After our first two practices, I feel pretty good about the direction in which our pitchers are heading. Last night (our first practice) we only had an hour, but then we were able to meet as a pitching staff for about 40 minutes. During that meeting, we discussed our pitching goals for the season. We have team goals for championships, such as conference, regional and national championships, and goals for individual games as well as for the average number of pitches per batter.
Many of our goals are extremely optimistic. Last year's DIII National Champion was Illinois Wesleyan University, who came in fourth place in their conference but earned a regional berth by winning their conference tournament. That tells us that if you are fortunate enough to play in a regional tournament, there is a chance to get to the World Series and win a national championship.
Our job as a pitching staff is simply to give our team a chance to win every game we play, one at a time. We set one goal that I have never concerned myself with before. We want to allow no sacrifice flies all season. When there is a runner on third base we want to get an infield ground out, pop out, or strike out. It may seem like strange goal to have, but last year we allowed six sac flies, which is very few. We allowed none in our 28 conference games. If we get better in that statistical area, that could conceivably help us win more games. Another goal is to have no innings of 20 pitches or more. That will be an extremely difficult goal, but we occasionally throw several games without having a 20 pitch inning, so why not make an effort to be efficient in every inning we pitch.
We have been very fortunate the past few years to have some pretty impressive statistics. Not only does our pitching staff have a good recent history of being pretty highly ranked nationally in some statistical areas, but our offense and defense have been just as successful. Our pitchers know that they have a great group of defensive players playing behind them, and those teammates make it easier to achieve so many of the team pitching goals. The defense and the hitters have their own sets of goals, and together we hope that in striving for some of these challenging goals we can succeed by advancing into the regional and national tournaments.
Many of the goals we have set I have not yet written about, but as a pitching staff we talk about some of them routinely. Our pitchers are constantly reminded of some of them when they go over their pitching charts and figure out what their strike percentages are, how many leadoff batters they are getting out, and how many stolen bases they are allowing, etc.
The importance of setting some statistical goals is that success in some statistical categories makes winning easier to do. In looking at last year's numbers, there are some areas that we must get better at in order to allow fewer runs and thus put less pressure on the offense and the defense. A couple of those areas are walks per nine innings and first pitch strike percentage.
Ultimately only one statistic truly measures the success of a team, and that is the win column. Doing the little things correctly and 'sweating the small stuff', while at the same time having trust, respect and confidence in all members of the team will give us the best chance to achieve success in that win column!
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