leaping

[Mike]

Leaping higher rather than forward hurts efficiency so why worry about it?

Guess if I thought about it I could have answered my own question. Leap away.

Sorry to hear you wont be posting, I have learned so much from you. Hope to hear from you again someday. Good luck with whatever your doing.

Mike

 

[BoardMember]

Guess if I thought about it I could have answered my own question. Leap away.

Sorry to hear you wont be posting, I have learned so much from you. Hope to hear from you again someday. Good luck with whatever your doing.

Mike

Technically, there NOTHING wrong with leaping.....As long as it INCLUDES a rear leg drag.......

Leaping is after all, is an explosive drive off the mound...It's pretty hard to "leap to high" if your rear leg is dragging. Although, there is a big difference between "leaping up" and "leaping out".......

Put a piece of standard binder paper torn from a spiral notebook under the pivot foot just at the front of the mound, and make the pitcher drag the binder paper with the pivot foot after the push off.

Binder paper is thin enough for the cleats to rip through for traction, but sturdy enough to stay together during the drag. Use it one or twice and tear off a new piece.....

WARNING: Don't use anything that won't let the cleats "bite the ground" through the paper......Like construction paper or a towel for example.......

 

[MTR]

Technically, there NOTHING wrong with leaping.....As long as it INCLUDES a rear leg drag.......

TECHNICALLY, if you are dragging a foot, it isn't leaping.

Leaping is after all, is an explosive drive off the mound...]

If the pitcher is on a mound, you are on the wrong field.

 

[Glipski]

I see leaping all the time and it's really an issue to me...here's why: when a pitcher leaps out without dragging the rear foot, she gains extra distance towards the plate that otherwise she wouldn't have had in the event she had performed a continuous drag as required by the rules. As anyone with even a basic knowledge of physics knows, the closer to the plate at release, the higher the relative velocity of the pitch from the batter's perspective. A closer release point means less reaction time for the batter. The foot drag rule was intiated to alleviate some of the issues of pitchers ending up standing next to the batter when they release the ball (being facetious, but you get the point). In my experience, and of course opinion, usually the ones who pooh-pooh the drag rule are the ones with pitchers who can't control it. We teach ours to drag and learn proper mechanics to get the speed without cheating...yes, the rules are clea,r so when they leap, they cheat. If foot dragging shouldn't be a rule, how about we petition to move the rubber to say, 30 feet for HS and College level? And we could also petition for loaded bats and nitrogen filled balls, too. The bat rules should be changed because they suck, and so do the rules about the construction of the balls. Rules are for big babies. We don't need no stinkin' rules!

Just call me the "Keyboard Ninja"

;-)

 

[halskinner]

Leaping = airborne. What goes up, must come down. The higher it goes up, the harder that jarring effect when it comes down. It IS the jarring effect that is not safe for the throwing shoulder.

The associations and their rulebooks are not stupid when it comes to using safe mechanics and incorporating those into the pitching regs. Softball has been around over 100 years and, in that time, the associations have figured out what is and is not safe to do when it comes to pitching.

Example; The rule that requires the wind up to be on the straight up and down plane of the body. Why that rule? To bring the wind up further away from the body is an unsafe action.

The same can be said for the leaping / airborne rule. Getting airborne and coming down on the stride leg harder is an unsafe action, therefore, a rule saying it is not allowed.