Hitting the riseball

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Jan 14, 2015
95
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Any good instructions or advice for batters to hit the riseball? If you know the riseball is coming, or you pick up the spin and recognize it as a riseball, what as a hitter do you do to be successful? If you are waiting for the riseball to be thrown, do you make adjustments in the batters box?
 
Jun 17, 2009
15,105
0
Portland, OR
I am curious, at what distance from the plate (distance from ball to plate) are you expecting a hitter to recognize the 'spin' and make a change in their swing to account for that information?
 

Chris Delorit

Member
Apr 24, 2016
343
28
Green Bay, WI
Lickety,

If you haven't already picked or 'read' the pitch prior to release point, your hitter absolutely can achieve the ability to ID spin orientation on the softball around approximately 1/2 the distance from the pitcher's release point to home plate. In the women's game, it's earlier.

If you ever see Coach White...or Earleywhine or Tschida for that matter, at a clinic or the ballpark, it's a great question you could present directly to the "pros". ;)

So to answer your question, yes there is a little trick with the hands relative to the barrel. But, why give away my big secret, right... :D What I will suggest is hands high in your player's stance, drill long in the legs and torso from load through contact.

As far as a couple drills you can use are high tees on a bucket or chair & high tee walk-throughs. Tschida also has a whiffle ball & string drill that's nifty, which you can find over on YouTube. Check it out if your ever bored! ;) There's also another post where I suggested using numbered balls, striped balls, etc. If you have a pitcher, or a machine, where you can achieve spin on a ball, you can acclimate your hitters by just standing in the box, and trying to read the ball spin & call it out. Pretty simple, but make sure to teach them what spins will look like prior to using that drill. Listen to your kids, you may be surprised by their answers.

Keep in mind that developing that ability to pick up the ball spin rotation is a skill that can take some time for young, inexperienced hitters to develop. Be patient.

Chris
 
Last edited:
Jun 17, 2009
15,105
0
Portland, OR
Lickety,

If you haven't already picked or 'read' the pitch prior to release point, your hitter absolutely can achieve the ability to ID spin orientation on the softball around approximately 1/2 the distance from the pitcher's release point to home plate. In the women's game, it's earlier.

If you ever see Coach White...or Earleywhine or Tschida for that matter, at a clinic or the ballpark, it's a great question you could present directly to the "pros". ;)

So to answer your question, yes there is a little trick with the hands relative to the barrel. But, why give away my big secret, right... :D What I will suggest is hands high in your player's stance, drill long in the legs and torso from load through contact.

As far as a couple drills you can use are high tees on a bucket or chair & high tee walk-throughs. Tschida also has a whiffle ball & string drill that's nifty, which you can find over on YouTube. Check it out if your ever bored! ;) There's also another post where I suggested using numbered balls, striped balls, etc. If you have a pitcher, or a machine, where you can achieve spin on a ball, you can acclimate your hitters by just standing in the box, and trying to read the ball spin & call it out. Pretty simple, but make sure to teach them what spins will look like prior to using that drill. Listen to your kids, you may be surprised by their answers.

Keep in mind that developing that ability to pick up the ball spin rotation is a skill that can take some time for young, inexperienced hitters to develop. Be patient.

Chris

This post is loaded with bad information.

Tschida's whiffle ball on a string drill is based on ignorance and an incorrect understanding of a riseball.

Videos like this here below, show how someone high up in the game can make up stupid drills ... anything for a buck I suppose. There has never been a riseball moving through the strike zone at the angle shown that is anything remotely close to a strike. It's pure nonsense.



Anyone with even a little physics background would look at such a video and laugh. It certainly made me chuckle :rolleyes:.

There is a lot of bad information out there. Trust, but verify!!!
 
Last edited:
Jun 17, 2009
15,105
0
Portland, OR
Here is a GIF of John Tschida's power-line drill. Simply laughable. It's sad when someone at this level misses the boat by this much. It is why readers of information need to perform a verification step.

John_Tschida.gif
 

sluggers

Super Moderator
Staff member
May 26, 2008
7,132
113
Dallas, Texas
FFS is right about this.

A riseball is an easy pitch to hit *IF* (1) the batter knows the rise is coming and (2) the batter has proper discipline.

The attached image is the flight path of a riseball in the women's game. This graph comes from a NASA program simulating softball pitching. (The graph for the men's game is slightly different.)

Note that the riseball flight path is *FLAT* as it goes over the plate. So, hitting the rise is simple:

1) A batter needs to know the pitch is coming. The rise swing is flatter than a normal swing. The batter has to adjust the path of the swing to match the plane of the ball at the plate.
2) A batter needs to understand what a rise looks like. If a batter hasn't seen enough rises, they will be surprised by the pitch. Even though a rise does not actually "jump", it looks like it jumps. (It is an amazing illusion.)
3) A batter needs a level swing at the top of the strike zone.
4) A batter needs to lay off pitches above the strike zone. A batter can't hit any pitch that is too high, including a rise.
 

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Last edited:
Jan 14, 2015
95
0
My original post is based on a conversation I had with my daughter last week. She stuck out a couple times in a game last week. She told me struck out on the riseball both times. But she also said "I knew she was going to throw me the riseball again, and she did". She seemed baffled that she knew it was coming but still failed. As a batter, if you feel the riseball is coming what do you do? What could I have told her?
 
Dec 18, 2016
163
28
Isn't the Riseball considered to be a chase pitch most of the time? I remember Mike White of Oregon telling his girls the best way to combat a Riseball is to not swing? Based on that, I'm going to presume that a great number of these end of out of the strike zone, so if you can lay off of it, it's in your favor.
 

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