Cliff Lee and the Formula for Great Pitching

One of my passions in life is baseball. I starting playing baseball when I started walking and stopped when my career ended at Vanderbilt.

I am now content to be the pitching coach for a local amateur baseball program here in Nashville.

That all being said, you can bet I am watching every pitch of the World Series.

I am not a Phillies fan and am not rooting for the Phillies in any way, but in Game 1 the Phillies' Cliff Lee did give one of the better pitching performances I have seen in a long, long time.

This morning I read through the NY Times and discovered that Cliff Lee was giving away the secrets to being a great pitcher:

He spun curveballs, cutters, changeups and fastballs to all parts of the strike zone. He grabbed the ball and fired, charged off the mound after innings, and repeated until the last out.

“You’ve got to be unpredictable,” Lee said. “You’ve got to show them stuff they haven’t seen before. Mix speeds, mix locations, and don’t get into patterns, because that offense is pretty potent. If they get a clue on what you’re trying to do and you actually do it, they’re going to make you pay.”

“Not nervous at all,” he said, before pausing and adding: “It’s been a long time since I’ve been nervous playing this game. It’s what I’ve been doing my whole life. I put all the work in. You do everything you need to do to prepare, and I try not to leave anything to chance. So what’s the point in being nervous? I’ve already done the work. It’s game time. Time to go out there and have fun and execute and let your skills take over.”

“He was getting that low strike called, so when we saw that low pitch, we started offering at it,” Damon said. “If it was a curveball, we looked silly with the check swings or whatnot, and if it was a fastball, it seemed like we were taking it. He was able to establish that part of the plate in the zone, and he went with it.”

"I'll pat myself on the back when it's over hopefully, but until then I'm going to keep grinding and do everything I do each day to prepare for my next outing and leave it at that," Lee said.