How to Practice to be a Catcher

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Juan Carlos with Expert Village, and today I'm going to show you how to become a competative baseball player. In this segment, we're going to talk about practice regiments for catchers. Now, what we want to work on for catchers is to improve our defense when blocking pitches, having a partner actually throw pitches on the ground and actually block, framing your pitcher on any location pitches with your wrist, and other stuff like throw downs and quick release. Now the couple things that you can do as far as improving your catcher's ability to improve it's defense and it's quickness is 1. improving at blocking by having a partner actually throw balls on the ground and have them block like so, and then the second thing is helping pitchers improve their pitching and location by framing pitches as well, in different locations. Other things are pickoffs at second base by improving their quickness by the time they catch the ball and fire the ball to second base. The more consistant you are in this type of practice regiment for catchers, the better you improve and the better competative catcher you will be. Now when blocking, it's very, very important that you want to pick up where the ball is going to end up going. So if you feel the ball is heading to the outside part of the plate, you want to move your feet, get down on both knees, have the glove out. Have the chest, you want it to bounce on your chest if it's hit hard and have it bounce downward as opposed to leaving your chest up where it can bounce all over the place. Okay, now as far as framing is concerned, if you receive a pitch close to the corner, or a little bit high or a little bit low, it's very important that you turn your wrist towards the inside part of the plate in order to convince the umpire that was a strike. This helps your pitcher maybe lessen the pitches, the number of pitches he might need and also improve the strikes he might get in order to win the game. These little things count in order for a catcher to be a very good catcher, and pitchers usually will appreciate it if you help them out."