A POETIC RENDERING OF THE
ULTIMATE MENTAL HITTING PLAN
FOR SOFTBALL PLAYERS
A Hitter’s Verse describes a mental hitting plan for softball players in an informal, relaxed, and poetic format. It is a poem that explains the details of what I call the ultimate mental hitting plan. The ultimate mental hitting plan simplifies hitting by allowing the batter to anticipate just one thing, and ignore everything else. Most of the time with this plan a batter will anticipate a fat fast strike and ignore other pitch types and locations. A fat fast strike is a pitch with most of the ball located inside the strike zone. It comes often from pitcher’s mistakes and hitter’s counts, but it also comes at any time and with any count. A batter should be ready for one on every pitch and not let it go. With this plan the batter ignores other pitch types and pitch locations for the entire at bat unless the batter gets to a count with two strikes. A player should anticipate a fat fast strike most of the time, but there are certain times when a deviation to this plan can be used. A deviation is a variation of the ultimate mental hitting plan called an alternate mental hitting plan. An alternate mental hitting plan can be used when the pitcher is doing something very specific, and very often, like throwing inside or outside a majority of the time, or like throwing at least one change up to every batter. When using an alternate mental hitting plan the batter selects a pitch or location to anticipate and ignores all other pitches and/or pitch locations. Use of the ultimate mental hitting plan or a variation of it requires discipline by the batter and the batter must only swing at what the batter is anticipating. There is never guessing when using the ultimate mental hitting plan, only calculated anticipation of a certain pitch or location while ignoring all others.If a batter gets to a count with two strikes then the two strike variation is automatically used. With the two strike variation a batter doesn’t anticipate a certain pitch or pitch location and avoid the others, but instead, the batter swings at any pitch in a location that is close to being a called strike.
tomssdthunder 