- Jul 14, 2018
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In regards to Koufax, I think the point of his quote is that as he matured as a player and gained an ungodly level of command, he stopped nibbling at the strike zone in an attempt to fool hitters and just went after them. His career numbers bear this out: for the first six years of his career, his K:BB ratio went over 2.0 just once. In the last six, his ratio was routinely over 4.0 and went as high as 5.38. He threw far more strikes than balls. As Casey Stengel often said, "You could look it up."
Of course it's ridiculous for a 12U softball coach to assert that he has some magic formula when calling pitches to generate weak hits vs strikeouts. The best a coach can do for his or her pitcher is to mix it up, change speeds, work the corners, change planes, use effective velocity. Sometimes that will result in a weak hit, sometimes a strikeout, sometimes a blast over the fence!
Of course it's ridiculous for a 12U softball coach to assert that he has some magic formula when calling pitches to generate weak hits vs strikeouts. The best a coach can do for his or her pitcher is to mix it up, change speeds, work the corners, change planes, use effective velocity. Sometimes that will result in a weak hit, sometimes a strikeout, sometimes a blast over the fence!