every pitch. Every drill. Every time. All the time. Great pitchers practice the parts of the pitch – not the pitch itself. They think. They feel. They perfect. Only then do they move on. The tiny detail that mediocre pitchers compromise and think “that’s not really that important” – that is the detail that will allow the next pitcher to rise above you. Being the best takes practicing the little details and then putting it all together in the end. It takes thinking about it and caring about it.
We ended our lesson with me telling her that she already knows what to do. She understands what individual things make up the pitch. She just needs to decide whether she cares enough about her own success to focus on the details. That will be difference between hoping she’ll be successful and knowing she’ll be successful. If she doesn’t set a target she will hit it every time. Pitching is a very detailed activity and only the detail oriented pitchers will be successful.
Share this article if you know someone who can benefit from this advice and keep in mind that this applies to every aspect of our game. We don’t throw, catch, field, hit, bunt, and slap. We do individual tiny motions that together make up these activities, and those tiny motions are what we should focus on to be the best.

***Note:  Oran is a Certified Instructor in the northern Virginia area.  His contact information is on the Instructors page of our website.