First Pitch: The Summer I Learned How To Learn

Matt Caldwell

Spring 1998

It is often helpful if a person can follow some kind of pattern in their daily life. For example, when I get up in the morning I go to the bathroom and do all of my bathroom things (shower, brush my teeth, etc.) then I go and put my clothes on. Finally, I put all of the books I need for class in my bag and go to class. This may seem very simple, but if I fail to do any of these activities, my whole morning and possibly my whole day is off. It is the same way with learning. Good learning takes place in a specific pattern with four steps. Author Roger von Oech has labeled the steps of this pattern the explorer, the artist, the judge, and the warrior (1986). If any of these steps are skipped, a person’s learning will be out of whack much like my life on a bad morning.

Indeed, the order in which a person takes these steps is very critical as to whether he or she will learn an activity. This is explicitly true in learning how to pitch a baseball. Some people think that pitching is easy: I get the ball and simply throw it to the catcher. However, the intricacies of pitching are numerous, and so are the mistakes that a pitcher can make. Timing, rhythm, and control all contribute to whether a pitch will be a strike, a ball, or a line drive past the pitcher’s ear.

When I first started pitching, I learned the basic delivery; that is, the wind-up that is the bare skeleton of what a wind-up should be. First in this wind-up (for a right-handed pitcher), the pitcher stands on the rubber with his hands at his sides. Second, the pitcher brings his hands together while simultaneously bringing them over his head. At the same time, he steps away from the plate with his left foot at a 45 degree angle to the rubber. Third, the pitcher brings his hands back to the front of his body while swinging his left leg from behind the rubber to the front of his body bringing it up to his chest. Fourth, the pitcher separates his hands, moving the ball behind his body into throwing position, while bending his right leg and pushing off the rubber with this leg. At this time, the left leg will be moving toward the plate to brace the "fall" of the pitcher. Finally, the pitcher plants his left leg approximately four to five feet in front of the rubber and throws the ball with an angle that is three-quarters of straight over the top. As it has been shown, pitching is hardly as easy as it looks.

As I said earlier, I learned this basic pitching motion when I started pitching. There really wasn’t any creativity in it, just as there isn’t any real creativity in learning the multiplication tables. But, like in math, I had to learn the intricate parts of the process before I could begin shaping it into something I was comfortable with. And, also like in math, once I became comfortable, I became better at it.

So there I was, I knew the secret to becoming a good pitcher: having the perfect delivery. Little did I realize that the perfect delivery was something that someone else had made up. It was their perfect delivery—it was how they had been most comfortable in trying to pitch. The "they" in this case could have been my coach, my dad, or some pitching instructor from 1958. Needless to say, I wasn’t any of them, so my motion had to be changed to fit my needs. I realized this by having a learning conversation with myself in fifth grade. I had a conversation with myself in which I described where I was in my development, my intended destination, and how to get there in terms of my pitching career.

I didn’t know I was having a learning conversation at the time, I hadn’t ever heard of such a thing. However, after reading the Harri-Augustine and Thomas text (1991), I realized that when I figure out something in my head, as trivial as deciding what to order at McDonald’s or as complex as learning how to find integrals in my Calculus class, I am having a learning conversation (1991). The result of these conversations can be whatever I put into them. If I take a conversation seriously, I will be satisfied when I leave McDonald’s. If I do not, I will fail my Calculus test. In the Harri-Augustine and Thomas text, the authors told the reader that not everything can be spoon-fed to us and still be useful (1991). There are some ideas that must be formed within our own minds, with the help of outside influences.

The outside influence in my case was the umpire. I was doing the pitching motion just as I was taught, yet the umpire continually called my pitches errant. Granted, ten-year-olds aren’t supposed to have pin-point accuracy, but they should still be able to hit a rectangle that measures eighteen inches by thirty inches (the average strike zone) from forty-five feet away at least part of the time. One of the first rules in baseball is that if the pitcher doesn’t throw strikes, he will get pulled and replaced with one that can. Consequently, I got to have a nice little learning conversation about my pitching while I was sitting on the bench for the rest of the game.

It was at this point that my explorer kicked in. As von Oech stated in his book A Kick in the Seat of the Pants, "exploring involves venturing off the beaten path." (1986, p. 25) I knew that I didn’t really feel comfortable pitching the way I was taught. I wasn’t coordinated enough to keep my balance with a high leg kick, so I eliminated it. Instead of moving my left leg behind the rubber in step two, I moved it to the side of the rubber. Also, instead of kicking my left leg high in step three, I merely kicked it out in front of me to brace myself when I threw.

My artist was awakened. I was taking the ideal pitching motion that I was taught and shaping it to meet my needs, or as von Oech put it, "doing something to it." (1986, p. 58) I began tweaking other parts of my delivery. I noticed in practice that I would constantly throw the ball to the right of the plate, out of the strike zone. To solve this, I moved my starting position on the rubber to the left. I kept making small adjustments to the left until I was satisfied with my pitches. I ended up starting my wind-up with my left foot off the side of the rubber. I tried my new-and-improved wind-up in practice and it played to rave reviews with my coaches. My accuracy had improved tremendously. Since I was no longer off balance in my wind-up, I could better control where the ball was going to end up.

Now it was time for the trial by fire. With my good showing in practice, I had earned myself another start. I went through my warm-ups with a sense of pride: I was using my wind-up. I had learned how to pitch and then adapted what I had learned to suit my own needs. The world was my oyster, and I had a horsehide pearl in the palm of my hand.

Little did I realize my new delivery had a potential flaw. In changing my kick from high to low, I had lost most of my momentum toward the plate during my delivery. This meant that I was pitching with just my arm strength, arm strength which wasn’t enough to blow the ball past batters. It was up to my warrior to help me through this predicament.

I had to adjust my strategy. If my delivery had sacrificed speed for control, then it was time to use that control. Instead of pitching down the middle, I used the corners of the plate to my advantage. I moved the ball inside and outside, up and down. If I had two strikes on a batter, I began salivating. In order to get the most out of my warrior, I had to quickly go through the explorer, artist, and judge within the span of a couple of innings. Each time a batter came up, I quickly took stock of his potential skills. If the hitter looked like a power hitter, I would pitch him away and low to keep the ball out of his prime hitting zone. If a batter looked like a fast runner, I would try to either make him hit the ball to the first base side or give him a tough pitch to bunt. I also had to pitch to each umpire’s strike zone. A borderline strike that was called in one game might not be called in the next. In short, consistently throwing good games involves dozens of adaptations to your game plan every time you pitch.

Conclusion

Well, I continued to pitch well. As I got older, my mental picture of pitching a good game changed. I wasn’t content with getting batters to hit the ball to my fielders, I wanted to strike them all out. I felt that the batter was coming onto my turf when he stepped into the batter’s box. Also, as I got older, I became more coordinated. My delivery switched to one that more closely resembled the "perfect" one I was taught years before. I was able to kick my leg high again while still keeping almost all of the control. Also, I learned how to throw different kinds of pitches: the curve ball, the change up, and even the knuckle ball. Through all of the techniques I learned about in this class—the four creative roles of von Oech (1986), the learning conversations of Harri-Augustine and Thomas (1991), and the mental pictures of Glasser (1986)—I had become a pitcher that I could be proud of. This made my summers all the more enjoyable.

If there are any morals to this story, here they are. First, the perfect anything is only perfect in the mind of whoever labels it. What works well for one person might not work as well for someone else, so he or she shouldn’t be afraid to tweak a seemingly "perfect" idea. Teachers sometimes forget this when they are teaching their students a skill. Oftentimes, they are so far removed from learning what they are teaching that they forget how it feels to start something from scratch. Teachers need to look at something for the first time more often. This keeps them grounded.

Second, teachers shouldn’t be afraid to learn from their students. My coaches were smart, but they could only see so much of the field at once. Many times, it was the players who would notice when the other team was likely to steal, or the runner on second base who would learn what pitch the pitcher was going to throw by the way he stood on the mound. Teachers often think they can see the "whole field" when, in reality, their students pick up more of the subtleties.

Bottom of the Ninth

Learning to pitch a baseball wasn’t the penultimate event of my life. There are other things that I have done that I am more proud of than striking out five people in a game when I was eleven years old. However, this example was the first time that I remember solving a seemingly big problem on my own. If I failed at this task, I would simply be placed in a different position the next game. But I didn’t want to fail. I had started something and now it was completely in my hands. My initial mental picture was one of me pitching in the World Series, but my picture changed as I grew older. Looking back, I can see that it wasn’t striking out the five batters in a game that should make me proud, it was that my explorer, artist, judge, and warrior performed so well that should make me smile. The perfect delivery is in us all.

Bibliography

Glasser, W. (1986). Control Theory in the Classroom. New York, NY: Harper and Row,

Publishers.

Harri-Augustine, S. & Thomas, L. (1991). Learning Conversations: The Self-Organised

Learning Way to Personal and Organisational Growth. London:Routledge.

Von Oech, R. (1986). A Kick in the Seat of the Pants. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.