Pitch Design Strategies 101
Introduction For those familiar with the integration of technology in today's game, you have probably heard of the term "pitch design" before. Pitch design has become somewhat of a blanket term used to describe the pitch development processes that range from tweaking an existing pitch in an effort to increase its effectiveness to the introduction of an entirely new pitch to a pitcher's arsenal. There has been some controversy on the semantics of the term that has centered around the idea of whether a completely "new pitch" can actually be created. This is not the idea that the term is supposed to evoke. To some degree, any type of manipulation that a pitcher imparts on a pitch creates a movement profile that has likely been thrown by someone, somewhere, at some point in time at least once, if not millions of times, before. But to "design" a pitch in the sense that most of us use "pitch design," it is simply the process of attempti...