Five More Things Youth Baseball Coaches Should Practice But Don’t
In my first book Baseball Chronicles, one of my most popular articles in terms of feedback was “Four Things Coaches Should Practice But Don’t.”
The four things I mentioned were: pitchers who don’t practice fielding from the mound, catching a foul ball near a fence, players who don’t slide and practice fielding wild pitches or passing balls. Reading some of the comments I received, many of the readers misunderstood my point a bit. There must be hundreds of things that we coaches should practice, but we don’t. I just picked four of them that I see popping up year after year. So in the spirit of practicing rather than just telling your players, here are five more things that come up over and over again that most coaches don’t practice or review.
1) Call waiting time. About once every couple of years I see a runner slide to second and either get up without calling a timeout or call a timeout and the umpire doesn’t acknowledge it. A smart infielder will put his glove with the ball on the base runner when he gets up from his slide. And they call him when he leaves the base even for a moment or assumes that he has time. We need to teach our young players that calling timeout in organized sports is very different than calling timeout in your own backyard. Coaches should practice having their players slide onto a base, then call a “timeout” with the coach playing umpire. The coach should intentionally not recognize the timeout immediately by keeping the runner on the ground. Each and every gamer should go through this at least once.
It’s the same situation when the batter calls timeout. Coaches should also practice this by teaching players not to leave the batter’s box until given time by the umpire.
2) Rundowns with too many pitches. I’m obsessed with this. We practice racing almost once a week. Many youth baseball coaches teach running back to the base from whence they came. I take the proactive approach that runs are a gift to the defensive team and you have to get out with the out. The ideal number of tosses is none. And after that, I teach my players that the ball should not be thrown more than once. I use the term “sprint mode” and teach my players that once you put a running back in this sprint mode, it’s hard for him to stop and change direction and that’s when we take our one pitch. This has to be practised.
3) Base runners stopping first. We see it all the time. A player will hit a slow ground ball and run to first base only to stop right on the base as if the base is a wall, thus slowing down and getting called out when if he had run across the base he would have hit him for a base hit. We tell our team to run to first base, but how many of us take the time to practice this? This is one of the easiest things to do and when you practice it, it will stick in the player’s head. Set up a cone ten feet beyond first base and have your team line up. On the command to “go”, they run one at a time and speed past the base to the cone. Simple but it works and should be practiced even with your best runners.
4) Covering 1st In Grounder On The Right Side. Another of my obsessions. Have you ever watched a youth baseball game when the ball is hit to the right side of the infield and the pitcher remains frozen on the mound? This can make a manager gray during the course of the day. We practice this by giving each pitcher a shot from the mound. He fakes a pitch and I ground out to him between first and second base. The pitcher has to run off the mound to cover first. One key here is to make sure the pitcher hits the first baseline about 6-10 feet short of the base and then spins it toward the base. The fielder of the baseball must guide the first baseman with the baseball. This should be practiced with a base runner simulating game conditions.
5) Pennants on high pitches. All the players who play for me in our league know that we play a lot. Each and every player must become competent bunters during the course of the season. We even practice bunting with two strikes, a strategy most baseball purists will disapprove of. We’re always changing our touch signals to make sure opponents don’t take it. Even with all this practice, it drives me nuts when a player is given the bunt signal and on the next pitch, he’s over his shoulders and offers himself anyway. So now the batter puts in a strike on a ball outside the strike zone and the other team knows we’re bunting. Coaches need to tell these young ballplayers that when the bunt signal is given, it doesn’t mean they have to bunt at all costs. We want them to bunt the balls in the strike zone. This must be told to the players and practiced. We practice bunting a lot in batting practice and whatever coach is pitching, I tell them to throw the balls out of the strike zone. So we’re practicing getting my players to recognize bunted balls and pull their bats back if the ball is out of the strike zone. Coaches need to practice this.
I mentioned in my early Baseball Chronicles that practices are the place to teach and games are the place to reinforce what is taught. I don’t know of any other formula that is more effective for most young baseball players. Even with the practice of many of these mistakes that crop up over and over again, we have to keep reminding ourselves that these players are still kids of twelve and under.