Baseball Pitching Tips - How to Hide Your Grip is Critical!

By Larry Cicchiello

For something that's very important, I'm quite surprised hiding your grip isn't talked about or taught more. How many things can be more detrimental for a pitcher than tipping off his pitches to opposing players and their coaches? Trust me, players, coaches and managers will look for opposing pitchers that tip off their pitches!

For decades, I have heard several times of a pitcher who has been very successful and all of a sudden he is hit very hard for four or five straight outings. Then he gets back on the right track and you hear he was tipping off his pitches and that's why he was getting hit hard. And some of these pitchers were outstanding professional pitchers so that shows what a common problem it is.

He can be tipping the pitches off in several ways and quite often it's because he is not hiding his grip on the ball for his different pitches. If you are using the full windup, make sure that even when you are raising your hands and pivoting on the rubber, you keep the inside of your glove facing your chest! If you are pitching from the stretch position, make sure that when you come set, you keep the inside of your glove facing your chest.

It's when raising the hands and pivoting on the rubber that alot of pitchers have a tendency to open up the glove and that is advertising your grip.

Some pitchers start with a fancy grip before every pitch and then sometimes switch to another grip at the last moment. An example would be starting with a circle changeup grip every single pitch and then changing the grip at the last second to the one you really want to use.

You can play some "mind games" with the batter also. If the batter knows that you have a very good changeup, you can move your hand around on the ball for a second or two, and lead him to believe that you might be going to your circle change grip. Then you can surprise him with a good, old fashioned four-seamer in on his hands.

One pitch later, you can move your hand on the ball again and this time you do throw the changeup. I'm not saying to do this on every pitch, but on occasion, it will work well for you and annoy the batter. Why not give the batter a little more to think about? He may start over thinking, outthink himself and become annoyed.

As a pitcher, I most certainly want to annoy a batter in any way I can.

Larry Cicchiello is the successful author of several very user friendly eBooks covering 320 topics on playing or coaching excellent baseball. ANY player, coach or parent who wants to help their child will be fully equipped! Check out some FREE baseball tips on hitting and FREE baseball pitching tips at LarryBaseball.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Larry_Cicchiello


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