Choosing Your Side of the Mound for Baseball Pitching

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Mike Lumley. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to teach you pitching. Before we get into the next phase, we're going to jump up onto the mound now. We're going to jump up onto the mound now and work on. Really it's important before we get up here that we decide which side of the rubber we need to go on. The way I like to do it, and I've seen a lot of guys both ways. What we need to do in baseball is really create angles as we pitch. So especially the guy that throws straight over the top, he needs to create angles that make him more deceptive when he throws to the plate. We have a couple of things here in an analogy and why. As a right-handed pitcher, we're going to move to the right side of the mound or the rubber. So what we're going to do is we're going to place our plant foot and bring our toe exactly even with the outside edge. Why we do this is to create a better angle when throwing to the plate. As I throw, right now my hand is going to be right around the right hand batter's head, which is really intimidating obviously to a right handed hitter. If I have a good dominating fastball, even if I don't, I can move inside, I can move outside and still plant a little bit of fear into a right hand hitters mind. As a lefty, when I come inside to a left handed hitter, my ball has such an angle that even though it's on the inner half of the plate, I'm creating an angle that appears to a left handed hitter and he's going to bail out just a little bit believing that it could hit him. In all reality, it hits he inner half of the plate. Angle is whether you're a high velocity pitcher or a midrange pitcher. Angles are really crucial, especially as you move up the ladder."