A bolt thrower can usually take care of bolt hitters. If you are a hitting coach, there is a lot you can do to prepare your hitters for a great pitcher. You can study pitcher tendencies like when throwing different types of pitches and do some guesswork, but generally stud pitchers are so good that most hitters can’t hit their pitches even if they know what the next pitch is.
The best way to get a pitcher out of your rhythm is to shake him up in some way. Some baseball coaches like to play small ball and try to steal bases and hit a few hits to force the team to make plays. This is a good tactic. Then there’s a tactic of creating a power lineup full of good hitters and seeing if one of them can open the game with an extra base hit. This tactic is probably even better as it can create momentum-shifting effects when a long ball is hit.
Either way, the bolt thrower has the upper hand and with one or two bolt throwers on the same team, the organization as a whole has a greater chance of winning. The pitch is definitely 75 percent of the game.
Possibly the greatest hitter of all time, Ted Williams has been quoted as saying, “The hardest pitch to hit is the slider.” If someone like Ted Williams said this, there must be a good reason. Most good pitchers who can develop a good corner or change are somewhat effective. The reason is that most decent hitters have trouble staying out of speed. Great hitters have the ability to quickly recognize different pitches, have a natural ability to fall behind, and are rarely fooled by off-speed pitches.
The slider, however, is a pitch that appears to be a fastball and then slides in a diagonal plane downward and inward (or inward) right at the last second. Ted Williams never had a problem recognizing and adjusting to any tone other than the slider. As a pitcher, developing a sliding pitch without hurting your arm is not an easy thing to do. However, developing this pitch with the correct technique would be a good idea, especially since the best hitter in the world had trouble hitting it.
As a hitter, it is important to learn the secrets of staying behind on all pitches as you climb the ladder of success. Hitting different types of pitches is challenging enough, let alone trying to decide to swing on a nasty slider. Hitters who learn to fall behind will be less likely to throw bad pitches.
