Keith Delucia's Blog

By Joel Thomas      A philosophy that has always blown my mind that is taught from youth baseball all the way up to higher levels of baseball is when coaches teach their hitters not to guess what pitch is coming.

As coaches, don’t we all dream of the players who are true students of the game? Is being able to educate our hitters on what pitch may be coming in what count not one of our jobs as coaches? Therefore I am going to state my philosophy as being one that doesn’t just involve guessing what pitch is coming, but instead making and educated guess on what pitch may be coming.  So if all the great hitters in the game don’t guess at the plate like many coaches preach, and always look to get a fastball and adjust from there, how it is possible to think a hitter in the big leagues could hit .300 and 45-50 homeruns? If they’re facing a pitcher who throws a fastball 90-100 MPH, and a change up or breaking pitch that may be 68-80 MPH, do you really think they have the amount of success they do because they’re always looking for one pitch. No, they are great hitters because they pick up patterns in certain pitchers or because they’ve educated themselves on the pitch to look for in a certain situation. If a great hitter hits a curveball out of the park on a 2-0 count, which is a fastball count, and it seems as if he was looking for that curveball, he most likely was. He may have seen the pitcher throw this pitch in the same count to a teammate earlier in the game, and he knew what to look for if he gets into the same situation.

The last point I will make about hitting is not really about hitting as much as it is about the way we coach. If we as coaches are teaching hitters not to guess, then doesn’t that technically make us hypocrites? What I mean is that if we teach our hitters not to guess then why does everyone teach to be aggressive in what are known as hitter’s counts (1-0, 2-0, 2-1, 2-1). Maybe it’s because we as coaches are guessing these are fastball counts… Just something to think about.