How to Pickoff a Runner at First Base

Video Transcript

"Hi! My name is Mike Lumley. On behalf of Expert Village, I'm here to teach you pitching. What we're going to do here is I'm going to go some picks. I'll go through them slowly. We'll come set, back foot's going to come in, open up, and throw. As you see my foot, my target is all in one line. I'm going to keep myself fairly direct right to first base. We'll come set, in, and directly to first base. As we get this footwork, the quicker we can get so we can start to speed up. As we get better and better, we just keep speeding up. It's not so much the throw. It's a big kind of a fallacy that you can go out and just throw as hard as you can to 1st base, but if you look at it, the harder throw that means you really have to wind up to get a strong velocity to 1st base. Really, the base runner to 1st base is all on reaction time. Whenever he sees an odd movement, he's going to react. Even though you're throwing really hard over to 1st base, you're really giving it away too early. As well as the lower body, we really have to concentrate on the upper body. We're not going to get ourselves into a big high arm slot. We're going to make sure that we kind of stay somewhat low, slightly side arm, but we're going to make sure we're up. We're not going to be way down here. If you notice, we're going to come here and almost across my body here. Foot in, cross, and throw. "