How to Cultivate Confidence Within Your Pitchers

• By Grant Young

Among the most commonly used baseball adages is that the sport is seeped in failure. And while that statement may be cliché, it’s also unequivocally true. 

Learning how to deal with inevitable failure while playing is one of the most fundamental aspects of playing baseball. Yet, just because it’s something all players grapple with doesn’t make it easier to handle. 

This can be especially difficult for pitchers. Not only are they standing on an elevated mound in the middle of the diamond, but if a pitcher (especially a starting pitcher) has a poor outing, that alone might make it nearly impossible for their team to win. 

While this will never change, getting pitchers to cultivate confidence is a ready way to minimize the failure they experience on the mound and teach them to get over that failure quickly, so that it doesn’t affect their next outing. 

And Brent Kemnitz has a few great techniques and lessons to instill this confidence within pitchers. 

Coach Kemnitz is in his ninth year as Assistant Athletic Director for Outreach and Staff Development after serving the previous 38 years as pitching coach at Wichita State for the baseball program. 

In Kemnitz’s 38 years as Wichita State pitching coach,  WSU led all NCAA Division I teams in ERA two times. The Shockers’ 1982 team established an NCAA record with 46 complete games while leading the nation with a 2.53 ERA and the 1991 staff led the NCAA with a 2.91 ERA. In 2011, Kemnitz was honored as he was named one of the top three pitching coaches in the country in a poll done by College Baseball Insider. During his time, the Shockers made seven College World Series appearances and won the 1989 National Championship.

Not only could Coach Kenmitz spot elite physical talent in his prospective pitchers, but he also knew how to cultivate mental strength with them once they arrived on campus—and mental strength starts and ends with having confidence. This is why his ‘Pitching: The Mental Game CD - Remastered’ course should be a must for any baseball coach who wants to maximize their pitchers’ confidence and their team’s success. 

Comfort Zone 

Coach Kenmitz understands how easy it is for both players and coaches to create standards and expectations for themselves as a result of their past performance and mental state. 

For players, this could be telling themselves that their only hope is making the team, throwing 15 innings, or being their team’s top pitcher yet not making the all-conference squad. For coaches, it could mean creating an excuse that a .500 record in a season is adequate, given the sub-par facilities they’re working with. 

These are just a few of the endless excuses those in baseball can cultivate for themselves, which creates a “comfort zone” that’s easy to revert to. 

But Coach Kenmitz stresses that these comfort zones are perilous for growth, both on the individual and the team level. 

Instead, he wants players and coaches to set up a high expectation and positive image for themselves. The only way that one can expect success to occur is if they’re actually expecting it to do so. And when it does, Coach Kenmitz says that the coach or player shouldn’t get overly excited or let it get to their heads because they had anticipated this success all along. 

Pitchers holding themselves to a high standard creates an innate feeling of confidence, which can translate to quality performances on the mound. 

Umpire Rhythm

One of the most frustrating and demoralizing aspects of being a pitcher is having to deal with umpires. 

Regardless of what level of the game a pitcher is at, they are undoubtedly going to deal with poor calls from umpires. 

But Coach Kenmitz notes that pitchers can typically get umpires on their side if they consistently remain in or around the strike zone. 

This is explained by Coach Kenmitz when he says, “If you can preach to your guys to be right around the zone, the zone will expand. Because umpires will get in a rhythm with pitchers a lot easier than they will with some hitter that comes in there.” 

Especially when it comes to a starting pitcher, if they can prove in the early innings of a game that they’re going to remain within the strike zone on most of their pitches, the umpire will gradually begin to call strikes on pitches that are increasingly out of the zone. 

Getting pitchers to understand this is a great tool for instilling confidence, because they know they’ll be rewarded for being around the strike zone; which will afford them an even greater advantage over hitters throughout a game. 

Short Memory

Coach Kenmitz makes it clear that because most coaches gets into this profession for the love of the game rather than money, they have got to keep their sense of humor. 

Coaches can’t lose focus of the fact that they’re coaching a kid's game, and are doing so alongside kids. If they get too stressed out and reactive over every outcome that happens in a game, that stress is going to rub off on their players, and cause them to lose their own confidence. 

This is the same reason who coaches have got to keep a short memory when it comes to their players. Every player is going to make some sort of mistake at some point. And if a coach continued to hold these mistakes against their pitchers, they’d be doing their team a disservice. 

Instead, it’s a coach’s job to show confidence in their pitchers in every situation, regardless of what happened in their past outing, which should enable the pitcher to start cultivating confidence for themselves.