How do you build a great softball hitter in an age of superior pitching? Get creative

So how do you build a great hitter in an age of superior pitching? Coaches say you’ve got to get creative.

Nowhere is that more obvious than in Lubbock, where Glasco employs some unconventional techniques during batting practice — the type Canady calls “terrifying.”

Glasco moves the machine close — the pitching mound is 43 feet away in softball, so he’ll regularly cut the distance in half — and doesn’t decrease the velocity, forcing hitters to react even faster than usual. He’ll have them stand on 2-foot platforms, keep the machine on the ground and hit rise balls at an exaggerated angle.

He’ll set two machines up to throw roughly one second apart. In the first round, players hit the first ball while the second flies by during their follow-through. In the second round, they have to wait and watch the first ball go by before swinging at the second. For the third round, a coach will stand behind the plate and call out if batters should hit the first or second pitch, gauging their reaction time.

“This is all just making them realize how powerful the human mind is and how elite they can be as hitters,” Glasco said. “It gives them so much confidence.”

Glasco compared it to basketball players doing quirky ballhandling drills, like looping the ball around their ankles, stomach and neck.

“They’re never going to do that in a game,” Glasco said. “But they’re doing it to become better ballhandlers. Well, we’re doing this to become better bat handlers. I want to take them outside their normal dimension.”

He admits his methods wouldn’t fly with everyone.

“If they put me on a major-league team and had me do this stuff, they’d think I was insane,” he said. “Guys making $4 million a year wouldn’t handle it well.”

But at the collegiate level, the coach still has major pull. Plus, the results speak for themselves.

“It’s definitely frustrating at first,” Terry said. “You miss almost every pitch. But once you get the hang of it, knowing your bat speed can be that fast, if you can hit one of those balls, you can hit any ball.”

Bat speed is the main reason Glasco will move the machine closer. If a hitter can increase their bat speed enough to connect on a 70 mph pitch when it’s 20 feet away, when the pitch is coming from double that distance, they’ll have even longer to watch it and decide if they’re going to swing.

Taking more time to read a pitch sounds wild considering the ball travels from circle to plate in roughly 0.4 seconds. But for elite players, the game slows down enough that the extra time is real. And in this sport, every nanosecond makes a difference.

The other major factor in all this offensive firepower? A shrinking strike zone.

“I do think the strike zone has gotten tighter,” said Pickens, the two-time All-American pitcher who has watched her sport’s offensive burst first-hand. “And it’s something as a pitcher, you have to accept: ‘OK, this is what I have to work with, what am I going to do about it?’”

Woolery at UCLA said the offense might be even more power-packed in the coming weeks — and she’s excited about what it could mean for TV ratings.

“As we get into the postseason, the strike zone gets even smaller,” she said. “Pitchers do have to come a little bit more over the plate. If you’re a casual fan, you love to see the long ball, so seeing people hit home runs really draws people to the game.”

Woolery credited her improvement this season — she went from hitting .424 last year to .515 this year — to Bruins assistant coach Lisa Fernandez, who preaches that a big part of being a great hitter is believing you already are one. Woolery said the Bruins tell each other, “It’s the warrior, not the weapon.”

There have been small technical changes with bats, too, though players don’t really understand them, and coaches say they’re relatively minor. Terry just knows that she feels “more powerful” when she swings, whether or not she makes contact.

Canady doesn’t hit often for Tech, but said the “sweet spots” on the bat are considerably bigger than when she was a freshman at Stanford. And that much is obvious even to the untrained eye, she said, because players are smacking homers left and right.

“I’m a fan of it when we’re on offense, but when I’m pitching, not so much,” she said, laughing. “I guess it’s a good thing I’m getting out of college when I am cause these girls can hit.”

And if everyone adopted her coach’s batting practice drills, they might be hitting even more.

“If every team did what we do every day, we’d see an even bigger offensive explosion,” Terry said. “I’m sure of it.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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