I am doing pitching drills in the off season to work on accuracy...can anyone give some advice?

Question

My accuracy drills usually consist of throwing at a strike zone sized target, picking a spot, and seeing how many times I can hit it in 5 pitches, then doing another set of 5 to see if I can beat it, etc etc etc. I have found this helps me to focus on thinking about every throw.

What I am wondering is if anyone has any thoughts on how to spruce these drills up, make them more interesting. Things such as games I can play like solitaire with throwing at a target. Is anyone else doing this or have any ideas or games?

Answer 1

One piece of advice and one drill
Piece of advice: If you throw 3 pitches during your drill that you are un-happy with, STOP, take a break then come back a few minutes later. There is nothing worse then practicing to become better and picking up a bad habit a drilling it into muscle-memory.

Drill: Draw a "T" on the ground with the intersection of the lines being the pitching rubber. Place a coin at the end of the T and practice keeping your self balanced enough and your stride length accuarate enough to pick up the coin at the end of your follow through. You can enough do this with a friend and make it worth some money, which increases your motivation to do well.

Answer 2

There are some drills I used to use, but I lived on a farm so they were easier to do.

We had an old building and I drew out a batter sized strike zone and used a skill-saw to cut holes just a little bigger than a baseball, about softball sized, into the strike zone and I'd work on aiming for them with various pitches.

I also found that nailing a tire to an old building (generally requies a nail-gun) and pitching for the center of it was a good practice as well. It is a bigger target, but if you just get down the repetitive motion of hitting the same target over and over it makes you more accurate, plus every time it bounces off the tire it is a good chance to practice fielding off the mound.

Hope that helps. :-)

Answer 3

One thing that helped me is watching films of pitchers who had successful careers and trying to pick up on some of the things they did.