06-12-2015, 05:07 PM
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#15
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Rookie
OVR: 2
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: Sedalia, MO
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Re: How do you guys hit without Guess Pitch?
If you just practice reading the ball as it comes out of the pitchers hand more, eventually you'll get to a place where you feel pretty solid with your decision to swing or not.
There's 3 main ways I've learned to do this, and I tend to alternate/use all 3 during the course of the game. Because handiness vs your batters handiness comes into effect, and the arm motion the pitcher uses, sometimes you have to switch this up. But as the game goes on you get a feel for what the ball is going to do.
The first is the obvious, stare at the ball the entire time from pre-pitch to swing. I've found this is good for getting timing down, but I swing on a lot more pitches on the edge/out of the zone than I should, and on a lot of low throws. You're focused on primarily the speed of the pitch and sometimes lose your place on where exactly the ball ends up in the strikezone. Needed mostly on super fastball throwers.
The method I use the most, is stare at the pitchers hand the entire pitch. After an inning or so you'll know at what point in the motion the ball leaves the pitchers hand. So when you focus on the pitchers hand, you begin to learn how the ball tends to curve and drop. As you focus on his hand, the very moment the pitch is thrown you'll get a sign of what is going to happen - if the ball immediately goes hard to the right or left of the hand you might want to lay off. If it drifts up, it's probably a curve, etc. I get a ton of walks using this, however deceptive pitches can be an issue, this years change up is especially deadly and you'll expect the straight fastball a lot with this method and it ends up dropping out at the end. You're timing will be from eventually learning to identify the speed based on the release of the ball, i.e. knowing the very moment its thrown if its a slider, fastball, or curve. Remember the key here is to stare at the pitchers hand, not the ball, on the pitch.
The third is focusing on the batters eye. That big box in the outfield behind the pitcher. I don't even directly look at the pitcher at all. This is a bit of both my first and second method. You get a good view on the angle of the pitch and how it will turn or arc. The goal here is to keep your eyes in a fixed position like my looking at his hand method, but this time you are looking "through" the pitcher. Because your eyes are in the exact same position every pitch, you create a strike zone in your mind and should immediately know based on what the ball is doing if it will be in that strike zone or not. And since you're "wide focused" and not closed in on one part of the pitcher or ball you still see the ball moving and can get a decent read on the pitch.
Problems with the last approach are pitchers with a lot of movement in their wind ups. A correctable problem is getting doubt with where you are staring, it should be at the same point every time. But if you begin to struggle you may move your eye placement to different parts of the box, causing the zone in your head to constantly change, not a great thing. Problems with all the approaches are odd throwing arms, it may just be me with these methods but I struggle specifically with underarm throws.
With all of these methods, until I get to 2 strikes, I create a smaller strike zone. Within the strike zone box I make a second, smaller box about half the size of the strike zone. I generally will not swing at all if the pitch is outside this smaller box. Leads to getting ahead of the count a lot, and some walks. When I try to teach friends how to play the show, the biggest issue nearly everyone has is seeing that the pitch will be a strike and they decide to swing, even though it's a pitch that is on the edges somewhere that they'll just barely get or pop out on. Learn to let these go. I've found that you'll pretty much always get 1 or 2 really good pitches to hit at every at-bat, sometimes you just have to work for them to get to that point though.
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