If you've been reading my blogs over the years, or attended any of my camps or lessons, you know there are a few key baseball strategy principles I teach all my players. Two of the big ones are:
#1, For Pitchers: Strike 1 is the best pitch in baseball.
#2, For Batters: Only judge your hitting in terms of "Quality At-Bats," not in terms of hits and outs.
Last week Gamechanger, the free mobile scorekeeping app, has proven both of these axioms to be true by analyzing 7 million games played and over 1 billion pitches thrown.
Yes, you read that correctly. SEVEN MILLION GAMES. ONE BILLION PITCHES.
Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci recently wrote an article about GameChanger and their findings (http://www.si.com/mlb/2016/02/11/big-data-gamechanger-high-school-majors) and the company has made a PDF of their most important data-driven discoveries available for free at: http://home.gc.com/redefining-success/.
Here's how this data can help young players have more success:
Pitchers are more effective when they get ahead in the count with Strike 1. The GameChanger PDF explains this perfectly and coaches should be stressing Strike 1 as much as possible throughout the season.
As hitters, if we know the pitcher is REALLY trying to throw Strike 1, and because in Little League we KNOW that the first pitch is going to be a fastball 99.9% of the time, the first pitch of the at-bat is often the BEST one to attack.
(A quick disclaimer: in Minors or other lower levels of kid pitch where the guys on the mound aren't nearly as consistent as Intermediate or Major level pitchers, we can basically ignore "first pitch hitting" as an overall strategy; rather, those young hitters should be swinging at every hittable pitch, regardless of when it's thrown during the at-bat.)
All hitters should be ready to swing aggressively at any pitch in the hitting zone, but especially as pitchers get more consistent throwing strikes, the first pitch fastball of every at-bat is a tremendous opportunity to hit the ball hard and rack up a ton of Quality At-Bats.
Of course, the first pitch isn't always a strike, but we MUST be ready to attack it if it is.
The "automatically take the first pitch" strategy is the worst advice we can possibly give young hitters, and 1 Billion pitches of data now proves that!
I hope you check out the GameChanger PDF as there is some really cool info in there of tremendous value to players and coaches, and if you plan on still keeping score with a pen and paper this season, you should really check out GameChanger's iphone app instead: it's really easy to use, and it's free!
Here's the link to their study one more time, http://home.gc.com/redefining-success/, and you can download the GameChanger app for free in the App Store.
I hope your season is off to a great start!