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Tips for Pitching Successfully in the FallPaul Reddick, Pittsburgh Pirates scout  Printer-Friendly Version
Fall is a very tricky time of the year to pitch successfully, mainly because most teams are playing part time in the fall. In other words, they only play on weekends or maybe once during the week. The other problem is that teams do not practice every day as they would in the spring or the summer, so pitchers tend to be a little bit out of shape because they are pitching once a week and not doing a whole lot in between to stay fresh. So here are a few tips that you can use to pitch successfully in the fall. 1. The obvious, stay in shape. Keep your arm strong. This can be easily done by getting outside every day. Just throwing for ten minutes will go a long way to making your weekend outings a lot better. You can also go through a typical 5-day workout rotation. In some ways, pitching in the fall can actually be a really good time to get into a consistent rotation.
For instance, you may do: On Day 6 you would pitch again. Or you could add in another short bullpen session on flat ground. But if anything, this is a real good opportunity to get into a rotation. What is important is to stay in shape and take care of your arm. 2. The second thing is take care of your arm before and after games. Because it is a little colder in the fall (at least here in New Jersey), make sure that you are properly warmed up before the game. I try to tell the pitchers to think like a boxer. You never see a boxer come into the ring without a sweat going. With fall ball, make sure of this because the weather's a little bit cooler. Make sure that you take that extra time to do some extra stretching, loosening up, warming up, running, even some sprint work wouldn't be bad. After the game, make sure that you are icing and doing your aerobic flush just like you would if you would pitch any other day. If you are going to get on a good cycle, this is the start of the cycle. So if you go back to tip number one, if you are going to be on a 5-day cycle, the minute you stop pitching is when that cycle begins. So you ice, you can do 20 minutes on a bike, a brisk 20-minute walk, some light jump rope, a light jog, anything that gets the blood flowing after that. It is important to take care of your arm physically, because that is the start of the cycle. 3. The other thing you can do for successfully pitching in the fall is monitoring pitch counts. I think what happens is that teams are not as staffed in the fall as they are in the summer and in the spring. So make sure that you are not being overused. Pitch counts are a tricky subject, because you can think of it a few ways. Here is how I like to think of pitch counts. Some people measure pitch counts in innings, some people measure pitch counts in total pitches thrown. I do not like to do either of those. I like to measure total pitch counts at how you arrived at the total. For instance, if you threw one 40-pitch inning in the first inning, you may not have even 75 pitches in you. You may only be able to have one more inning in you, or not even that. You could be in muscle failure. So let us say that you threw five 15-pitch innings and you are at 75. And in between innings your team was fairly productive offensively - they got guys on base and they did not go down 1, 2, 3 - and you had an adequate rest in between innings. Well now you can go beyond your 75-pitch count, as long as you are getting to that total in manageable workloads and not getting to them all at once.
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Paul Reddick co-authored the book, 
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