[Bigvivec]

Hand position for short pitches…
I was fooling around on the practice green this morning before I played and stumbled onto something new…hand positioning for short pitches that made them much easier…previously I set up to every shot with my hands just left of my zipper…I tried putting my hands closer to the inside of my thigh with good results, the middle of my left thigh with great results, and the outside of my left thigh with a revelation…middle of the thigh with the ball positioned middle of an open short pitching stance was very accurate and repeatable, taking a solid divot and contacting the ball first squarely…on the outside of the thigh I got good divots, square contact and by opening and closing the face was able to control spin pretty consistenly with a simple swing and body rotation without depending on flippy hands or big hinging of the wrists which introduces a degree of timing, skipping it in fairly low with a hard check, but able to dig it out of pretty deep rough as well as slap it off hardpan fairly consistently…it was a shot that I had seen watching the Open used quite a bit with lofted wedges, but kept fairly low and still running, no circus flops here…the beauty of the shot was that I was able to take a fairly aggressive short pitching swing ensuring good momentum through impact, keep the ball low, and still only send it about 20 paces with a solid pass thru the ball…this made tricky lies that you need a little more power thru impact to ensure keeping the club on line and digging the ball out much easier to execute, and less apt to be the victim of the dreaded short pitch deceleration through impact…
Just fooling around…