Want to know the No. 1 secret to being a successful baseball pitcher at any level? Your ability to locate a pitch. You must be able to locate your pitches, That's the most important part of pitching, location.

Pitching location is all about getting the right pitch to the right spot at the right time. It's your ability to move the baseball in and out, and up and down in the strike zone, with complete confidence and command.

That's the difference between having location and not having location: When a pitch needs to be on the outside corner of the plate, you've got to be able to execute that pitch on the outside corner of the plate. Plain and simple.

To be effective at pitching, you've got to be able to throw the ball where you need to throw it when you need to get it there. Having good command and being able to locate any pitch at any time, will allow you be effective on the mound.

A great guide to teaching the pitching basics is the book "The Picture Perfect Pitcher" by Tom House and Paul Reddick (2003). The authors break the motion into 5 absolutes of pitching: balance position, equal and opposite elbows, late rotation, blocked-off frontside, and finish. Many Little League pitchers don't always achieve these positions, which makes pitching very difficult.

1.  The first absolute is balance. Balance is more than all your weight on the back foot. The front leg should be raised about waist level, and back as far as the rubber. The hips and shoulders should be cocked so that the batter can see the pitcher's numbers. This is the point most young players fail to reach. It is a little uncomfortable to almost turn your back on the batter. Also, the front foot should be relaxed and both eyes picking up the target.

2.  From the balance position, the pitcher separates his hands in a circular motion to get to the power position. At the power position, the upper arms are generally both parallel to the ground. A current major league pitcher that doesn't have his arms parallel to the ground is Andy Pettite. His front elbow is extremely high, but his back elbow is low to keep the elbow-to-elbow line straight. Dennis Eckersley was just the opposite. His back elbow was held high, but the front elbow stayed low. The biggest problem seen in Little League is that the front elbow never gets high enough. Kids tend to not want to block their view of the target and get their arm out of the way by keeping the front elbow too low.

3.  Once the young pitcher has reached balance position, broken his hands out to power position, the next thing he wants to do is turn and face his target. However, by opening toward your target too early, you have taken away the use of your legs and hips. Late rotation means that you show your numbers to the batter as long as you can, until the body uncoils just before planting the front foot toward the batter. Just before impact with the ground the front foot turns to point to the plate, at the same time the body uncoils, or twists at the hips and shoulders.

4.  Next, the glove comes to the chest, or chest to the glove. In an effort to throw harder, young pitchers will whip their glove around so that by the time they release the ball, it is down by their glove side knee. Once the pitcher flies open like this, all that is left to throw the ball is the shoulder and elbow, therefore both assuming a good amount of stress. By flying open, the pitcher's momentum is no longer going toward the plate, so control is a big problem.

5.  The final step is the finish. Sometimes this is called the follow through. Once the ball is released, the pitcher's body should twist so that the throwing elbow crosses the body and ends up on the outside of the opposite knee. To do this properly, the back has to bend, and the body extend toward the batter.

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