The Florida Marlins are trying to correct a flaw in Reggie Abercrombie’s game:
”He could be an impact player if he cuts down on his strikeouts and puts the ball in play,” said John Mallee, the Marlins’ minor-league hitting coordinator.
Mallee said ”pitch recognition” has been Abercrombie’s biggest problem.
As a result, the Marlins have put in extra hours trying to correct his most glaring weakness.
”We spent every day with the breaking-ball machine, slider machine, working on pitch recognition and changing his approach, making him more selective,” Mallee said. “Consequently, he’s hitting better and striking out less.”
The common wisdom is that plate discipline is difficult to teach. The Marlins recast this as a pattern recognition problem (pitch recognition). Maybe Abercrombie won’t ever walk much, but if he gets on base via hits a lot, the walks won’t matter too much.
Baseball Musings is conducting a pledge drive in March. Click here for details.
I had always wondered about use of advanced pitching machines. I remember reading about how nuanced these things can be…how individual pitcher profiles can be loaded in, and how close to the real deal these things can be calibrated. So a hitter can set the thing to “Randy Johnson” and see the big, fast, sweeping slider whizz past his knees. It would seem sensible to get younger players up to one of these things, and just have them call out “ball” or “strike” as the pitch comes to them. A couple hundred pitches a day in the offseason, and there you go. Any musicians out there might liken it to learning relative pitch…so you listen again and again to music note changes and learn to recognize which sounds are what. Like the “NBC” thing…it goes “N-B-C”…if you know it, well the N to the B is a major sixth. Once you can hear that, you can identify the sixth anywhere. Am I crazy to think that this type of methodology focused entirely on figuring pitch location might work with batters? Or is it that plate discipline really is something that can’t be taught? It just seems that certain players do in fact develop patience later in their careers…and maybe this could be cultivated using the tools available. At least it sounds like the Fish are trying.