Posted by: tom.guerry (tom.guerry@kp.org) on Thu Oct 4 11:27:39 2001

A few women's fastpitch thoughts.(I have started a thread here because the September threads do not show in October,and the October replies to September topics show only at the end of September posts.)

As Mark mentions,there are some long threads at the fastpitch forum,but they can be hard to find/search.The most recent has to do with the pitching distance-should international and 18u Gold(different governing bodies) go to 43 ft which is the NCAA pitching distance ?

As your friend Wade Boggs has experienced,even he can only wave at the ball going 70mph from a pitcher leaping off the 40 ft pitching slab and releasing the ball around 35 ft away.In my opinion,43 ft would be right for the top level women's game.This is not likely to be the situation for most high school kids,and the colleges are already at 43 ft.Both these situations give adequate reaction time for a full swing.The best full swing is the Mankin/Nyman/Epstein/baseball/rotational/lower body/whatever you want to call it swing.

For fastpitch you want to adjust by using as small as possible a swing radius and a more upright axis of rotation.You need to really work on crowding the plate and accentuating bottom hand torque to keep the middle in ball fair and to be able to reach the outside pitch.This is the best swing,but not well understood or coached,and kids rarely put the time in necessary to maximize their potential(in the fastpitch forum thread it was stated that almost no one had seen a hitter work as much as pitchers do-what's with that?)

When coaches talk about taking the hands to the ball,they are just doing the best they can to get some kind of contact,preferably a grounder.It would be theoretically ok to consciously teach a linear style for certain kids and situations,but this is more likely to just confuse the muscle memory and weaken the full swing,so mastering multiple mechanical styles is rarely realistic.Unfortunately,most of these linear approaches are just making a compromise for a possible immediate gain that in the long run prevents kids reaching their potential.They are also usually a poorly understood mixture of styles that suboptimizes both.

An example of a successful rotational swing(slow power hitter type) is Cal's Veronica Nelson.No other hitters on the team can protect her,unfortunately.Last years stats:BA .353,93BB,19 HR,150AB,.780 slugging,OBA .601.