Great Irony

My DD has been playing "A" ball for a few years for a couple of different coaches.
One of the funniest things I remember is when our coaches watch the competitions pitchers warm before a game.

When they see a girl who throws "slow" they sigh.. "oh no, I hope our kids can hit her, they hate slow pitching.. I wish they would throw their power Pitcher"
Then the assistant chimes in "were not the only team that hates to hit slow pitching you see it all the time"
Armed with this knowledge come tryouts and we always pass on the girl who spots pitches but doesn't throw hard.

It's funny

I've seen the "slower" pitcher make good hitting teams look silly. Usually though by the 2nd time around they will light her up. We won a big tourney 1 summer when they caught up to our ace and we brought in the slow pitcher. Ground ball after ground ball to 3rd base.

16U DD does not throw fast and plays rec. Past fall we combined with a TB team and had 5 pitchers, all good except DD.

She outpitched them all.

She does not walk anyone unless she wants to and will not throw a strike unless umpire makes her.

Ironically she would not get a hit if she could pitch to herself, she destroys fast pitchers. The faster the better.

(Part of it is compation DD plays against but no one has gone yard on her in 8 years of pitching, you better be able to hit the heck out of the ball if you do. She is not going to help you. She has not gone yard batting but has hit the fence a few times against faster pitchers)

This is so true! So many teams think the nicknames of their pitchers should be Fast, Faster and Fastest. DD has slower than average speed but can paint corners like an artist, locate a changeup and a drop, and make that fastball look like it's coming in at 55 after a good off speed pitch. But I see a ton of teams that won't even give her a look because she isn't one of the speed sisters. Last year, the third time through the lineup was the inning that beat her in 1:40 games. We'll see if she gets better this year.

DD played with a girl who threw only off speed, movement pitches. They were slow and slower. DD had to catch for her. The other catcher refused to catch for her because she flat out could not catch the drop balls, and "junk ball pitches" that this girl threw. The other girl was a better catcher as far as blocking, and had a stronger arm, but she just could not catch for this girl for some reason. She made a lot of hitters look completely silly swinging at some of her stuff. Problems arose however when this girl became tired and the pitches didn't drop, or didn't break as much. When she hung pitches it went south in a hurry.

This is so true. I remember the first tournament of this past spring. We lost our first bracket game against a weak team that had the slowest pitchers I have ever seen but she was very accurate. We lost 2-1, went to the losers bracket, won every game in the losers bracket and ended up winning the tournament. The only team that came close to beating us is the team we lost to, and beat them in the losers bracket by a score of 3-2. Every other team we beat by at least 4 runs. Slow pitchers are a killer for teams used to hitting against faster pitchers. The next week in the cage we started working on hitting off slower pitchers.

I coached a middle school team a couple years ago and we had two pitchers. One threw slow and the other threw slower. They could both throw strikes though and did a decent job keeping the ball down in the zone. We would start the slower girl and try to massage her through the lineup twice. If we tried to get a third time through, we got hammered. However, she could make good hitters look silly. Our shortstop was a busy girl with all the rolled over ground balls. Once we were through the order twice, we took out our slower girl and put in our slow girl. But, because the hitters had seen slower, our slow girl looked like Lisa Fernandez winging the ball in there. If she could get us one time through the order, we were generally done either literally with a win or figuratively because the other team was drilling us.

It was a fun way to coach. Great kids that year.