Attacking The Strike Zone

As the baseball season begins to hit full stride, let's take a look at the success rate in percentages of strikes thrown by a pitcher during a game, and it's correlation to his teams success that day. As we worked our way through the wonderful winter months, our pitchers heard the same general thing from me every night at indoor workouts: Attack the strike zone. Your fastball percentage for strikes should be between 65%-75%. Your breaking ball needs to be between 60%-65%, as well as your change-up/split finger. Now, let's combine that with the approach we are trying to take on the bump, and what we teach at HH. I'm constantly preaching to our pitching staff 2 things(albeit they probably hate hearing it on a daily basis): 1) That we have to get to 0-1 counts on hitters, versus 1-0 counts, and 2) Get the hitter to put the ball in play in 3 pitches or less.


By getting to 0-1, we dictate that the hitter expand his strike zone, allowing us to make him hit a pitch that we want him to swing at. If we fall behind to 1-0, now the hitter is in the "drivers seat," in that he can look for a pitch that he likes, in order to drive the baseball. Obviously, these are not the only two counts you see in baseball. With that said, by putting a hitter in a situation where he is expanding the strike zone, and possibly chasing a pitch that we want him to swing at, we put our defense in the best possible position to be successful.


The other part to our approach is getting the hitter to put the ball in play in 3 pitches or less. By attacking the strike zone, we become the aggressor, by throwing quality strikes, but also allow our defense to work in the field. Ask any position player, and they'll tell you how much they hate being behind a guy that strikes out 10+ batters in a game. To that point, they hate it even more if a guy has walked 10+ batters, and if this is the case, the pitching coach should make his way to the parking lot with the player, and neither should come back.


My personal feelings aside, if we can keep our fielders in the game, we dramatically decrease the occurrence of errors because our fielders have to be on their toes at all times. When you see high strike out/high walk games, you're bound to see errors committed in the field. As the late, great Crash Davis once said to a young fireballer named Nook LaLoosh, "Don't try to strike everybody out. Strikeouts are boring! Besides that, they're fascist. Throw some ground balls, it's more democratic."

Any questions or comments, you can reach Chris Kurtz at aceselite@gmail.com