Model Pitchers

starsnuffer said:

Ueno has no hips, and throws around her body, much like a batter would use pelvic twist to give them rotational momentum in their swing. If you've ever coached youth, and had girls pitch like this (it's fairly common unfortunately, For some reason some instructors release the ball at the seam on the side of the pants) you have all kinds of problems when they hit puberty. They either give up because they get tired of smacking themselves or they develop crazy lean, sideways pelvic tilt, or non-linear arm whips to get "around" the issue. If they stayed open in the first place they would never have had to make this adjustment. I'd never want a girl to be taught to pitch like Ueno pitches. . . sure, she gets results, but you wonder how many kids have ended up with health issues trying to emulate her.

-W

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starsnuffer said:

I'm sorry, I must have just dreamed about the young ladies that I've worked with and coached that have had to suffer through the pain that this pitching style inflicts on them during puberty.

-W

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FiveFrameSwing said:

Jennie Finch:

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The challenge is out there to others. How is it that Ueno, despite being short and having relatively small levers, can reach pitch speeds that place her as one of the sports top female pitchers?

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FiveFrameSwing said:

It sounds like you don't have an answer to the question. That's okay ... simply say that you don't understand how Ueno can have such short levers and still hurl pitches at 70mph.

Just because 'your' model of pitching doesn't explain why someone like Ueno can be so accomplished, shouldn't be a reason to attempt to scare people away from analyzing real data.

You've clearly punted on trying to explain how someone with such small levers can throw so fast.

The challenge is out there to others. How is it that Ueno, despite being short and having relatively small levers, can reach pitch speeds that place her as one of the sports top female pitchers?

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starsnuffer said:

I can understand why she can pitch that fast, however I also understand that the mechanics are dangerous to health and not useful for young pitchers to learn, and therefor an exercise in futility.

Uneo starts with a very powerful leg drive. In one of the clips you posted, you can even see how she makes herself illegal by lifting up her pivot foot and "stamping" it back down to the rubber to begin her drive. She turns out her knee before hand, and being bowlegged myself (like Uneo) I understand how important it is to use this motion to get a good drive. With straight legs, it's more efficient to begin like a sprinter with the knee towards the catcher, but with bow legs, this energy is largely wasted and puts pressure on the outside of the foot and forces the toes outwards.

The thing that stands out most about her pitching, and probably what allows her to translate so much of her leg drive to her arm whip is that she is incredibly efficient in landing hard and stopping her lower body's forward momentum with her stride leg, it's almost as if she hits a brick wall (maybe this is an advantage of short legs?). How she does this is rather amazing, considering that she lands on the ball of her foot rather then the entire foot. Her muscular structure of her calves is a testament to how much strength it takes to do this and come to such a dead stop. This allows all of that energy she built into her leap to translate directly into her arm whip. Watch her pitch, and you can see her arm whip speed up nearly 3x the moment her stride leg lands. . . while her arm is still nearly 3/4 back towards 2nd. Compare this to Finch, wheras her arm is nearly straight down and her internal rotation has begun by the time her stride leg lands. This means that Uneo uses her short arms to translate power for a longer period of time then a tall pitcher like Finch, who only has the forarm/wrist movement time to translate that forward leg driven power.

As I mentioned earlier, Uneo also rotates her hips during this time and "slams the door" which can add the pelvic motion to bring more speed. Even her front foot rotates here so her toe is facing the catcher. So much of her body is moving during the pitch, it must have been incredibly hard for her to learn to be accurate with this kind of motion, but she seems to manage.

At the end, she has very good IR movement and an incredible whip, which is probably the most important part of her pitch and probably the part of her motion that is worthy of further study.

I don't claim to understand everything about how she pitches, but I can see how she makes the tools available to her work for her. If I was teaching short bowlegged men to pitch, I might use her as a model.

-W

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