Latest / From the Coach's Mouth / Episode 58: Rich Balswick

Transcript

Episode 58: Rich Balswick · From the Coach's Mouth

• 0:00
  My inclination is to say let's not be in such a hurry to get
• 0:05
  these kids into a game. In fact, I made this note to
• 0:09
  myself this morning. I was awake half the night last
• 0:13
  night thinking a little bit about some of our conversations.
• 0:16
  Let us not be in such a hurry to get our kids into a game.
• 0:21
  Whether you live Northeast West or.
• 0:22
  South The best last kitchen phone comes from the coach's
• 0:28
  mouth. Welcome to the From the Coach's
• 0:44
  Mouth podcast with your hosts Jay Bolden and Ken Krause.
• 1:04
  Yes, hello everyone. Welcome to the From the Coach's
• 1:07
  Mouth podcast. This is Ken Krause.
• 1:09
  Here is always with the man who puts the N into Indiana, Mr. Jay
• 1:13
  Bolden. Jay, how we doing today?
• 1:15
  I'm doing pretty good, Ken. That's a good one.
• 1:17
  I haven't heard that one before. So you're just getting wittier
• 1:20
  and wittier as as you get older and older, buddy, which which I
• 1:23
  absolutely appreciate. So I'm doing good man.
• 1:26
  Got to share a little story. Kid played her first tournament
• 1:28
  this past weekend. Team did really good.
• 1:30
  We went three and two on the weekend, rotated everybody in
• 1:34
  Ken, everybody batted, switch positions as much as we could.
• 1:37
  They're 11 years old, we're trying to develop them.
• 1:39
  It was a really good weekend. Just struggle a little bit at
• 1:42
  the at the plate early and then started to put it together at
• 1:45
  the end. It was her first tournament,
• 1:46
  knocking the rest off. But honestly, it was a great
• 1:48
  weekend for them. Super proud of them.
• 1:50
  They're all getting better and their and their softball IQ is
• 1:53
  growing. So how about you?
• 1:54
  What did you do this past week or weekend?
• 1:56
  And nothing. But.
• 2:00
  No, I'm just kidding. I but I did want to comment on
• 2:02
  you. You know, you're very wimpy.
• 2:04
  They're rotating all the kids, letting them play, letting
• 2:07
  everybody bat. You're ruining their chances at
• 2:10
  a college scholarship, Jay. Yeah, You know, I saw so many of
• 2:13
  them this weekend at that C level tournament that we played.
• 2:16
  And I mean, they were like lining up to talk to the players
• 2:19
  after the game. Can I?
• 2:20
  Could I I couldn't believe it. You know, I think I saw Patty
• 2:23
  Gossel there. I think she flew in from
• 2:25
  Oklahoma to go to to the tournament and was there waiting
• 2:28
  to talk some kids. But yeah, no, none of none of
• 2:31
  them were there. And you know what the IT was a
• 2:34
  great weekend. And and I talked, you know, I'm
• 2:36
  not the head coach. I talked to a head coach.
• 2:38
  I said, you know what, look at this weekend, this is a great
• 2:40
  weekend. There are no parents here to
• 2:41
  talk to you after any of these games.
• 2:43
  What a great weekend. Everybody was happy.
• 2:45
  Everybody played and everybody got better.
• 2:48
  You know, I think next year we'll get a little more serious.
• 2:50
  But right now, like we're just letting them play and the kids
• 2:53
  are having fun and it's fun to see them learn and grow.
• 2:56
  Yeah, well, that's, that's the key, Jay.
• 2:57
  That's what it's all about. I'm glad that everybody was in
• 3:00
  there. They had the chance to play,
• 3:02
  find out if they like it, get a chance to figure out kind of,
• 3:07
  you know, what they can do. You guys got a chance to see
• 3:09
  what else to work on. I mean, that's really what it's
• 3:12
  all about. You know what was awesome, Ken,
• 3:15
  is we have 3 pitchers on our team.
• 3:17
  Every kid went 2 innings, 2 innings, 2 innings, 2 innings, 2
• 3:20
  innings, 2 innings. Everybody got a chance to
• 3:22
  develop, to work on new pitches, to do the things we needed to
• 3:25
  do. And you know what?
• 3:26
  We still ended up with a winning record on the weekend.
• 3:28
  We went three and two. I mean, you can't beat that.
• 3:31
  So, yeah, not that the wins are all that important at this
• 3:34
  level, but I think that that is important just from the
• 3:37
  standpoint that they got a chance to see that this works
• 3:40
  and it's fun and and they everybody get a chance to
• 3:43
  contribute. Absolutely.
• 3:45
  And I was, I was super excited. I work with all three of our
• 3:47
  pitchers, actually four. We have one that's kind of she's
• 3:49
  a little younger, but still working.
• 3:50
  So I work with all four of them. They got an opportunity to work
• 3:53
  on things in game to make help them develop with those pitches.
• 3:56
  But enough of me rambling. Speaking of pitching, we have a
• 4:01
  mentor of ours that is on today who is absolutely helped us
• 4:06
  tremendously. God give some people a little
• 4:08
  bit of background on this person.
• 4:10
  I'm so excited to dig in today and cannot wait to for people to
• 4:14
  listen to what's what what this person is going to say.
• 4:17
  All right. Well, we are really excited to
• 4:19
  speak with today's guest because he has not only been one of the
• 4:22
  premier figures in pitching in both men's and women's fast
• 4:26
  pitch over the last 30 plus years, he's also a personal
• 4:29
  friend. As a pitcher himself, this
• 4:32
  Northern California native had a very successful career playing
• 4:36
  at the highest levels of the men's game.
• 4:38
  Among his many accomplishments was being named MVP of the 1967
• 4:43
  Amateur Softball Association, now USA Softball Men's National
• 4:48
  Open Division Championship while earning runner up honors with
• 4:52
  Fairchild Falcons out of Mountain View, CA.
• 4:55
  Our guest was also a member of three National Championship
• 4:59
  teams, participated in three Olympic Sports Festivals which
• 5:03
  used to be held in non Olympic Games years, and was a three
• 5:06
  time All American Pitcher. During that time.
• 5:08
  He became an accredited teacher and taught for 10 years at Los
• 5:12
  Altos High School, but he never lost his passion, fast pitch
• 5:16
  softball, and eventually left academics to become one of the
• 5:19
  world's most successful fast pitch softball pitching
• 5:22
  instructors, primarily on the women's side of the game.
• 5:26
  For more than 30 years, he has helped hundreds of pitchers
• 5:28
  perfect their games and go on to play at all levels of collegiate
• 5:32
  softball, including one Gatorade National Softball Player of the
• 5:35
  Year, 2 Gatorade State Softball Players of the Year, and
• 5:39
  multiple All Region and Allstate Players of the Year in
• 5:42
  California at a time when the state was the ultimate hotbed
• 5:45
  for fast pitch softball. One of his best known students
• 5:48
  was UCLA's Angelica Jelly Selden, who led her team to the
• 5:52
  championship series as a freshman and went on to play
• 5:56
  professional softball in Italy before becoming a collegiate
• 5:59
  pitching coach and successful private instructor herself.
• 6:02
  He is also the author of the popular Wix Wednesday's post on
• 6:07
  Facebook, which we certainly look forward to reading each
• 6:09
  week. For all his accomplishments and
• 6:12
  accolades, however, our guest still remains a student of the
• 6:15
  game and is likely to ask questions and solicit opinions
• 6:19
  from other instructors as he is to offer his own.
• 6:22
  We can't wait to speak with him. So let's get to it.
• 6:24
  Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm from the Coach's
• 6:27
  Mouth podcast. Welcome to the one and only Rich
• 6:30
  Balswick. Welcome, Rich.
• 6:35
  Hi, Rich. We're really happy to have you
• 6:37
  here, as we said, and very excited to tap into that wealth
• 6:41
  of knowledge of yours. All right, so let's get started.
• 6:45
  Rich, we we asked this of just about all of our guests.
• 6:48
  How did you get started in fast pitch in general and even more
• 6:51
  importantly pitching specifically?
• 6:53
  How did it all start for Rich Balswick?
• 6:55
  Well, the first thing I think about is when I was about nine
• 6:59
  years old, Little League baseball had not quite got
• 7:04
  started yet in and, and so we were actually introduced to
• 7:10
  softball to start with. And so I had an uncle that
• 7:14
  played on a local town league. You know, men's fast pitch was
• 7:18
  pretty popular. This is going all the way back
• 7:20
  to like 19491950, if you can believe that.
• 7:24
  Somehow or another, I'm still only about 35 years old.
• 7:31
  That's, that's how I was introduced.
• 7:34
  I can still see the uniforms that the men wore when they when
• 7:38
  they played in those days. And for some reason the game
• 7:42
  just got a hold of me and I pitched on a for our local
• 7:48
  church as as an adult, as a 14 year old.
• 7:53
  Fortunately, there was a men's fast pitch guy that was in that
• 7:58
  area that played at the highest level who I eventually was
• 8:03
  introduced to when I was in high school.
• 8:05
  And so I, I got some foundations early, you know, especially in
• 8:10
  the realm of the rise ball and drop that, you know, has served
• 8:14
  me well through the years. I didn't have to overcome bad
• 8:18
  habits because because of this guy's, you know,
• 8:22
  professionalism, etcetera. And I just evolved at that
• 8:27
  point, playing in local town leagues and, and I eventually
• 8:31
  got a tryout the very first fall that I was a high school coach
• 8:37
  at Los Altos. As you had mentioned, that was
• 8:39
  1964. I saw my first men's national
• 8:44
  tournament in Sunnyvale, which is right next to Los Altos, back
• 8:48
  in the fall of 64, watching people pitch like Herb Dudley
• 8:53
  and so forth, Saw a rise ball that I had never seen before, a
• 8:57
  change up that I had never seen before.
• 9:01
  And so it was like I was, I, I lived in an environment where,
• 9:05
  where it was, you know, I look back on it and it was just a
• 9:08
  flood of some of the most excellent information you could
• 9:12
  possibly imagine. And it's what breaks my heart
• 9:15
  today is that, you know, so many kids get started on the wrong
• 9:21
  foot. And I, I was baptized in a way
• 9:24
  that helped me not have to overcome, you know, some real
• 9:29
  rude habits and so forth. I think that's important.
• 9:32
  Fortunate to get a try out with the Fairchild Falcons and it led
• 9:37
  me to some other teams that were quite, quite good.
• 9:41
  I suffered by having to play on the better teams.
• 9:45
  So what was what were some of those other teams you played on?
• 9:48
  Well, the thing that's crazy is that I, and I look back on this
• 9:53
  and I hate to, I hate to admit this, but I started chasing
• 9:57
  money a little bit underneath the table and that kind of stuff
• 10:01
  and bounced around way more than I should have.
• 10:04
  The Fairchild Falcon organization was fantastic and I
• 10:08
  made a mistake of leaving them after my first year, which was
• 10:13
  in the season of 1965. But they picked me up in 66 and
• 10:19
  had, you know, and I ended up pitching in my first national
• 10:21
  tournament, haven't been picked up by them and so forth.
• 10:25
  So I'll stop my answer right there.
• 10:30
  All right, so we saw you talking about working with a Major
• 10:34
  League Baseball pitcher when you were young.
• 10:36
  Were you a baseball pitcher as well?
• 10:38
  Yeah, and that's kind of an interesting sidelight.
• 10:42
  Some years ago now, I was teaching a girl how to pitch who
• 10:46
  had been taught by her mother. And we were going month after
• 10:50
  month after month. And she was so fixed in her
• 10:53
  habits of, of locking her arm and forcing her hand through the
• 10:58
  release area and so forth. And I, I must have worked with
• 11:03
  her for over a year and never made one speck of progress.
• 11:09
  And it, it caused me just incredible grief.
• 11:14
  And I felt like the good Lord Lord reminded me of of an
• 11:17
  experience that I had when I was in high school.
• 11:21
  A Major League Baseball pitcher came to town and was working
• 11:26
  with the pitchers and, and as I replay my experience and
• 11:31
  listening to this Major League pitcher, I was a either a
• 11:35
  freshman or sophomore in high school.
• 11:37
  I, I looked back on it and I realized that all I did when he
• 11:42
  was there. I mean, here we are talking, you
• 11:44
  know, about excellence personified and I'm just waiting
• 11:48
  for him to stop talking. So I a ball in my hands and back
• 11:53
  and throw it again. As it turned out, it was
• 11:56
  probably one of the bigger mistakes I ever made.
• 11:58
  I ended up having elbow problems and so forth.
• 12:01
  And, and by the time I was a sophomore in college, I couldn't
• 12:05
  pitch anymore because my mechanics were so poor.
• 12:09
  And that's part of, you know, what kind of opened the door for
• 12:12
  me on the on the softball pitching side.
• 12:15
  So here I have an opportunity to listen to somebody that knows
• 12:19
  what he's talking about. And I was probably more
• 12:22
  unteachable than the girl that I was complaining about.
• 12:27
  Couldn't I couldn't affect. And that really kind of sets the
• 12:31
  tone a little bit of a few things that are in my mind as I
• 12:34
  talk with you guys today. Is that how much goes on in the
• 12:40
  realm? And you probably know this
• 12:42
  better than I do, Jay, when, when kids come to college and
• 12:46
  they're and they're in there certain certain grooves of how
• 12:50
  to pitch a ball, it's really kind of even dangerous to play
• 12:54
  around with how much you try to change this, that or, or
• 12:58
  whatever. And I'm just so concerned about
• 13:02
  I, I was, I was a coach at Los Aldos High School in 1972 when
• 13:08
  Title 9 was introduced. And I was the first softball
• 13:12
  coach at Los Aldos High School, and I saw this flood of need for
• 13:17
  pitching coaches back in 1972. And it was mostly fathers with
• 13:23
  baseball backgrounds. They were trying to teach their
• 13:26
  daughters how to pitch. And you guys know as well as I
• 13:29
  do how all of that really got the game off on a very distorted
• 13:34
  footing because of the way that mechanics of pitching were
• 13:38
  interpreted back in those days. And it still lingers very
• 13:42
  strong. Yeah.
• 13:43
  Yeah. Yeah, so you're talking like the
• 13:45
  hello elbow mechanics and that sort of thing.
• 13:48
  All of that, yeah. And then mainly, you know,
• 13:51
  mainly you know, in, in my mind, there is a way in which in
• 13:55
  sports there there's a level of relaxation that needs to go on
• 14:01
  in the realm of, of, of a ball being released.
• 14:05
  And so much of what's being taught is a forced snap and a
• 14:10
  forced effort forward with the arm.
• 14:13
  And those types of habits are, are get so get so ingrained and
• 14:19
  my, you know, and you know, and, and the latest thing I've, I've
• 14:23
  commented on a little bit is that on the rise ball kids are
• 14:26
  being taught to turn their wrists like this and their thumb
• 14:30
  travels with the ball and they're trying to spin the ball
• 14:33
  backwards, etcetera. And I, I don't know how much
• 14:36
  detail to get into with all of that, but it gets so distorted.
• 14:40
  And so we, we have trouble in the game really identifying what
• 14:45
  we're talking about because you have announcers that aren't
• 14:49
  helping at all. It seems to me in so, so many
• 14:52
  situations with terminology on, on pitches and complementing
• 14:57
  spins and things like that. And it's pure bullet spin and
• 15:01
  all all that, as you guys know. But.
• 15:05
  Forgot the question I think. No, it's OK, Stay with that
• 15:10
  because we, we, we're going to get into that too, Rich.
• 15:13
  I have, I want people to hear because I am a, I don't want any
• 15:17
  forward effort when I'm teaching kids.
• 15:20
  I don't want it. I don't want to see that
• 15:21
  shoulder turning to the catcher because if the shoulders turning
• 15:24
  to the catcher, the hand is turning to the catcher, the arm
• 15:27
  is turning to the catcher. Now we're throwing bullet spins
• 15:29
  because the thumb is involved. And that is something I learned
• 15:32
  from you, Rich, many, many, many years ago.
• 15:35
  And I try to model that with all of my kids.
• 15:38
  And so let's, let's get into that.
• 15:40
  But I want to get back into your background, just like I promise
• 15:42
  you, we're going to dig into the bullet spins and a forward
• 15:45
  effort and all that. I can't wait to get into that.
• 15:47
  But I want people to to know a little bit more about your
• 15:50
  background because I want to ask you, what about you being a
• 15:53
  pitcher, Rich? What was your strength as a
• 15:55
  pitcher? Were you a power pitcher or were
• 15:57
  you more of that a movement guy? Or was it a combination of both
• 16:00
  of that? What was it?
• 16:01
  What were you like there? Was some level of combination
• 16:04
  there's no question that when I first broke into playing at at
• 16:08
  at a national level, you know, I was probably throwing the ball
• 16:12
  as hard as anybody in the world was, you know, and, and for a
• 16:16
  year or two there. But in my own experience in
• 16:19
  playing against the Clearwater Bombers that very first year
• 16:23
  that I was ever at a national tournament, I started out the
• 16:27
  very first game. I still remember striking out 18
• 16:31
  and the, and the of the 21 batters that I faced, you know,
• 16:35
  and I, I wasn't thinking about the batter's swing angle or
• 16:39
  anything like that. I was just reaching back and
• 16:42
  getting it, you know, and it was pretty dominant with the rice
• 16:45
  ball and mixed in and drop. Never, never bothered with the
• 16:48
  change up And that series that and I I mentioned something
• 16:52
  about this, I think on on the Internet that series.
• 16:56
  I ended up giving up a home run to somebody by the name of Ron
• 16:59
  Wethersby that pitched for Clearwater bomber or hit for
• 17:02
  Clearwater Bombers. And I came up with a change up
• 17:05
  that that next winter and pitching on for Fairchild
• 17:10
  Falcons again at the national tournament in 1967.
• 17:14
  And we beat Clearwater, who were the defending champions twice
• 17:19
  and they couldn't score off of me.
• 17:20
  But I would say that by that time already I was more of a
• 17:25
  pitcher than I was throw and I was beginning to understand what
• 17:30
  hitters were doing and and I started recognizing where the
• 17:34
  bat was in relationship to the ball.
• 17:37
  Every time the ball went by the hitter, I knew whether the bat
• 17:41
  was on time or over the ball or under the ball and an effective
• 17:47
  how I pitched. I always was pretty much in
• 17:49
  charge of what I threw because of my understanding.
• 17:53
  And again, I got a lot of help back in those days.
• 17:56
  Some guys that had played for years, a Stanford graduate, that
• 18:00
  helped me a lot. I went into a gym, practiced an
• 18:03
  hour a day, five days a week that very first year I was a
• 18:08
  high school coach. I don't know why I didn't get
• 18:11
  fired. I mean, so there was a lot of
• 18:14
  preparation. I recognized through the help of
• 18:17
  somebody else who was, who was a catcher, that a ball needed to
• 18:21
  be spinning backwards to be a rise ball.
• 18:24
  You know, when we call that 12/6 spin where that line is, and my
• 18:29
  rise ball jumped huge even though I was, you know, throwing
• 18:34
  it, you know, rather rather fast.
• 18:37
  So that's, you know, kind of how I got started.
• 18:40
  And I recognized that I was learning to release the ball by
• 18:45
  letting it go rather than forcing it.
• 18:48
  And so there was never a thought of trying to turn the ball and
• 18:51
  twist it. I, I recognized as, especially
• 18:55
  after I coached for a number of years, how positioning the thumb
• 18:58
  was so important in getting the ball to have a proper axis and
• 19:03
  allowing the ball to slide under my thumb.
• 19:06
  And when kids are trying to throw the ball and they're
• 19:09
  twisting it like this and their thumb travels with the ball, the
• 19:12
  ball hits the thumb and squibs off all the time and they're not
• 19:16
  getting backspin. And the announcers are still
• 19:18
  calling it a rise ball. The advantage of that particular
• 19:22
  release, though, is that when the ball goes off the end of the
• 19:24
  hand, it gets this kind of rotation as it's coming out and
• 19:30
  it's got a great big circle in the back of the ball.
• 19:32
  So when I watch some of these college pitchers, I recognize
• 19:37
  that they're, they're visualizing the ball coming out
• 19:39
  backwards out of their hand, but in reality, it's falling off the
• 19:43
  end of their hand and they don't know what it's supposed to look
• 19:46
  like when it comes out. So how, how can you throw
• 19:49
  something if you don't know how it needs to come out of your
• 19:53
  hand? And it's something that if you
• 19:56
  try to do too much with it, you mess it up.
• 19:59
  You, you in other In other words, you're letting the energy
• 20:01
  of your arm and your hand come through the release area and you
• 20:05
  use this. That that whip, that whip and
• 20:09
  lag as a way of allowing and causing the fingers to drive
• 20:14
  through and under the ball and up rather than trying to turn
• 20:19
  the doorknob. I hate turn the doorknob
• 20:22
  terminology, but it's tied to the concept of letting it go
• 20:27
  even. Even the golf swing is
• 20:29
  misunderstood. When you try to hit a golf ball,
• 20:34
  you're creating tension in that swing in such a way that you
• 20:37
  can't repeat it very well and you actually slow the club head
• 20:41
  down and a lot of the trying process and developing speed on
• 20:46
  a softball pitch gets compromised because of those
• 20:50
  same well meaning efforts. I could go on and on and with
• 20:54
  illustrations between golf and pitching a softball.
• 20:58
  I think one of the things that I, I've talked to the kids
• 21:01
  before about when they're trying to throw the rise ball and I use
• 21:04
  the, the idea of a Golf Club like a pitching wedge.
• 21:07
  That's fixed, right? It's fixed.
• 21:09
  So when you bring it through, it just kind of chops in and gets
• 21:12
  underneath there. The ball comes off and that's
• 21:14
  how it gets the backspin to go high and and to carry and then
• 21:17
  to sit down on the green. And, you know, I think it's the
• 21:21
  same thing you're talking about here is that, you know, rather
• 21:24
  than trying to twist it, which is going to automatically turn
• 21:27
  your hand forward, you just want to hold it in place and let the
• 21:30
  ball come out. Is that the idea?
• 21:32
  For sure. And when you're throwing it, if
• 21:35
  you understand what you're doing as you're getting inward
• 21:38
  rotation, we hear that IR concept taught a lot.
• 21:43
  Well, when I, when I throw a drop, I'm rotating inward and my
• 21:47
  thumb comes down in front of the ball and my thumb is pointing
• 21:51
  towards the ground as the ball leaves.
• 21:54
  And the thumb is really kind of at 12 at 12:00 as I'm letting
• 21:58
  go. And and so there's an inward
• 22:00
  rotation that's happening naturally.
• 22:03
  And too often kids are are are releasing the ball as young kids
• 22:08
  where their thumb is staying out here at at 2:00 and so forth.
• 22:13
  So when they let go of the ball, it's balls got this angle on it
• 22:16
  all the time. It's got a cut.
• 22:18
  Yep. Why?
• 22:19
  The pitch gets hit all the time and I see that happening still
• 22:23
  with numerous hard throwing kids and they don't realize that the
• 22:27
  bottom would come out of this thing if they if they if they
• 22:31
  allowed the hand to rotate over. Same thing rise ball.
• 22:34
  If the thumb position gets gets more sideways and the and the
• 22:39
  ball is able to come out with backspin like this because of
• 22:42
  the thumb being outward rather than being pointed towards home
• 22:47
  plate, there's an inward rotation, but my thumb is still
• 22:51
  sideways as I'm as I'm snapping through.
• 22:54
  So whether I'm throwing a drop or a rise ball, the position of
• 22:58
  the thumb is often influencing the purity of the axis more than
• 23:04
  we realize. And so I talk about the thumb
• 23:08
  quite a bit with kids, even though the thumb isn't throwing
• 23:12
  it at all. All the thumb is doing is
• 23:13
  supporting the ball until the fingers take over.
• 23:16
  Yeah, Rich. And then, you know, I want to
• 23:20
  bring this point up too. I'll have kids in college.
• 23:22
  They'll go away to college, you know, at Division One, they'll
• 23:25
  come home and and they'll say, yeah, coach worked on my drop
• 23:27
  ball. She wants, she wants me to get
• 23:29
  all my weight on my front foot and, and push the ball down.
• 23:32
  I mean, what, what, where, why? And, and so she'll throw that
• 23:37
  ball rich and the ball just goes straight down on an angle.
• 23:40
  And sure, it goes low, but there is no break on that ball
• 23:44
  whatsoever. And the ball, like you said,
• 23:46
  doesn't fall out. It just moves downward on an
• 23:49
  angle. But this is at the highest
• 23:50
  level, coaches telling kids to get all their weight on their
• 23:54
  front leg and, and push the ball downward.
• 23:57
  I mean, right there, that's forward effort that we don't
• 24:00
  want. And so I'll show, I'll show a
• 24:02
  video of Mike White throwing his drop ball.
• 24:04
  He's got his weight predominantly on his back and
• 24:07
  he's coming over that ball like crazy.
• 24:09
  And that ball is is dropping probably 8 inches with a break
• 24:14
  in it. So what are your thoughts about
• 24:15
  some of the the things in college right now that the
• 24:18
  college coaches, college pitching coaches?
• 24:20
  Well, you know, I see that all the time and announcers are
• 24:24
  always talking about how important it is to keep the ball
• 24:27
  down, to keep the ball in the yard.
• 24:30
  Well, the way a lot of these kids are throwing their fastball
• 24:34
  with the with the compromised spin and the ball just kind of
• 24:37
  sits there instead of really, really dropping like it
• 24:40
  potentially can. The ball is approaching the bat
• 24:46
  at on on the flat side and this launch angle swing, the bat is
• 24:51
  on playing with that fastball and you see kids hitting pitches
• 24:56
  that are ankle high out of the yard because it's right.
• 25:01
  It's right in line with them dropping that shoulder the way
• 25:04
  they do on that swing. And they wonder why the ball
• 25:07
  keeps jumping out of the yard on on them when their pitches are
• 25:11
  on plane with the bath. And I can tell coaches are
• 25:16
  calling pitches without a slightest clue of what I mean.
• 25:21
  Obviously there's exceptions to what I'm talking about here, but
• 25:25
  it's amazing to me how often balls are being thrown right
• 25:29
  into the wheelhouse of a pitch. They were trying to get LOI
• 25:33
  guess her last name is for at Oklahoma Down and away.
• 25:37
  That was right in her, you know, perfect cooked area for her to
• 25:42
  just launch the ball out of the yard.
• 25:45
  So there's just an awful lot of ignorance that's tied to the,
• 25:50
  you know, and so so kids are afraid because they're not being
• 25:54
  taught how to pitch. You can tell.
• 25:56
  I mean, I watched the game between Oklahoma and and Texas
• 26:00
  just last weekend. I guess it was, it was a good
• 26:03
  game, but it took them three hours and I, I swear half the
• 26:08
  batters had three and two counts on them because even as, as well
• 26:12
  as they were pitching in a lot of ways in that game, they're
• 26:16
  they're still, you could tell that they were afraid to throw
• 26:19
  strikes. They didn't know how to get the
• 26:21
  ball to move the way they needed to.
• 26:23
  I know here, here's the top two teams in the country.
• 26:27
  Now, again, I, I in general, I, I'm, I want to be totally
• 26:31
  complimentary to those two programs as far as pitching is
• 26:36
  concerned. The pitching coach at Oklahoma
• 26:39
  is fantastic. And of course, Mike White, who
• 26:43
  knows more about pitching than Mike White and so forth.
• 26:46
  And yet his girl, his main pitcher, I'm not going to
• 26:51
  mention names. The reason why she gets in
• 26:53
  trouble is because when she let's go of the ball on her rise
• 26:58
  ball, it's not spinning backwards when it comes out of
• 27:01
  her hand. I can tell that when the ball is
• 27:04
  being released, it's falling off the end of her hand and you see
• 27:07
  this big circle behind the ball and she's throwing it fast and,
• 27:13
  and when she gets it in the right area and the hitter's not
• 27:16
  anticipating the pitch, she has some pretty good success.
• 27:20
  But you know, what would that pitch be?
• 27:23
  And I, I've, I've been tempted to call Mike, but you know, I
• 27:30
  don't want to assume, I don't want to assume those types of
• 27:32
  things, you know, and when I watch that girl pitch, if she,
• 27:36
  maybe she needs to come up with something that actually spins
• 27:40
  backwards. And just the, the focus of
• 27:44
  getting underneath the ball and coming under to spin it
• 27:47
  backwards will automatically reduce the speed of the ball
• 27:51
  because you're not getting the same forces through the back end
• 27:54
  of the ball. And it becomes an off speed rise
• 27:57
  ball that's actually maintaining an upward, upward inclination.
• 28:02
  That brings a point to me. Do you guys think that a rise
• 28:05
  ball actually rises the way a drop drops in a sense?
• 28:09
  My opinion, no. I mean, I've seen enough things
• 28:13
  that when you look at you put it on video and it's more of a
• 28:18
  thing, it actually what I've seen is that it levels off.
• 28:22
  However, I will also say that what I believe happens is that
• 28:27
  the ball acts in a way that the brain doesn't understand.
• 28:32
  And so there's like a little gap in there.
• 28:34
  So it appears to jump up because the brain expects the ball to
• 28:39
  start coming down at a certain point.
• 28:41
  It looks like it's going to do a certain thing.
• 28:42
  And then all of a sudden it didn't do what it was supposed
• 28:44
  to do. There's a little glitch there.
• 28:46
  Then the brain tries to catch up and all of a sudden the ball is
• 28:49
  higher than it was expecting. And then it looks like it
• 28:53
  jumped. Because I know I've certainly.
• 28:54
  Seen it when I was first coaching and teaching kids.
• 28:58
  Of course, to get the ball to spin actually backwards, I would
• 29:02
  be only, you know, 15 feet or so in front of the of the father,
• 29:07
  you know, illustrating the rotation of the ball and
• 29:10
  throwing the ball really quite softly.
• 29:13
  And I actually hit fathers in the forehead more than once with
• 29:18
  the ball because they were so they were so inclined to
• 29:22
  anticipate the ball sinking as it was being thrown even that
• 29:26
  short distance that the glove, the the eyes wouldn't track the
• 29:30
  ball. And so kids are making outs
• 29:34
  because they're still imagining the ball, you know, or
• 29:37
  anticipating a sinking action. So the bullet spin reduces,
• 29:43
  reduces the dropping action of, of that pitch.
• 29:47
  And as a result, it's successful, especially when
• 29:51
  they're able to throw it, you know, exceedingly fast, you
• 29:54
  know, in the high 60s and low 70s, even when you see girls
• 29:58
  throwing in the mid 70s, if the hitter is sitting on, on that
• 30:03
  so-called rise ball and, and there's, and they're able to
• 30:06
  anticipate the timing of the swing, they still have a chance
• 30:10
  to be competitive. And that girl that throws that
• 30:13
  fast is learning to change speeds a little bit more and is
• 30:18
  having more success. And she's not trying to throw it
• 30:21
  80 miles an hour anymore. Time blew.
• 30:26
  Hey Jay, on a scale of 1 to 10, how important do you think brush
• 30:30
  contact is for pitchers? It's pretty high up there Ken,
• 30:34
  probably a 10 since it's hard to get maximum speed and or
• 30:37
  accuracy without it. Yeah I agree, but have you ever
• 30:40
  had a student who struggled to get good light brush contact?
• 30:44
  Sure, all the time, in fact. Especially when they've been
• 30:48
  taught hello elbow and are trying to throw around their
• 30:50
  hips or they're sliding their hips out of the way doing that
• 30:54
  crazy ninja move. So what do you do when you run
• 30:57
  into this situation? Keep railing on them until they
• 30:59
  get it right. I used to do that a lot, but
• 31:02
  then I learned about a product called Pitch Squeak Ken.
• 31:05
  Pitch squeak. What's that?
• 31:07
  It's a cool little armband with a squeaker inside of it.
• 31:11
  Like a dog toy. Yeah, kind of.
• 31:14
  So how does it work? Well, you slip the armband onto
• 31:17
  the pitcher's forearm and you set it so the squeaker is where
• 31:20
  the brush contacts should happen.
• 31:23
  Then when the pitcher goes into release, she tries to get it to
• 31:26
  squeak like this. If she makes it happen, she got
• 31:30
  brush. If there's no sound, she knows
• 31:33
  immediately and can make a correction.
• 31:35
  Wow cool, so she gets immediate audible as well as tactile
• 31:39
  feedback. There you go again, showing off
• 31:42
  with those big and technical words again.
• 31:45
  But yeah, she can feel it and hear it.
• 31:48
  Does it really work? You bet it does.
• 31:51
  I use it with my students all the time and it helps them learn
• 31:54
  how to get brush contacts pretty quickly if they practice with
• 31:58
  it. Sounds neat.
• 31:59
  Where can I get one? It's easy, Ken.
• 32:02
  Just e-mail support@pitchsqueak.com and
• 32:06
  Jason, the inventor of it and a Poly Girl certified pitching
• 32:10
  coach himself, will ask you how many you want and send them
• 32:13
  right out. I'll do that today.
• 32:15
  Thanks, Jay. What's that address again?
• 32:18
  You bet, Ken. It's support@pitchsqueak.com one
• 32:24
  more time for those of you who are listening,
• 32:26
  support@pitchsqueak.com and don't forget to mention in the
• 32:31
  e-mail that you heard about it right here on From the Coach's
• 32:34
  Mouth podcast and you'll receive 10% off.
• 32:38
  Play ball. A question I, I would ask you
• 32:42
  guys is that when I'm swinging at a rise ball, do I want to be
• 32:48
  trying to hit it with a level bat?
• 32:51
  Do I want to use the launch angle swing to hit that rise
• 32:55
  ball? Or do I want to get my swing in
• 32:58
  a position where the bat head has a chance to stay above the
• 33:02
  ball? If I'm, if I'm facing a pitcher
• 33:05
  that's throwing a lot of upward angled pitches that we're
• 33:09
  calling rise balls. And again, when they're throwing
• 33:12
  the ball 70 miles an hour and that ball is, is is leaving
• 33:17
  without, without pure overspin that makes it sink.
• 33:20
  A true drop starts on an upward trajectory and more than people
• 33:24
  realize. And if you actually tried to
• 33:28
  throw a drop level to begin with and you have good spin on it,
• 33:31
  the ball won't reach home plate. So a lot of times the difference
• 33:35
  between a drop and a rise ball is that a rise ball is taking
• 33:40
  off on the same trajectory as the drop is, but it doesn't have
• 33:44
  back spin on it. And if you're throwing it fast
• 33:47
  enough, gravity doesn't have enough chance to really 'cause
• 33:50
  it to turn over all that much. And it just reduces the the
• 33:55
  steepness of the upward angle as a result of the lack of drop
• 33:59
  spin. So a lot of those pitchers that
• 34:02
  are throwing in the high 60s are creating a level of
• 34:05
  differentiation between what they call their fastball and
• 34:09
  they're and they're Roswell because of those types of what I
• 34:13
  call in a way of compromise and the spin, if that makes sense.
• 34:17
  Yeah, definitely. And I would say this too, Rich.
• 34:19
  I mean, all what you're saying there is spot on.
• 34:22
  And also too, I think when you're talking about the drop
• 34:26
  ball and the rise ball kind of coming out at the same, at the
• 34:29
  same kind of level, it's because the mechanics on that pitch are
• 34:33
  predominantly the same outside of how you're spinning the ball
• 34:37
  and how the ball comes off your hand, right?
• 34:39
  And I think what what we see nowadays is that's getting so
• 34:42
  muddied down, right? And so confused because of
• 34:45
  forward effort, because people are turning the hand, forcing
• 34:49
  the hands, the the wrist flicks the snap the wrist, right.
• 34:53
  Those are those are forceful actions instead of letting the
• 34:56
  ball come out the way it's supposed to with the grip that
• 34:59
  you have. But I think the consistency
• 35:01
  pieces, everything is the same until it isn't, which means the
• 35:05
  mechanics on the rise ball have these little, you know, little
• 35:09
  adjustments that are are need to be made to make that ball spin,
• 35:13
  right. But every time you throw a
• 35:15
  pitch, those mechanics should be almost identical.
• 35:17
  Would you agree with that? Yeah, with that question.
• 35:20
  And that's part of, that's part of my concern about the way the
• 35:24
  spin is being taught because because it's impossible, there's
• 35:28
  too much activity going on in a short distance that, that you
• 35:32
  can't repeat it consistently, you know, And so one of the
• 35:37
  things I was mentioning, you know, that I, I find myself
• 35:39
  experimenting a little bit with my teaching on, on pitching is
• 35:44
  that, you know, and I, I have, you know, I, I have
• 35:48
  relationships with some other coaches that, that buy into this
• 35:52
  idea that if you spend too much time moving too slowly, that you
• 35:57
  eventually are, are reducing your chance of kids developing,
• 36:02
  you know, top speed on their pitches.
• 36:04
  Well, I'm, I'm of the inclination that if, if you
• 36:09
  allow kids to just carelessly let go of the ball too too much
• 36:13
  too soon in their in their development, that that you can't
• 36:18
  start creating a monster in terms of what what they need to
• 36:22
  learn to do to eventually become a pitcher.
• 36:25
  My inclination is to say, let's not be in such a hurry to get
• 36:30
  these kids into a game. In fact, I made this note to
• 36:34
  myself this morning. I was awake half the night last
• 36:38
  night thinking a little bit about some of our conversations.
• 36:42
  Let us not be in such a hurry to get our kids into a game.
• 36:46
  There's, you know, enough pressure.
• 36:48
  The good Lord himself didn't start his ministry till he was
• 36:52
  30 years old. So there was a lot of a lot of
• 36:55
  preparation going on in his life for eventually what he was
• 37:00
  doing. So it's an area where I kind of
• 37:04
  want to try to influence the game if I can and especially
• 37:07
  love the opportunity to kind of bounce this off of you guys.
• 37:11
  Maybe we're we're spending too much time too early in the
• 37:16
  process to explode off the pitching rubber.
• 37:20
  All we're thinking about is maximizing the velocity of the
• 37:24
  hips moving forward, etcetera, etcetera, to, you know, to
• 37:28
  create velocity on the ball. When what I really need is to
• 37:32
  understand what my exact posture is at the point I let go of the
• 37:37
  ball and how the ball is going to exit my hand at that point.
• 37:42
  And teach the the exiting action of a pitch with the energy of an
• 37:49
  arm relaxing and falling and coming through, you know, and
• 37:54
  either rotating over the ball or coming under the ball.
• 37:57
  It's an inward still an inward rotation that's either creating
• 38:02
  12/6 spin forward or 12/6 spin backwards.
• 38:05
  And of course, there's more than one way to read the spin axis on
• 38:09
  this ball. Here I have dots on the sides
• 38:13
  and I have, you know, a line that's going over the over the
• 38:17
  center of the ball. But in reality, if I'm throwing
• 38:21
  a good rise ball, a terminology that you know some people are
• 38:25
  using and you guys probably use this is the axis of the spin is
• 38:30
  3:00 with that dot and 9:00 with that dot would be, would be the
• 38:36
  same as 12-6 spin as a line going backwards here.
• 38:40
  And so I, I also can be measuring and and so forth.
• 38:45
  And I, I try to teach this very early with kids is to get them
• 38:49
  to understand what the ball needs to, needs to look like in
• 38:52
  the air. When I first moved to back here
• 38:56
  to Idaho here 3 1/2 years ago, I had some girls that knew how to
• 39:01
  spin the ball to some degree when they were three feet away
• 39:05
  from their catcher. But they only did that for a
• 39:08
  little while. And the next thing I know,
• 39:11
  they're 40 feet away throwing full speed and they're wondering
• 39:15
  why the ball won't rise or drop, so to speak.
• 39:18
  And so they there, there needs to be a very gradual education
• 39:23
  that's going on. And I think there's a way in
• 39:26
  which I, I, instead of depending on machines to tell me whether
• 39:32
  I'm getting my spin right is, and I develop an eyesight and
• 39:37
  vision. I can tell whether somebody's a
• 39:39
  pitcher by just walking up to a backstop while the game's going
• 39:43
  on. And I know within two or three
• 39:46
  pitches, usually just one, whether they know how to pitch
• 39:50
  or not because of how the ball looks.
• 39:53
  I can tell they don't know what the heck they're doing because
• 39:57
  the ball has too much of, of, of this, too much of A gyro spin or
• 40:04
  it has too much of a tilt in the axis.
• 40:07
  And both of those things. Again, you know there's a lot of
• 40:11
  criticism that coaches are spending too much energy and
• 40:15
  trying to get the axis of the spin right.
• 40:18
  And making it well, I don't. I don't know what perfect is,
• 40:22
  really, except that I know when something is spinning
• 40:26
  efficiently. Well, Rich.
• 40:28
  And I think that, you know, what you're talking about here goes
• 40:30
  back to a larger issue in the game, which is there's way too
• 40:34
  much emphasis on games and playing games and playing 150
• 40:38
  games during the year and not enough time being spent working
• 40:42
  on some of these things. And not just in pitching, but,
• 40:45
  you know, fielding, throwing, hitting, base running and pretty
• 40:48
  much anything within the game itself.
• 40:51
  And you know, it does definitely show up in pitching.
• 40:54
  I just real quickly, I'm fanatical about spins.
• 40:58
  I got that from you. I know that if if I ever had a
• 41:01
  student pitching and you walked by, I'd certainly want you to
• 41:04
  say, yeah, Ken, you're doing a good job.
• 41:06
  Not just shaking your head and walking away and saying.
• 41:10
  Me too, me too. Yeah, So you know, but yeah, I
• 41:14
  will sit there, especially with a kid that's blocking out the
• 41:16
  arm, pushing the ball down the backside.
• 41:19
  So we've got to fix that first, got to fix the end.
• 41:22
  Otherwise everything else that comes before that doesn't really
• 41:25
  matter. And you know, sometimes it'll
• 41:27
  take them 3 or 4 lessons to get the idea to overcome a habit do.
• 41:32
  You guys spend any time teaching kids to to learn to read the
• 41:37
  swing of the of the of the batter.
• 41:40
  Oh, yes, Sir, yes, Sir. As as a pitch caller in in.
• 41:43
  College if you teach them right. Yeah, yeah, For me specifically,
• 41:48
  I see. That's the first thing I'm
• 41:49
  looking for. Rich, when I'm watching batters,
• 41:51
  what's the first swing look like?
• 41:52
  Where are they at in the box? How can we attack that swing?
• 41:55
  Can we, like you said, can we be above the barrel?
• 41:58
  Can we be below the barrel? How do we attack?
• 42:00
  Do we need to change speeds here like and then trying to bring
• 42:03
  it? And I will talk to to kids all
• 42:05
  the time, Rich, when I'm doing a lesson with a kid and let's say
• 42:09
  they're a little bit more advanced and we're starting to
• 42:11
  get into the IQ of the game. I do a lot of work where I I
• 42:15
  talk about tunneling. I want everything to look the
• 42:18
  same because to me, I want the batter to think you're throwing
• 42:21
  a fastball until you're not. And so I talked to them.
• 42:24
  The batter's not going to wait till the ball's early on them to
• 42:27
  decide to swing or not. They're going to look for that
• 42:29
  ball out here right in this kind of last third of the pitch.
• 42:33
  And that's where I need the ball there to make the break.
• 42:37
  And so we'll talk about if their swing is doing this, we're going
• 42:39
  to attack this way. We can go a ball away, we can go
• 42:41
  a ball above. So yeah, I think that's
• 42:43
  important. And that's softball IQ.
• 42:45
  I think those are some of the things we're we're missing today
• 42:47
  in today's game. Is that softball IQ of where's
• 42:50
  the batter's weakness and how can we attack it, right?
• 42:53
  I think that's huge, huge. But I want to, I want to switch
• 42:56
  gears for you real quick, Rich, because I, I want to get your
• 42:58
  opinion on something here, Rich, or, or excuse me, Ken and I talk
• 43:02
  about this all the time. What are, what are your new
• 43:05
  thoughts about all the crow hopping that's is being
• 43:08
  purposefully taught to female pitchers today?
• 43:10
  Are you in favor of it? Do you see it, see issues or,
• 43:14
  or, or what's your, what's your thoughts?
• 43:15
  Because there are, as we know, there are instructors out there
• 43:17
  that are full on teaching a leap.
• 43:19
  What's your thoughts on that? I know what you're asking me.
• 43:23
  I I wish I had a good answer. Well, I think I have a pretty
• 43:27
  good answer when that type of emphasis exists.
• 43:31
  One of the things that I've discovered is that there is a
• 43:35
  way in which that front side can only handle so much force.
• 43:40
  And if you start getting more speed off of the rubber going
• 43:46
  forward into that front side and that front side starts breaking
• 43:51
  down on that in itself, you know, should be discouraging,
• 43:57
  you know, this idea of trying to leap, you know, totally outside
• 44:00
  the circle and everything else. The way a lot of these coaches
• 44:04
  are teaching. There's a girl now that's
• 44:07
  pitching, that's pitching in Texas that's still young in high
• 44:10
  school that when I first saw her and her and met her dad, she was
• 44:16
  just being, you know, leaping off the planet.
• 44:20
  And the only way she could land without hurting herself, in my
• 44:24
  opinion, is that she actually was using her push off foot as a
• 44:29
  way of connecting to the ground slightly ahead of her stride
• 44:33
  foot. Well, the moment that happens,
• 44:37
  that's reducing the shock value of of that front side to
• 44:42
  maximize efficiency in a pitch. So there's some things that are
• 44:47
  going on there that I think are more compromised than people
• 44:51
  realized. I need to throttle back a little
• 44:54
  bit where I don't have that need to even have the need to reset
• 44:58
  that stripe or the push off foot and allow allow in a way I don't
• 45:04
  care whether that push off foot is getting airborne as much as I
• 45:10
  do it being at a tempo that the front side can handle with
• 45:16
  balance and stability and consistency if I touched on
• 45:20
  anything there. Yeah, that's great.
• 45:22
  Yeah, it's, it's crazy how it's getting overemphasized in such a
• 45:28
  way. And I don't know about you, but
• 45:31
  I, you know, some of the some of the issues that kids are
• 45:34
  struggling with in their low back is happening because
• 45:37
  they're creating more force into the front side then their back
• 45:42
  can handle. And it takes, you know, some
• 45:45
  real strength building to, to be able to stabilize because if
• 45:49
  you're not stable on that front side, it's affecting your
• 45:52
  movement and your control. And you're, you know, it's
• 45:56
  affecting the effectiveness of your whole pitch.
• 45:59
  And there's too much effort being made or unwisely.
• 46:04
  And I think we, I think we forget what the spirit of the
• 46:07
  rule is. Why, why is the pitching rubber
• 46:10
  there? The pitching rubber is supposed
• 46:12
  to be our starting point in some form.
• 46:15
  The moment the ball of that push off foot connects to the ground
• 46:20
  ahead of the landing foot landing, that is a crop and the
• 46:25
  pitcher is getting an unfair advantage with that.
• 46:28
  But at the same time I say that I recognize that there's still
• 46:34
  only so much that they can do. I mean, I'm, I think to myself,
• 46:38
  well, if I can replant that right foot a second time and
• 46:42
  somebody makes that legal, actually makes it legal in the
• 46:46
  rule book, why can't I bounce a second time on and a third time
• 46:51
  pretty soon I'm halfway to home plate before I let go of the
• 46:55
  ball. Yeah.
• 46:56
  Yeah. And at that point, you don't
• 46:58
  have to be too fast. Governor, what the spirit of the
• 47:01
  rule is and let's stay within that framework rather than
• 47:05
  trying to find a way a pitcher to give, you know, give them
• 47:09
  kind of a false permission and a false security.
• 47:12
  Well, Rich, too. And I think that, you know, when
• 47:14
  you look at that, the way you're landing, our bodies are built
• 47:17
  for protection, not performance. That's a priority.
• 47:20
  And if your body senses that your front leg can't handle all
• 47:24
  the energy that you're trying to throw into it, it's going to
• 47:28
  slow you down and that's going to throw off your timing.
• 47:31
  You know, you were talking about tempo.
• 47:32
  I think it's going to throw off your timing.
• 47:34
  It's going to. Yeah, your posture.
• 47:37
  It's going to make you slow yourself down.
• 47:41
  You're not going to get that quick energy transfer that you
• 47:44
  need to sling the arm through. Now you are going to have to
• 47:47
  throw more with your arm because you're not getting that from the
• 47:50
  legs. Would you agree?
• 47:52
  That's good. That's good.
• 47:53
  Ken, I, I really like what you're saying right there.
• 47:56
  See, I've been paying attention. You have taught us well, Rich.
• 48:00
  You have taught us well. Well, wouldn't you guys also
• 48:03
  agree that, you know, this is what happens with the way, you
• 48:07
  know, so many different things in this world, but when you
• 48:12
  think you know, something which so many people do about
• 48:16
  pitching, they become the most difficult person to teach
• 48:21
  because they think they know. Yeah.
• 48:24
  Yeah. I pray that the three of us
• 48:26
  understand today that that we don't know at all.
• 48:30
  There's still there's still a way in which we can get better
• 48:34
  and we can and we can create a smoother path to preparation for
• 48:40
  a game and so forth. You know, I just think it's so
• 48:43
  sad when these girls are 8 years old and they're being thrown
• 48:48
  into a game two weeks after their first time they ever have
• 48:52
  a softball in their hand and things like that.
• 48:55
  And the types of pressures that they deal with and, you know,
• 48:58
  their need for, you know, their own identity be to be developed
• 49:04
  with some level of success. And they're running into all of
• 49:07
  this. Correction, correction,
• 49:09
  correction, correction. And you know what?
• 49:11
  What's the hurry? Let's let them play.
• 49:14
  You know, if you leave a kid to themselves, what are they going
• 49:18
  to do when they throw the ball on their hand?
• 49:20
  They're going to bend over and they're going to push it
• 49:23
  forward. I mean, that's what any of us
• 49:26
  will do. Well, I want to enter into a
• 49:30
  little girl's life where I'll ask them to show me how they're,
• 49:35
  how they're going to throw the ball underhand and they'll 19,
• 49:40
  you know, 100% of them will bend over and push the ball forward.
• 49:44
  Well, I what I'm going to do is say, let's, let's take a look at
• 49:50
  another position that you could possibly be in where whereas you
• 49:54
  guys know that arm just naturally rests against the side
• 49:58
  of your hip. And when when you're in that
• 50:00
  position, your, your hand is actually forward a little bit.
• 50:04
  And if you could just get them to understand that when they're
• 50:07
  letting go of the ball, don't pull your arm down and push it
• 50:12
  forward. Just allow the hand to lag
• 50:15
  behind the elbow and allow the fingers to to roll forward and
• 50:20
  you'll start them on a path where they don't have to unlearn
• 50:25
  something. Does that make?
• 50:26
  Does that make sense? 100.
• 50:29
  Percent get ready in 2 days. We're trying to get started with
• 50:33
  a skill that will serve them well.
• 50:37
  I don't know how we can cause that to happen, but usually
• 50:42
  usually that when you agree that that's what's happening with
• 50:45
  most 8 year olds, sure they're throwing into the fire.
• 50:49
  Right, right. They're just trying to aim it,
• 50:52
  you know, because everybody's telling them just throw strikes,
• 50:54
  can't defend walks instead of, you know, hey, just do the best
• 50:58
  you can. A walkathon instead of a game.
• 51:03
  Yeah. Yes.
• 51:04
  Always remember in a situation that I had years ago where I had
• 51:08
  an opportunity to work at some length with the town league in
• 51:13
  Sebastopol, which is a little town next to Santa Rosa years
• 51:17
  ago. And I had an opportunity to
• 51:20
  spend time with the girls that were pitching in that league in
• 51:25
  the in on the 12 year old range. And there were eight teams in
• 51:29
  the local town league and all 12 pitchers, probably not all 12,
• 51:35
  but most of them had a sound foundation.
• 51:38
  And you cannot believe the quality of games that were being
• 51:41
  played in a little town because the pitchers had enough time to
• 51:47
  understand what it meant to be a picture.
• 51:50
  And it wasn't a walkathon. And the kids were having a lot
• 51:53
  of fun. Nobody's having fun when you got
• 51:56
  walkathons going on. And all of that could be fixed
• 52:00
  if people would just use some common sense and do some
• 52:03
  planning, some planning ahead of time.
• 52:06
  So Rich, I guess looking at it then, you know, you've had so
• 52:10
  many of your Gatorade Players of the year, Allstate, All
• 52:14
  Conference, all these other things.
• 52:15
  So we tend to think of you as working with all these really
• 52:17
  high level kids. But it sounds like you've got a
• 52:20
  lot of passion for, hey, let's get these kids in when they're
• 52:24
  8-9 or ten. You'd almost rather get one of
• 52:27
  those coming in than a kid who's got bad mechanics that's been
• 52:30
  fairly successful and but that you have to break down and start
• 52:34
  over. I mean, do you like working with
• 52:35
  the littles? I well, I, I, you know, I
• 52:38
  haven't, I haven't been doing much coaching since I moved here
• 52:41
  to, to, to Eagle ID. But, but you're hitting the nail
• 52:46
  on the head. I mean, there's, there's, I
• 52:48
  can't think of anything more satisfying than helping somebody
• 52:53
  transition from knowing zero about pitching a ball and, and
• 52:58
  giving them some level of preparation where there's a
• 53:02
  foundation that's being built that's giving them a chance to,
• 53:07
  to not hurt themselves. Number one, to develop the
• 53:11
  ability to repeat something and then understand what it is that
• 53:17
  they're trying to repeat in terms of the simplicity of the
• 53:20
  axis of spin and so forth. And then understand the reason
• 53:25
  why they are doing that. Why are you making or putting
• 53:30
  energy into the direction of a, a ball in terms of how it spins?
• 53:35
  They, they don't even, they don't really relate to the, to
• 53:39
  the contest that they're having with a bat that's coming towards
• 53:43
  it and, and how the spin on the ball is affecting.
• 53:47
  And of course, I believe very strongly in that vertical
• 53:50
  emphasis of a pitch because because of the difficulty of
• 53:54
  squaring up to it when a ball is moving sideways, especially the
• 53:59
  way kids are trying to throw curve balls, they're trying to
• 54:02
  throw curve balls with bullet spins and the ball, all it is is
• 54:06
  a slight angle. And if they leave the ball over
• 54:10
  the plate, it's really easy for the bat to be squared up to the
• 54:14
  ball. And I try, I don't.
• 54:16
  I'm not necessarily trying to teach kids to strike everybody
• 54:19
  out, but I I call the game in such a way that I'm doing all I
• 54:25
  know to do to keep the hitter from having an easy time of
• 54:30
  squaring up to the ball. My goal is a pitcher.
• 54:34
  As I got older and, and understood pitching is that I
• 54:39
  wanted them to not be anxious. I want them to be so screwed up
• 54:45
  at home plate that they don't have any confidence in being in
• 54:48
  there. And that reminds of of one of
• 54:53
  the better hitters of all time, if not the best.
• 54:56
  There was a teammate of mine back in 1967 pitching, you know,
• 55:01
  playing for the Fairchild Falcons.
• 55:04
  We're facing a Harvey Circle, and I think I might have
• 55:07
  mentioned this to you, Ken. And we're in the finals of the
• 55:10
  national tournament, and Harvey Circle's pitching for Aurora.
• 55:15
  And I'm watching Ray, my teammate, batting 3rd and he's
• 55:20
  doing a dance in the batter's box.
• 55:22
  I can tell that he's not comfortable because his tunnel
• 55:26
  that he was throwing the ball in was such that Ray didn't know
• 55:31
  whether the ball was going to drop or rise.
• 55:34
  And he played with the bottom of the strike zone.
• 55:36
  So his strikes looked like balls and his balls look like strikes.
• 55:41
  And he struck 17 out of 21 outs. And we're supposed to be one of
• 55:46
  the better hitting teams of all time.
• 55:48
  And I see girls today and, you know, you see scores 16 to 14
• 55:53
  and things like that, that that's not fast pitch softball.
• 55:57
  Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's a low scoring football game.
• 56:02
  Yeah, but Ray was a mess when he went up there his second time
• 56:06
  and his third time he had less confidence each time he got in
• 56:10
  the box. I'm probably fooling myself in
• 56:13
  90% of the situations, but it really helps to let go of a
• 56:18
  pitch with the confidence that you're going to have success
• 56:21
  with it. And kids are afraid to come into
• 56:24
  the zone with the ball, and they have every reason for being.
• 56:28
  You have a girl there in Chicago, that's the pitching
• 56:31
  coach there at Northwestern. When she pitched for Oklahoma,
• 56:36
  she came right into the zone all the time.
• 56:39
  You know, with Muuma, with her rise and drop, she wasn't three
• 56:43
  and two on account because very often because she knew how to
• 56:47
  pitch. I believe that.
• 56:49
  Why? Can't kids to do that?
• 56:51
  I believe that pitching coach at Northwestern is also a former
• 56:54
  student of Rich Balswick. Am I mistaken?
• 56:58
  I Yeah, I'm pretty sure that that that pitching coach at
• 57:02
  Northwestern is a former student of yours, is it not?
• 57:05
  Right. Right for sure from the time she
• 57:07
  was 910 years old and I just an awesome student.
• 57:12
  In fact, I have, I have her picture on a wall here.
• 57:16
  You know, I mean, she, she didn't have the natural athletic
• 57:20
  ability like somebody like Angelica Selden did.
• 57:23
  Angela, she was a fantastic talent.
• 57:27
  In fact, I hesitate to talk about her too much because I'll,
• 57:31
  I'll bring into question the wisdom of the coaching that she
• 57:34
  received there, all that kind of stuff.
• 57:37
  When she left college and pitched professionally, she was
• 57:41
  able to become a a true pitcher because she could throw her rise
• 57:45
  ball. At UCLA, when they tried to get
• 57:48
  her to throw the rise ball, they were trying to get her rise ball
• 57:52
  to go 65 like her drop did. And if you're spinning the ball
• 57:57
  backwards, it's it's difficult to to to get, you know, to get
• 58:02
  the ball and speed and so forth. So when she became a complete
• 58:07
  pitcher as a professional and going into her experience there
• 58:11
  in college, she was striking out two batters an inning.
• 58:15
  Well, I think she only got 1 batter in inning, you know, an
• 58:19
  average, you know, when she was in college, another girl that
• 58:22
  created great movement with her with her rise ball was a girl
• 58:27
  that pitched for University of Oregon, you know, not too long
• 58:32
  after that. And again, I think it's
• 58:36
  important for coaches to understand that it's literally
• 58:40
  physically impossible to spin a true ball backwards, a true rise
• 58:45
  ball backwards as fast as you can spin a ball forward.
• 58:49
  Right, guys, You agree with that?
• 58:51
  100%. Where if it's close to being
• 58:54
  squared off, you're going to lose some speed because of where
• 58:59
  the energy is going underneath the ball.
• 59:02
  When I'm throwing a peel drop fastball, so to speak.
• 59:06
  And I, I don't you like the term fastball, like I know you guys
• 59:09
  don't either, but the forces are going directly through the up
• 59:14
  and through the back of the ball as the ball is being released.
• 59:18
  So I'm a, I'm a real believer in, in the Harvey Sterkel
• 59:23
  concept that you make your balls look like strikes and your
• 59:26
  strikes look like balls. There was a pitcher that we
• 59:29
  faced out here in California that played with the top of the
• 59:33
  strike zone. That way he'd throw high drops
• 59:35
  that look like a ball and they'd come down into the strike zone.
• 59:39
  So he had the ability to make most of his pitches.
• 59:44
  You know, You know, the only way I like a curveball, let's put it
• 59:47
  this way too to save some time, is that I like a curveball and
• 59:52
  it looks like a ball and it ends up being a strike, surprisingly.
• 59:57
  You know, starting off the plate and then coming onto the plate.
• 1:00:01
  I never ever took the chance to fit and facing a left-handed
• 1:00:07
  batter took the chance of throwing a curveball and trying
• 1:00:11
  to catch the outside corner. It wasn't a percentage pitch.
• 1:00:14
  When I got older I played around a little bit with starting the
• 1:00:17
  ball inside off the plate and I had a big, big breaking
• 1:00:21
  curveball. You know where the first
• 1:00:23
  response of the batter was, the pitch is going to be inside and
• 1:00:28
  they'd stand there and take it. And as you guys know, a lot of
• 1:00:32
  the tunneling aspects that we're doing, I mean, I, I watch what
• 1:00:37
  it is that, you know, these Oklahoma hitters are doing.
• 1:00:41
  And I can't help but recognize my read is, is that they take an
• 1:00:46
  initial read of the tunnel or the, the, you know, where that
• 1:00:50
  pitch is. And they determine rather early
• 1:00:54
  in the end the delivering of the ball, whether they're going to
• 1:00:58
  swing it or not based on the initial position of it.
• 1:01:01
  And that's why them take, you see them take a lot of low rise
• 1:01:06
  balls that look like balls and the pitch ends up coming up to
• 1:01:11
  the knees and they'll take it and it looks like they just took
• 1:01:14
  the ball right now right down the middle practically.
• 1:01:17
  Well, it's because of the way they're reading pitches, you
• 1:01:21
  know. And so a big part of coaching is
• 1:01:24
  is to get into the head of the hitter.
• 1:01:26
  What's the hitter looking for and how are they identifying
• 1:01:30
  what you're throwing to them as to whether to swing at it or
• 1:01:34
  not? That's some interesting
• 1:01:36
  territory there to, to start teaching kids and that why can't
• 1:01:40
  you teach that to some degree when they're 12/13/14 years old?
• 1:01:45
  Yep. Instead, we're teaching robots
• 1:01:48
  to throw the ball. No imagination whatsoever.
• 1:01:52
  And they're, they're being totally controlled.
• 1:01:55
  And the pitchers that I coached, where they realized they, the,
• 1:02:01
  the, the hitters had them lined up and they would confess to me,
• 1:02:05
  Rich, I knew when I was in the 5th inning that the hitters had
• 1:02:10
  me lined up. They knew what I was doing and
• 1:02:12
  there wasn't enough differentiation in what I was
• 1:02:15
  doing. She had a good change up or
• 1:02:17
  whatever. And we, we have to have enough
• 1:02:22
  variety in our speed, movement and location to keep the hitter
• 1:02:26
  guessing if possible. I don't want to be predictable.
• 1:02:31
  Yeah, I'll, I'll shut up. No, just insane.
• 1:02:35
  You don't want a pattern. You don't want to throw the same
• 1:02:37
  pitch in the same count every time to the same location,
• 1:02:40
  because that's easy to pick up too, right?
• 1:02:43
  Got to be, yeah. Got to be surprising.
• 1:02:46
  Got to be, you know, a little nutty with it.
• 1:02:48
  You you want the hitter, you know, every hitter has their own
• 1:02:52
  personality, but it's, it's just amazing.
• 1:02:56
  Well, but you guys agree, isn't it amazing how good the hitting
• 1:03:00
  is? Oh, yeah, yes.
• 1:03:02
  I mean I, I mean I, I am impressed.
• 1:03:06
  And how about that home run that girl from Texas hit that went
• 1:03:11
  about 3 stories up on a building on the other side of the left
• 1:03:14
  field fence came from a what looks like a defeat to a victory
• 1:03:21
  boy. What a what a what a stud.
• 1:03:23
  She is godly. I almost walked away from that
• 1:03:27
  game and then I fortunately saw the the last home run.
• 1:03:33
  Anyhow, it's it, it really is amazing how some of those kids
• 1:03:37
  with those live bats, I mean, if she can hit the ball over 300
• 1:03:41
  feet like she hit it there, you know she can.
• 1:03:44
  She doesn't have to get all of it to get it over that 200 foot
• 1:03:47
  fence. That makes pitching a real
• 1:03:50
  challenge. I need to get that pitch moving
• 1:03:54
  in a direction that is a contradiction to the trajectory
• 1:03:59
  of the bat. I'm throwing a real good rise
• 1:04:02
  ball, and I saw this with hitters when I played, when they
• 1:04:06
  knew I was throwing a rise ball and they were looking for it.
• 1:04:10
  Their approach to the ball was from the top.
• 1:04:13
  If they were sitting on my drop, you would see a little more of a
• 1:04:17
  a launch angle swing. Yeah.
• 1:04:20
  And, and so as a as a, as a pitch collar, I want to know
• 1:04:25
  what that bat is doing. I want to know whether it's at
• 1:04:28
  an upward angle or not. I want to know whether the the
• 1:04:32
  the bats going under the ball or over the ball.
• 1:04:34
  How often do we see batters actually over the top of a rise
• 1:04:39
  ball and fouling it off? Even with poor spin?
• 1:04:44
  They're under, they tend to be underneath it.
• 1:04:46
  Would you guys agree? Yes, yes, absolutely.
• 1:04:50
  So there's there's space that we can go into as coaches to learn
• 1:04:55
  to dominate hitters again. And you're seeing flashes of it
• 1:04:59
  here and there where you're where you're getting some low
• 1:05:01
  scoring games and so forth, because the kids that are
• 1:05:05
  pitching know pretty well how to pitch.
• 1:05:09
  But the ERA of .022 like some pitchers had, you know, 20 years
• 1:05:16
  ago, I think I think that day is over even even if would you guys
• 1:05:20
  agree? I mean, for sure.
• 1:05:23
  So I've got to be a little more realistic in my expectations of
• 1:05:26
  the outcome. And I try to understand if
• 1:05:30
  you're giving up pop flies that land in an open spot on the
• 1:05:34
  outfield, you're doing a good job as a pitcher.
• 1:05:37
  Yep, Yep. You're weak ground balls and
• 1:05:40
  they're seeing eye dogs going through the infield.
• 1:05:43
  Don't feel like you're going to, you know, hang yourself by your
• 1:05:46
  thumbs because somebody got a base set.
• 1:05:48
  They just they happen to find a home.
• 1:05:52
  And do we need to understand when, when to be complimentary
• 1:05:58
  of our pitcher? Because if I get up, fly, that
• 1:06:01
  falls in and I lose the game, obviously I'm disappointed.
• 1:06:06
  But as a coach, I'm not going to rag on the pitcher.
• 1:06:09
  Hey, great pitch. Just, you know, ball just went
• 1:06:12
  to went the wrong place. It's a game of chance.
• 1:06:15
  Yeah, yeah, you. Can do game of.
• 1:06:18
  Yeah, you can do everything right and still have a bad
• 1:06:20
  outcome. Yep, yeah, for sure.
• 1:06:24
  You know, we, we, we want to teach our kids when, when you're
• 1:06:27
  working with 10/12/14 year old kids, their identity is so
• 1:06:32
  fragile and it's so related to, to performance, you know, and
• 1:06:38
  you're, you're trying to get them to evolve in such a way
• 1:06:41
  that who they are is not whether they throw a strike or a ball.
• 1:06:46
  And you know that there's too much pressure on my sense of
• 1:06:50
  well-being when that happens. And there's a difference between
• 1:06:53
  being fearful and apprehensive, in a way.
• 1:06:57
  If I care about what I'm doing and I want to be successful, and
• 1:07:01
  I'm approaching a game, I'm dealing with levels of
• 1:07:04
  apprehension before the game starts.
• 1:07:07
  I'm curious about outcome. And.
• 1:07:12
  Important to me, I don't want to discourage pitchers from having
• 1:07:15
  that, but I I want them though that when they throw a pitch, I
• 1:07:21
  want them to have confidence that they're giving themselves
• 1:07:24
  their best chance to keep the hitter from hitting the ball
• 1:07:29
  hard. And I keep track of not how many
• 1:07:33
  hits they give up per SE, but how many times are they allowing
• 1:07:38
  the ball to get hit hard. You know, I can give up 10 hard
• 1:07:42
  hits and win a game. One nothing.
• 1:07:44
  Guys, when I'm looking in the mirror that night that I was all
• 1:07:48
  I was, was lucky. Right.
• 1:07:53
  Yeah, absolutely. What successful failure when
• 1:07:56
  we're when we're working with these kids, right?
• 1:07:59
  Or Rich. I don't know if you can see it
• 1:08:01
  or not, but the T-shirt I'm wearing says process over
• 1:08:04
  outcome. Yes.
• 1:08:05
  Isn't that the truth? Yeah, it is.
• 1:08:08
  Yeah, yeah, you guys have a great attitude and as you can
• 1:08:12
  tell, I start wandering around, you get old and and you talk too
• 1:08:16
  much, but Oh no, that's. All right, we love it.
• 1:08:18
  Yeah, that's you're coming out of your mouth.
• 1:08:21
  I, I want to try, in fact, I, I sometimes play with that Wix
• 1:08:26
  Wednesday. I don't do it really
• 1:08:27
  consistently, but I'm, I'm really thinking seriously of
• 1:08:32
  getting something started on Facebook where I want to try to
• 1:08:37
  set it up in such a way that if people want to pay me some
• 1:08:39
  money, they can. But I, I, I don't, I don't want
• 1:08:44
  to make a demand out of it. If people like yourself, like
• 1:08:49
  what, what you're hearing, you're hearing something that's
• 1:08:52
  unique, Why not? Why not hit the hit the credit
• 1:08:56
  card and, and give me 20 bucks? Absolutely.
• 1:09:00
  Absolutely. But I what I really want though
• 1:09:04
  is the message to get out there. Yeah.
• 1:09:07
  That's what you guys want, right?
• 1:09:09
  Absolutely, 100%. And when you agree, Jay, that
• 1:09:14
  one of the more frustrating things is that when you get a
• 1:09:16
  freshman in that can throw the ball hard but doesn't know how
• 1:09:20
  to pitch, the the challenges of unraveling that to some degree
• 1:09:26
  are is something that you really need to be careful of.
• 1:09:29
  It is and it's it's a process, right?
• 1:09:32
  It's like we can't overhaul everybody.
• 1:09:33
  We've just got to make some adjustments that's are going to
• 1:09:36
  help that kid be a little bit better.
• 1:09:38
  And every year just little adjustments.
• 1:09:39
  You know, I have a junior right now when I first got her, it was
• 1:09:44
  like, wow, like OK, that's going to that's going to be a problem.
• 1:09:47
  And so we just started with basic little things and we every
• 1:09:50
  year we've just added a little bit.
• 1:09:52
  And so she still feels comfortable what she's doing,
• 1:09:54
  but her spins have gotten better.
• 1:09:56
  She understands her mechanics better.
• 1:09:58
  And to me, that's the goal, right?
• 1:09:59
  My goal is a pitching coach. They're rich is to make every
• 1:10:02
  kid they're better. Whether it's my number one or my
• 1:10:04
  #5 I just want to make all of them better.
• 1:10:07
  Isn't that the truth? It really is.
• 1:10:10
  Those are the satisfying things about coaches.
• 1:10:12
  It it's not wins and losses, it's it's learning how to
• 1:10:16
  achieve consistency with the skill and develop an
• 1:10:20
  understanding of what you're actually causing and why you're
• 1:10:25
  causing it to, to create confusion in the batter,
• 1:10:29
  etcetera, etcetera. Absolutely.
• 1:10:31
  Yeah. So, Rich, I have one more
• 1:10:33
  question for you. And you know, we told you it'd
• 1:10:35
  be an hour. We're already a little bit past
• 1:10:37
  that. Yeah, well, you can slice this
• 1:10:39
  and get rid of all of my. No way.
• 1:10:41
  Anything coming out of your mouth is gold, buddy.
• 1:10:44
  So we're not cutting any of that, Yeah.
• 1:10:46
  I'm throwing the ball 60 miles an hour compared to somebody
• 1:10:50
  that's throwing 70. I need more differentiation.
• 1:10:55
  Throwing throwing 60 then I do 70 if that makes sense.
• 1:10:58
  Yep, for sure. You know, so there's just so
• 1:11:01
  many variables, you know, that that people don't see.
• 1:11:06
  I watch what goes on in these games.
• 1:11:09
  I'm fascinated when I watch these better teams face against
• 1:11:13
  each other. I and I'm looking at that batter
• 1:11:17
  and I'm trying to get into that batter's head.
• 1:11:20
  You know, what is she thinking? What is she looking for?
• 1:11:23
  I can't help but think that when you see some of these balls get
• 1:11:27
  hit the way they do, that it had to be a pitch that that hitter
• 1:11:32
  was hunting for. I don't want to guess, I want to
• 1:11:35
  hunt. And, and there's a way in which
• 1:11:37
  if I study pitchers, if I study pitchers, there's not many
• 1:11:42
  pitchers out there that that I can't learn from, you know, just
• 1:11:48
  in general how they, how they approach things.
• 1:11:51
  And it's hard to get hitters to think that way.
• 1:11:54
  I can remember when I was coaching a team, one of the
• 1:11:56
  questions that you were going to ask me was whether, you know,
• 1:12:00
  I've ever coached, you know, you know, coach softball.
• 1:12:04
  Well, I coached the men's fast pitch team.
• 1:12:06
  It was sponsored by Lucasfilm back in 198586 in that round
• 1:12:12
  there for a couple years. Oh, that's fun.
• 1:12:14
  And Peter Brown was my pitcher and I was in my late 40s, still
• 1:12:19
  trying to be competitive, you know, and I'd have my first
• 1:12:23
  baseman whispering at me. Rich, leave Peter in.
• 1:12:30
  Actually, to be honest with you, that didn't happen very often.
• 1:12:34
  I'd like to think that I was being pretty objective, but I
• 1:12:39
  certainly, I certainly had the and again, I wouldn't claim to
• 1:12:43
  be, you know, an, an excellent coach in terms of, you know,
• 1:12:49
  backing up bases and knowing where you have to be every time
• 1:12:53
  and so forth. I, I, I did, I did know enough
• 1:12:58
  to know that when when we weren't doing it right.
• 1:13:00
  We need to learn how to do it. The the game.
• 1:13:05
  The game is being well played by a lot of teams and a lot of
• 1:13:08
  coaches and people like yourself.
• 1:13:12
  You know, I mean, there's no accident that Paddy Gasso is, is
• 1:13:16
  as effective as she is with her, with her kids and live with a
• 1:13:22
  freedom of fear of failure and so forth.
• 1:13:25
  And of course, the direction the game is going is that it's in
• 1:13:30
  fact, I just read something a few days ago, just a couple of
• 1:13:33
  days ago, is that they're thinking in terms of creating a
• 1:13:37
  five year window. Have you have you guys read
• 1:13:39
  about some of that stuff? They have a window between the
• 1:13:43
  time they're 19 and what, 24? If you're older than 24, you're
• 1:13:50
  your chances of playing are totally eliminated.
• 1:13:53
  So there's a lot of games being played with the eligibility
• 1:13:57
  rules and things like that. And you know, there, there's
• 1:14:02
  pluses and minuses of these portals and things like that
• 1:14:05
  there. There's a balance that's been
• 1:14:08
  lost in the game. And I don't know what the answer
• 1:14:11
  is. Do you?
• 1:14:12
  Do you guys have any answers? Unfortunately, no, and I think I
• 1:14:17
  don't know, I it's just it is what it is at this point.
• 1:14:20
  I think you you know it, like you said, it's good and bad and
• 1:14:23
  it's it's, you know, the game is still growing.
• 1:14:25
  I, I don't know, Rich. Every day I I back and forth
• 1:14:28
  with it. With this, though, that as
• 1:14:31
  pitching coaches, we need to help our kids understand their
• 1:14:36
  limitations without knocking them down and to understand what
• 1:14:42
  level they need to be playing at Oklahoma.
• 1:14:48
  And it's really important that that, you know, you know, some
• 1:14:53
  kids are just never going to throw the ball faster than 55, I
• 1:14:59
  think. And so, you know, it's dumb to,
• 1:15:05
  you know, it's dumb to be pushing kids into situations,
• 1:15:09
  you know, to boost your own ego because because they're, you
• 1:15:13
  know, they're playing for UCLA or whatever.
• 1:15:16
  We, we've got to help kids as they're approaching their
• 1:15:20
  sophomore and junior and senior year, what, what their
• 1:15:24
  expectations start needing to be.
• 1:15:27
  And we need to be a father to them in some way and and build
• 1:15:31
  that relationship where they're not feeling down on themselves
• 1:15:35
  because there's nothing worse than trying to compete when
• 1:15:38
  you're in over your head. Yeah.
• 1:15:40
  Well, Rich, thank you so much. We really appreciate all the
• 1:15:43
  time you gave us today. This has been really fun.
• 1:15:46
  You're a legend, as we keep saying.
• 1:15:48
  And it's it's been so great to tap into that wisdom and the
• 1:15:53
  really digging deep on the rise ball especially.
• 1:15:56
  And we know you're a specialist and that.
• 1:15:57
  So again, just thanks. Yeah, Thank you so much, Rich.
• 1:16:00
  You mean it's it's a it's an honor to talk to you and pick
• 1:16:03
  your brains some more. Like I said, yeah, I know Ken
• 1:16:05
  feels the same way. You've been a mentor to me and
• 1:16:08
  to Ken and to many others out there who have kind of taken on
• 1:16:12
  this pitching role. So thank you not only for what
• 1:16:14
  you've done for us, but for all the other people.
• 1:16:16
  Tell your people that you know to to e-mail me or or text me or
• 1:16:21
  whatever. I'll be happy to talk to them.
• 1:16:24
  I'm going to be throwing some ideas out there being shared
• 1:16:28
  today, but I, I, I really believe that, you know, there
• 1:16:33
  needs to be some things out there that expose the difficulty
• 1:16:37
  of changing kids after they've been pitching a certain way for
• 1:16:41
  5-7 years. And then there's a way in which
• 1:16:44
  we need to start turning some of that around at the beginning,
• 1:16:48
  etcetera. So how do they get a hold of you
• 1:16:50
  if they want to e-mail or text you or whatever?
• 1:16:54
  Yeah, what's your? E-mail.
• 1:16:55
  They can go Rich at Balswick Fastpitch.
• 1:16:59
  They can also go richbalswick@gmail.com.
• 1:17:04
  And we'll put it in the notes, too, for people to do it.
• 1:17:06
  So if you want to get a hold of you, yeah.
• 1:17:08
  So I'm going to, I'm going to I'm probably I'm hoping to well,
• 1:17:13
  let me bounce this off of you guys.
• 1:17:15
  You don't need to obviously pass this on to other people, but I,
• 1:17:20
  you know, out of respect from my relationship, especially with
• 1:17:23
  with Mike Goleisen, you know, Mike has shared a lot of inside
• 1:17:27
  information with me that has helped me with my own own
• 1:17:31
  understanding, especially and athletic movement in general.
• 1:17:36
  And he has, you know, he has some pretty strong ideas as you
• 1:17:39
  guys probably know. But but I don't want to give,
• 1:17:43
  just give things away. And yet there's a part of me
• 1:17:48
  that would like to use that that window in Facebook where if if
• 1:17:55
  people don't have two cents to their name, could actually could
• 1:17:59
  actually learn enough about pitching, you know, to become a
• 1:18:03
  coach and or become a pitcher if they would pay attention to some
• 1:18:08
  of these basic fundamentals and so forth.
• 1:18:11
  Because I'm really not looking for money today and I'm looking
• 1:18:15
  for, I'm looking for the game to be changed.
• 1:18:20
  Obviously we can only influence so much, but but what you guys
• 1:18:23
  are doing are just so important. And you know, and I regret in a
• 1:18:28
  way that Mike and I and Rick Paulie never were able to fully
• 1:18:33
  pull some together with fast pitch foundations.
• 1:18:36
  I think you guys could see the potential of all of that.
• 1:18:40
  Yes, yes. But, you know, that's all water
• 1:18:43
  over the dam. But there's still, there's still
• 1:18:47
  no reason why some of us can't put our heads together and, and
• 1:18:52
  promote, you know, you know, I don't think the same way Rick
• 1:18:55
  does. I don't think the same way Mike
• 1:18:57
  does. And I'm, I'm sure there's some
• 1:18:59
  things that you guys are teaching today as, as some key
• 1:19:03
  points that I, you know, that I'm totally ignorant to.
• 1:19:07
  Well, all of that to me is OK in, in general, you understand
• 1:19:11
  what you're doing and why and you're and you're producing,
• 1:19:15
  you're producing quality, etcetera, etcetera.
• 1:19:19
  Well, that's, that's really one in one that that that's what we
• 1:19:22
  want to have happen. So people like yourself, Jay, as
• 1:19:25
  a coach at a college level, you, you don't have this issue of
• 1:19:31
  such horrible habits that are just not even close.
• 1:19:36
  And there's some people out there teaching things that are
• 1:19:39
  so bass ackwards it's just crazy.
• 1:19:43
  Well, yeah, I hear you all right.
• 1:19:45
  Guys, let's, let's, let's try to stay a little closer together
• 1:19:50
  through the years and say a little prayer that the good Lord
• 1:19:53
  let me hang around for a while. Yep.
• 1:19:56
  You are in my. OK.
• 1:20:00
  Thanks, Rich. Thank you SO.
• 1:20:02
  All righty. Well, that's it for us this
• 1:20:04
  week. Thanks to all of you for
• 1:20:05
  listening and the kind words you've been sharing with us.
• 1:20:08
  If you like what you're hearing, Please remember to give us a
• 1:20:10
  like, leave a comment and share this podcast on your social
• 1:20:13
  media channels. Make sure you never miss an
• 1:20:16
  episode by following us on your favorite podcast platform.
• 1:20:20
  And if you're so inclined, you can also leave us a great review
• 1:20:22
  on Apple Podcasts to help more people find us.
• 1:20:25
  On behalf of the From the Coach's Mouth podcast, have a
• 1:20:28
  great rest of your week and weekend.