Softball: How to Turn Off Your Pitcher’s Nitpicking Brain

There’s a time and a place for nitpicking the details but during a game isn’t one of those times. We need to help our pitchers learn to turn off their nitpicking brains so they can increase their effort and performance.

There’s a time and a place for allowing our brains to delve deep into what we’re doing and all the ways we can improve it, but while we’re competing isn’t one of those times! While the detailed brain can help us make adjustments and improvements in practice, it can also cause us to be “careful” and lessen our overall effort which definitely isn’t what we want during games!

This whole topic was something I’d observed but never really thought much about until I recently spent time talking with University of Oklahoma Associate Head Coach and Pitching Coach Missy Lombardi. We were talking pitching and Missy was telling me how pitchers need to have two different types of practices: pitching practices and performance practices. Pitching practice is where the pitchers work on all the little details which definitely involve using their nitpicking brain. These types of practices involve correcting certain pitches or working on various mechanics or any of the millions of other things that pitchers are constantly working on.

But then, when the pitcher gets into the game she’s got to shut off that brain and get into her competition brain. In other words, during games pitchers must turn off their nitpicking brains and switch to more effort-specific brains, which means that pitchers must also have performance practices. While this sounds logical, and even easy, it’s far from it. Women are especially hard on themselves which means that our nitpicking brains stay pretty close to the surface all day long. Never mind during games when most instruction that pitchers hear involve all manner of nitpicking.

So it becomes important to hold some kind of practice to help pitchers step out of that small, nitpicking brain and get into a bigger, effort-type brain. This sounded completely logical to me, but again, until I heard Missy talk about it I’d never really thought about it that way. Missy told me about a couple of different workout concepts that she does with her pitchers that I immediately started using with all the pitchers I work with – and I was amazed at the results.

So basically, here’s what I learned from Missy and how I’ve found success using it with pitchers:

Performance Practice 1: Yes or No

This can either follow a portion of practice where the pitcher was working on the smaller, more nitpicking part of pitching – or else it can be done as a stand-alone pitching practice.

Simply have your pitcher throw each of her pitches, one-at-a-time, and following each pitch have her turn to you and tell you two things:

1. What was the pitch? – so you can chart it to see if there’s a pattern with any particular pitch.

2. Yes or No to this question – Was that your best effort? While this question may sound ridiculous, you’re going to be amazed at how hard this is for your pitchers. Initially you’re going to have to help them through this, and here’s why: When your pitcher throws a pitch and turns to tell you whether or not it was her best effort, she’s never thought about that without the result being tied to it. For instance, let’s say your pitcher throws a drop that goes in the dirt. She turns to tell you “Drop, no”. When you ask “why” (and for the first 5-10 pitches you’re going to have to ask “why?” to make sure they’re judging the right thing) she’ll no doubt say, “because it was a bad pitch”. That’s when you say, it’s not about nitpicking the pitch, it’s simply about your effort – was that your best effort?” This seems to really help them understand that you’re only isolating effort right now and therefore you’re helping them practice effort. Pitchers in particular rarely if ever practice effort without it being immediately tied to results. Now don’t get me wrong – of course results matter! But the first step to helping effort and results matter is for us to help our players, and in this case our pitchers, practice their efforts – free from the results. So go through at least 10-15 pitches, simply doing the Yes or NO, best effort or not game until it’s clear that your pitcher gets it and is able to judge her effort separate from the results.

3. By charting each pitch and putting a Y or N (Yes or No) following each based on best effort or not, you and your pitcher will be able to see any patterns regarding effort.

Performance Practice 2: 7 to 10

This practice can be done following the Yes or No practice and helps the pitcher practice the concept that both effort AND results matter in games.

Simply have your pitcher throw each of her pitches one-at-a-time, and following each pitch she’s going to evaluate each one on the following criteria:

• Location

• Movement

• Effort

She’s going to use a 7 to 10 scale with 7 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. So here’s how it works:

• If the pitcher nails her location ("Location"), the ball broke like it was supposed to ("Movement") and it was her best effort ("Effort") that means she was great in all 3 so it’s a 10!

• If she nails 2 of the 3 then it’s a 9

• If she nails 1 of the 3 it’s an 8

• And if she misses all 3 it’s a 7

Again, sounds easy but this really starts to help your pitcher quickly and accurately notice the good, and focus on the things that matter in a game – effort, movement and location. Keep in mind that Missy has Speed as one of her 3 criteria instead of Effort, but I found that it helped the pitchers stay aware of giving their best effort and not dropping down to being careful by switching out speed for Effort.

Know that when you’re working on Changeups and Fastballs that there are still 3 factors to use in grading the pitch, but that they switch slightly due to the nature of both pitches:

• Location

• Speed (fast for the fastball and slow for the changeup)

• Effort

Here are a few things I found out when I first started doing these workouts that might help you as well:

• As the coach you’ve got to avoid your nitpicking brain when you’re having these performance workouts. Say bigger, more general comments than detail-specific comments since you want to help your pitcher stay away from nitpicking so you stay away from that as well

• Be patient with your pitchers as they learn to separate outcome from effort.

• When your pitchers start evaluating their location, be forgiving based on their skill level. If they’re Division I college pitchers then they should hit the glove without it moving but if they’re a high school pitcher then they might get a glove size grace area.