Daughter too hard on herself...

[RADcatcher]

You might have to work with HER idea of goals/good, and help her evaluate if those are reasonable ones, and also helping her realize reaching 90% of her goal, or 70% of her goal is still progress, effective, etc and not an abject failure.

After that is communicated let her work it out herself for a few months.
Stop fueling it with words.
( particularly guessing at what words would work are potentially words fueling the problem)

 

[Gags]

For whatever reason, she's concerned if the ball isn't going directly down the middle, it's 'terrible'

Ask a HS/College/Pro pitcher what a "mistake" is when pitching, and 9/10 will likely answer "a pitch right down the middle".

I'm sure there's other issues to correct, but changing her perspective of what a 'terrible' pitch actually is could be a good starting point.

 

[Cannonball]

The potential problem with this is that she might not be doing it to be prima donna, she might legitimately be holding herself to different/higher standard than the parent/coach is. If you say "great pitch!" and she's thinking "no it wasn't, I was trying to throw it more inside, and I missed, and I didn't land where i wanted to, and it didn't feel strong out of my hand" etc, your appraisal of good/bad pitching in her eyes goes down and before long she feels, maybe rightly, that she knows better than you about what needs to be happening, what's good and bad, etc.

You might have to work with HER idea of goals/good, and help her evaluate if those are reasonable ones, and also helping her realize reaching 90% of her goal, or 70% of her goal is still progress, effective, etc and not an abject failure.



tl:dr Is she a perfectionist?

Ok

 

[PJR202]

Someone once told me that in an absolute perfect scenario, a pitcher should never throw a strike. You always want them swinging at the least hittable pitch you can get them to swing at.

Difficult? Of course. But the point is, unless you're a contact pitcher (such as my kid), you don't ever want anything going down the middle (way, way easier said than done, obviously). If you're a contact pitcher that's all over the zone, even better.