How did our Pitchers do this Spring?

Before we begin, we would like to extend our congratulations to Alex Kranzler (junior from Old Tappan High School) for earning All-State NJ.com “Player of the Year” honors.  This is a significant accomplishment and it’s a credit to his hard work these past few years at RPP.  He has been pitching, throwing and training at RPP since 2019 and probably spent over a total of 150 hours training this past off-season.  Alex’s fastball was up to 93 mph this spring.  Congrats Alex (as a side note Sean Hard also from RPP earned the same state-wide honor in 2021, he was up to 95 mph).

Ok, so how did our pitchers do this spring?

Many folks think of us as a place where you go to improve your velocity. While that might be 100% accurate, many fail to recognize that day-in day-out we are working towards helping our athletes become more efficient, complete pitchers.  This involves several different topics, including improving:

1. 1. Velocity
   2. Command and control
   3. Pitching arsenal (variety of pitch types)
   4. Ball movement and pitch design
   5. Endurance (going deep in games)

And hopefully also lowering the injury risk of injury through continued mobility work and strength training.

Accomplishing all this is a big task and it takes time and effort and hard work. So unlike many prior articles where we discuss our ability to improve velocity, today we’re going to cover our pitchers’ command and control. The reality is that with enough effort and hard work, most high school athletes can throw hard.  But winning games is what it’s all about and success on the mound can’t be had without good command and control.

Although ERAs aren’t necessarily the best measure, they do tell a good story.

The following list highlights RPP pitchers with a sub-3.50 ERA from this spring.  This is primarily based on publicly available information, mostly through MaxPreps and NJ.com websites.

As a result, the list tends to be older athletes playing high school baseball where the information is more available.  Please note that we have done our best to capture all of our athletes that were sub-3.50, in the event we missed your data and it is publicly available, our sincere apologies!

The overall ERA average for the following group was 1.81.   So, with that said BIG Congrats to our athletes with what turned out to be an incredible spring.  Throw hard but also command and control the ball for the WIN!

Here we go…

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