Tonight’s Reliever was Logan Norris a 5’10” 175 lb. RHP from Bossier City, LA. He pitches at LSU-Shreveport, an NAIA school. This season Logan compiled a 3.50 ERA going 9-1. He pitched 3 complete games, including 1 shutout. He pitched 64.1 total innings and struck-out 57 batters while allowing 27 walks. Last year he pitched 10 innings for the Braves and struck out 5.
Logan Norris does not possess the typical major-league pitcher’s body. It is safe to say that he is on the small side. With this being true, he needs to do some unorthodox things with his mechanics to throw an 87-89 mph fastball. In the wind-up, he uses a huge leg kick to gain a lot of momentum towards the plate. His fastball shows a lot of late action; riding in on a right-handed batter. His curveball is a nice compliment to the tailing fastball he throws. He gets every ounce out of his 175 pound frame by staying closed and whipping his upper body around. A lot of pitching coaches would not advise throwing off your front foot, but I feel like Pedro Martinez (another small pitcher) pitched like that throughout his career. In the video, you notice that Logan uses his front leg the same way Pedro did. I posted a picture below of Tim Lincecum (yet another small pitcher) spinning off his front leg. In Logan’s first outing at Falmouth it looked like his front shoulder was swinging open, and I felt like that led to his control issues. However, you can tell in the video he keeps his front shoulder tucked-in and threw first pitch strikes to 91.7% (11/12) of the batters he faced. At Falmouth he threw only 32.4% strikes. He was very successful today, throwing 75% of his pitches for strikes. In the video, I would like to point out that Logan utilizes the slide step, when in the stretch, to control the running game. The slide step is when a pitcher does not lift their leg as high and their front foot sort of “slides” towards the plate before the release point.
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