Gaming

Hit the slider in baseball

A stud pitcher can usually handle stud hitters. If you’re a hitting coach, there’s not much you can do to prepare your hitters for a great pitcher. You can study pitching tendencies like when he throws different types of pitches and make some guesses, but usually pitchers are so good that most hitters can’t hit their pitches even if they know what pitch is coming.

The best way to get a pitcher out of his groove is to shake him up somehow. Some baseball coaches like to play small ball and try to steal bases and make some bunts to force the team to make plays. This is a good tactic. Then there is the 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 changing effects when hitting a long ball.

Either way, the stud pitcher has the upper hand and with one or two stud pitchers on the same team, the organization as a whole has a better 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 for it. Most good pitchers who can develop a good curveball or change speed are somewhat effective. The reason is that most decent hitters have trouble staying on the off-speed pitch. 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 down and out (or in) right at the last second. Ted Williams never had a problem recognizing and adapting to any tone other than the slider. As a pitcher, developing a slider without hurting your arm is not an easy thing to do. However, developing this pitch with proper technique would be a good idea, especially since the best hitter in the world was having trouble hitting it.

As a hitter, it’s important to learn the secrets of staying behind on every pitch as you climb the ladder of success. Hitting different types of pitches is challenging enough, let alone trying to decide to swing at a nasty slider. Hitters who learn to hang back will be less likely to swing at bad pitches.

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