Pitching Stats That Matter to College Coaches

Which high school pitching stats are most important to these college coaches? When they're out looking at players and when they look at a stat line, whether it's a game or whether it's a season. And hopefully this gives you some goals to shoot for and to understand the numbers behind it, because we're going to be talking about some of the numbers and some goals for you and also your communication with these college coaches and what to convey about yourself. What do they care about? This will help streamline the recruiting process for you. And if you're new to my channel, my name is Alex Swinson. I'm a former Division I college coach, scout and recruiter with 11 years of experience. And now what I do is help high school baseball players and their families navigate this college recruiting process and put them in the best possible position to play at the next level. And if you get anything from this video, please subscribe or comment down below here on this video. So we're going to be talking about four important pitching stats that these college coaches look for. And. And not all stats are created equal. Some of these stats can be fudged. We don't know your statistician and how flexible they are with hits and errors and all of that. We don't know always what your competition is, especially if you're not in our local area. As a college scout and recruiter, you could be playing really, really, really good competition. So that stat line as far as hits might be a little bit higher, but man, that was an all state team or vice versa. It could be a really, really bad team. Okay. And the stats that we're going to be talking about are harder to fudge. All right. They're not perfect, but they're a lot harder. And the first one is innings pitch. Right. It's pretty self explanatory. If you're not pitching a lot in high school, well, hey, you're probably not going to pitch a lot in college, all right, or at the professional level. So innings pitch and you obviously want to manage that from an arm health standpoint. And the second stat line that we would take a look at is strikeouts. The third is walks in the fourth is strike percentage. You should know your strike percentage very important. Now we're going to talk about numbers and what these college coaches are looking for for all of these stats and then also some goals for you to shoot after and also see where you stand. We're also going to take a look at a stat line. Let's rewind to strikeouts. Why is that important to College coaches, because it likely shows that you have swing and miss stuff, that you compete, and that you probably have good command of your fastball and at least can throw your breaking ball over for a strike, which is important, or at least control. You can throw it in the dirt when you want to, you can flop it over when you want to for a strike. Very important. As we go through this, and what are some numbers from a strikeout perspective, what college coaches are looking for? All right, you want to at least have more than one strikeout per inning. For the Division 1 level, typically, we're looking for 1.5 to two strikeouts every inning. For Division 3 and Division 2, it's more like 1 to 1.5. Somewhere in that range per nine innings. All right. College coaches look for nine innings because we play nine innings as we go through this. Let's go to walks. All right? Anything more than one walk every two innings is a problem, and it's huge red flags. For every nine innings, you want to stay at three walks or less. All right? Very important. Walks just show, like, hey, if you're walking a lot of guys at the high school level, you're likely going to walk a lot of guys at the college level because it's just one. The hitters are better, the umpires are better, and the strike zone is definitely smaller at the college level. So walks are huge red flags, and we want to keep that as low as we possibly can. Then we have strike percentage. All right, Goals for strike percentage. We definitely want you in between 60 and 70%. Obviously closer to that. 70% is excellent. You should begin keeping track of this on a game to game basis as you go through this. So we got any pitch. We have strikeouts, we have walks, and we have strike percentage. Let's talk about real quick a stat line. All right? What would kind of stand out for me as a college level, maybe at the D3, D2 level here is really like, hey, you pitch 45 innings, okay, you have about 60 strikeouts and you have 15 walks. That would be like, hey, we're starting at a good place here at the Division 1 level. We, we're looking at, hey, around 70 strikeouts there. That is standing out at the Division 1 level. So 45 innings, 70 strikeouts, and then also 15 walks or so again. Compete, compete, compete. Throw those strikes. Throw your fastball for a strike, throw your breaking ball for a strike. So goals for you to shoot after, all right, Is more than one strikeout per inning. And maybe you don't have the highest velocity out there. All right, that's okay. Make sure that you can have command of all your pitches and keep guys all off balance as you go through this. And then from your strike percentage, if your strike percentage is high, it will take care of the walk. So. Right. Hopefully you got something from this video. And if you have any questions or any comments, comment down below and I'll see you in the next video. Take care.