"All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work...”
-Former Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter
Although coaching pitchers is certainly not on the level of interpreting the Constitution, it does often come down to semantics, and this quote will serve all of us in baseball very well.
Just casually walking by youth baseball games some pretty typical instructional cues can be heard from the stands and dugouts and even from the players themselves, and they seem to be the same basic "tips" that I heard way back when I was a kid.
It is wise to ask ourselves a few questions:
1) Are we sharing this advice because we are certain it will help?
2) Are the instructional cues based on science or on tradition?
3) Do the pitchers even understand what those cues really mean?
4) Is calling out pitching advice during the game all that helpful anyway?
This week I will look at some commonly shouted out instructional cues and share some thoughts on what they mean, and if they are really what the best pitchers in the game do at all.
danny@arizonapitching.com
www.arizonapitching.com
