Little humor here ...yeah. fair. there were a couple of #2s in rec this year, but not many thankfully. I remember a few from last year too, not terrible. The typical MO around here is your #1 pitcher pitches innings 1-2, and then you get someone else inning 3, and then if you've got a chance at winning or it's the unlimited run last inning, you bring back #1 otherwise you get someone else an inning too. So even in the crappy "can't reach the plate" situations, at least it's usually only 25 or so minutes in the middle there.
But I wouldn't necessarily say #1 gets the game moving, because that's a BROAD category, and where most of the walkathons come from really. Because there are a lot of girls just out there basically stepping and lobbing it like the coach would. Sure, it gets to the plate, near the plate ,bounces on the plate ,etc but I'm not sure that's going to develop them.
IMO, you need to be at least attempting to whip it/releasing at the hip, and on average at least 1 pitch per batter should be a "you should've swung at that". It's a low bar and still might be an 8-walk inning, but at least there's a sense that if they keep at it, they'll get better, and that someone's actually teaching them "right".
On the other hand, we faced a girl the other day that I guess was kinda doing that, but she had all these wiggling and bouncing, and did what I guess technically is a "Crow hop" in that she took a step with her push foot first, before getting through what wasn't an unreasonable delivery. But she repeated her motion pretty well every time! (also was mostly high balls around the umpires head)
Somewhere in reading this description of rec ball I started thinking about the movie Dances With Wolves.... the vast tundra and nothing going on for 20 minutes...?
What are your thoughts about having pitcher evaluation before the season?
Like they have player assessments?
A,B,C
Perhaps by a certain age if someone wants to call themself a pitcher they should have to qualify at some skill level to be able to pitch?
(to keep some integrity of the game intact)
Simply considering that a coach can teach basics how to pitch, isn't really going to develop much quickly to make it very useful. If you get to pitch without training on your own it really deteriorates the rest of the game.
So what about a standard before teams are put together? Like I commented earlier perhaps to be a pitcher you would have to be able to hit a door 5 out of 10 times. That is not an unreasonable request. Say specifically above 10u.
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