College-Bound Pitchers Should Ask Tough Questions Of Their Future Baseball Coaches

Back-to-school means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For senior baseball pitchers exploring the college option, the NCAA's early-signing period (where scholarship athletes commit and sign on to a school) is fast-approaching (November). And I know from personal experience that many tough decisions lie ahead.

For non-scholarship baseball players, deciding on which school to attend and visiting with the college baseball coaches can be daunting, too.

But in both cases the process of choosing a college and a college baseball program doesn’t have to be stressful... if you have an idea about what to expect and what questions to ask.

To start the process you've got to sit down with your college-bound son and first decide what your son is interested in studying at school (you know, what is your son interesting in becoming later in life when baseball is over?). And second: how does your son's educational interests match-up with the educational programs offered at the school?

For example, your son may be interested in Physical Therapy, but the school, though it may have a good baseball program, may not offer a Physical Therapy program. Those are some questions to get the college conversation rolling.

If you’re able to visit with a college coach, ask about study hall for athletes: Is study hall required, and does the athletic department provide free tutors for athletes, available anytime? The school should offer that, but some don't.

Ask about the graduation rate of baseball players. Ask how long it takes the typical baseball player to graduate. (Because some programs are so game- and travel-intense in the spring, athletes are required to take a reduced class-load, which makes it difficult to graduate in 4 years.)

Ask what most baseball players do after college: Do they play pro baseball? Go to grad school? Head straight to work? Is the answer the coach you're talking with in-line with what your son wants to do after college?

One thing to watch out for: Be careful of promises to play freshman year. 99% of non-scholarship freshmen DO NOT play freshmen year at Div. 1 schools. (And if they do play, it's many times limited and during non-conference games only.) Don't have playing right-out-of-the-gates be a determining factor in your decision: make learning the top-priority. (If you’re good enough to pitch as a freshmen, you'll pitch... BUT... you've got to be patient.)

The best rule of thumb for college-bound pitchers? Go with education, first, and baseball second.

Yours in baseball,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher®
www.thecompletepitcher.com

I Have Not Forgotten...

I was supposed to be on a plane headed home to St. Louis.

We had just finished a second-place finish in the Northwest League (NWL). My team, the Boise Hawks, a Chicago Cubs short-season-A team based in Boise, Idaho, dominated the league thanks in-part to the season-long-success of future Major League pitchers Dontrelle Willis, Felix Sanchez and Sergio Mitre. They comprised three of our starting five.

I was the closer. It was the late summer of 2001.

After earning a spot in the league finals, it was the San Francisco Giants minor league affiliate, led by pitcher Jesse Foppert, (who made his Major League pitching debut in 2002), who showed us why he was the Giants’ #1 draft pick that year: he completely mowed us down.

With the season over, my teammates and I had one day to pack our bags, clear out the clubhouse and hop on a flight home for the off-season.

My flight was to leave at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 11.

The night before I was supposed to leave Boise, I had called my sister to let her know when my flight was expected to arrive at the airport in St. Louis. The game plan was: I’d sleep in, grab a quick brunch and head to the airport a few hours early because I had extra bags that I wanted to make sure made it home with me. (It's amazing how much "stuff" you can collect over the course of a Minor League season.)

The next morning, my host mom, with whom my teammate and I lived, woke us up at 8 a.m. in a frantic panic. She had been watching the morning news and saw that an airplane had crashed into one of the towers at the World Trade Center in New York. (At that point, no one knew a second plane was headed toward the second tower.)

I got up, grabbed a Gatorade from the fridge and tuned into the events on the news with everybody in the living room.

Within minutes of my sitting down on the edge of the couch, the news crews panned the sky to catch a second plane weave through the cityscape and barrel into the second tower.

Like the rest of America, I watched in horror as smoke billowed out of the two World Trade Center towers.

My mom and sister immediately called on the cell phone. Then my dad, who called to say that my grandparents in New York were OK.

Twenty minutes later, the first tower collapsed. Then the second. My roommate, host family and me just sat there on the couch… silent and motionless.

I didn't get home until Sunday morning, five days later.

That was four years ago. I was in Boise, Idaho. I have not forgotten.

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher®
www.thecompletepitcher.com

Pitching In The Information Age

Back in the 1980s, when I first started playing baseball, one of the biggest challenges of maximizing potential on the pitcher’s mound was that very few coaches knew how to teach pitching.

Aside from a few instructional books (there weren’t many) and an occasional baseball article in Sports Illustrated (it was the only sports mag at the time) very few coaches knew what they were doing. Remember, that was pre-VHS. And those that did know the art of pitching inside and out had limited means to pass information to the rest of us – especially where I grew up in upstate New York. Slowly, however, that changed.

With the Internet, information not only became more readily available, it became more frequently obtrusive. As it turns out, in the 21st century its not for lack of information that ball players suffer, it’s for too much information. And as it turns out, this overabundance of information often gets in the way of efforts to not only maximize pitching potential, but to stay healthy and remain injury free. Yes, an excess of pitching information can at times be as detrimental as the ignorance of when I grew up in baseball.

Just check out the instructional Web sites, the Internet-based pitching gurus and baseball-related blogs that are popping up on-line left and right. The sheer number is downright scary! Search GoDaddy.com to purchase .com domain names with the word “pitch,” “pitcher,” or “pitching” in it and just about every pitching-related domain name in every variation is taken. From FireYourPitchingCoach.com and PitchingYips.com to PitchingAtoZ.com and ILovePitching.com, pitchers are covered… or are they?

Now I’m not trying to take a stab at the sites mentioned (which is why I mentioned one of mine, too) but I strongly believe that this excess of pitching information today is creating a dangerous overload for baseball coaches, parents and players. And I certainly don’t mean to complain about the expanding amount of information and advice on the Internet. I’m not advocating a return to pre-VHS. But there are certainly problems with the current info overload.

Here’s what I’ve noticed, and I’ve provided some solutions, too:

Pitchers no longer think for themselves

In working with numerous high-level baseball pitchers both as a Div. III college coach and through my instructional pitching business, The Complete Pitcher, Inc., I sometimes wonder what happened to good ole’ intuition and common sense.

Coaches these days “call pitches” from the dugout instead of letting the pitcher figure out how to dissect hitters pitch-by-pitch, inning-by-inning.

As a result, many pitching coaches are crippling the ability of a pitcher to pitch out of a jam, or pitch through the heart of the line-up without “training wheels.” As coaches, you’ve got to allow the pitcher to think on their own two feet, or they’ll be worthless later in their career because they’ll never develop the mental strategic conditioning that’s required to out-think opponents and win.

If you lose because the pitcher calling his own game makes a mistake: big deal. Talk about what pitch was thrown, why another pitch may have been better, and move on. That’s how pitchers need to learn – but for the most part, it’s not happening.

Pitchers make pitching more complicated than it has to be

Look, pitching isn’t rocket science or I wouldn’t have been able to do it. And while becoming a complete pitcher requires consistent, directed work, it’s not that complicated. But I fully understand how it can seem difficult when trying to sift through the massive amounts of information we’re inundated with on a daily basis.

I’m also fully aware how difficult it is to sort out the most important fundamental advice for pitchers of all ages and abilities – especially when there’s a Web site on pitching out there on every side of any pitching topic: Long toss on a line; don’t long toss on a line. Lift weights; don’t lift weights. Run; don’t run. Think; don’t think. You get the point.

Mix-and-match pitching philosophies

With so much pitching information and advice out there, one common tendency may be to mix-and-match a-little-of-this and a-little-of-that. The problem here lies in that fact that no program is given a chance to succeed.

Choices are great. It’s what our country was built on: choice. But pitchers today need to develop the patience to stay with a program for at least 8 weeks before looking for something else.

And it doesn’t matter whose program it is, or what the details include. More pitchers would experience more success if they just stuck with something – anything.

So now that you've read some of my observations, here’s what I suggest:

Be patient and become a student of the game

Take some time to really become a student of the game of baseball pitching. Whether through a Web site, phone conversation, e-mail or snail mail, get to know your instructor. Read articles, books and magazines. Understand the foundational principals of pitching. (The more you do this, the more you’ll see that most coaches who’ve come from a professional background have a similar approach… but to that end, there are always exceptions!).

Implement one thing, and see it through to the end. If you see that it doesn’t work, try something else. Everyone’s different and what worked for me, for example, may not work for you.

Trust your intuition and think for yourself

Work closely with your current pitching coaches and instructors to learn pitch count strategies. This goes along with becoming a student of the game, but ask your coach to call your own game. (After all, it’s your name is the win-loss column in the newspaper the next day). Take control of your career.

Stick with what works

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If you’ve found a book, a video, a training program or a Web site that works for you, then do what my good friend Dontrelle Willis, a pitcher for the Florida Marlins, always says: “Do what you do… do what you do!” (Willis and I played on the same pro team the entire 2001 season.)

The baseball pitching information overload isn’t going to go away. And, I’m sure the pitching Web sites and on-line gurus will still keep popping up left and right. But with patience, due diligence and some thinking on your own, you’ll be able to take it in stride and maximize your potential with no problems at all.

Yours in baseball,

Steven Ellis
The Complete Pitcher®
www.thecompletepitcher.com