10th Honors English
Ms. Meara
24 January 2016
Grips on the baseball
Have you ever watched a baseball game and seen a pitchers pitch move or drop? If you have its due to the way the pitcher grips the ball. For the pitcher to be effective they need to have a fastball, and a side pitch. What a side pitch is what baseball players refer to as off speed pitches. These can be a changeup, a slider, curve ball, splitter, or sinker. The whole point of having an off speed pitch is to throw the batter of balance because all hitters want to hit is fastballs. Something that people don't know is to throw a good off sped pitch it requires more than a good arm. It needs a certain wrist movement, either up or down, and a correct grip on the baseball. I'm going to show and explain in this post is the correct grips for throwing on off-speed pitch.
"Research has revealed that the wrist and forearm snap straight unless throwing on off speed pitch, then it will snap down, or to the side." (House 64).
"There are many different grips in pitching, but those who can consistently have the same repetition on off-speed pitches will have the biggest impact." (House 65).
The reason there is being so much emphasized on these grips is, it doesn't matter how good of an arm you have, if you cant throw off-speed pitches you wont be effective. Also these grips and snapping off the wrist needs to be consistent because if they are not you will not only have bad results, you can also strain or hurt ligaments in your arm. For example when you throw a curveball, you snap down and put tons of strain on your arm, then with a slider, you snap to the side also putting pain in your arm.
Which pitch do you think puts more strain on your arm, throwing a curveball and snapping down, or throwing a slider and snapping to the side.
I think this was a very good blog post. I definitely think it's good that you show the correct grip for the off speed pitches because they are very effective in getting a batter to swing and get a strike on his count.
ReplyDeleteThis is a very insightful post, James. I believe that having the right grip on the baseball is very essential in order to throw certain types of pitches. To answer your question, I would think that throwing a slider and snapping to the side would put more strain on your arm due to the motion of the pitch being strange.
ReplyDelete