The definition of play is defined as “engaged in an activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.”

We are told to play with a ball.  Play the game and have fun.

It doesn’t matter the level that you eventually play at.  Careers are usually ended with the phrase, “I just wasn’t having fun anymore.”

That level of fun can sometimes be determined by our successes and failures. We obviously have more fun when we are finding success.  But the idea of playing and having fun needs to remain a fixture in all ballplayer’s minds and hearts.

We play shortstop.  We play first baseball.  We play centerfield.

We don’t work shortstop.  We don’t work first base.  We don’t work centerfield.

Play leads to fun and fun usually leads to increased success.  Whenever we enter any situation looking to have fun, the results are usually improved.

Yes – there will be times when the game will beat you up and take some of the fun away from you.  There will be times when it is more difficult.  But we need to remember that we are playing a game.

Never forget to have fun on a baseball field.

Your career is often too quick to spend anytime dreading the negative.  The best who have ever played this game looked like they were enjoying the game and that enjoyment turned into a love.

I hope you will always remember the words uttered by every umpire and instill that level of play into this game.

Go out and play –

Until Next Time,

Multiple World Series champion Curt Schilling stated that “baseball is not a game you can achieve individually.”

The game requires minimum of 18 ballplayers, one umpire and eighteen parents, grandparents or caretakers who made the trek to the ballpark.

If you take those simple numbers and times it by a thousand, then you will have 37,000 people who have affected and allowed you to play this game from the time you were six until college.

So many people invest so much time into this game that it can never be looked at as an individual game.

This game must be played for those other players on your team.  This game must be played for the parents who have sacrificed so much with the hope that you can find success in this game.

We owe it to ourselves to play this game for all of them and never for ourselves and our own purposes.  Play the game for your teammates.  Play this game for your family.  Play this game to challenge your opponent.  Play this game for the past ballplayers who have made so much progress and allowed us to play this great game.

Baseball is truly a team sport that demands individual achievement.  But we cannot get lost in our own achievement because so many people have given us the opportunity to play the game.

Respect your opponent always.  By them showing up and putting on the uniform, they are giving you the opportunity to play the game.

Make sure you take time to appreciate of these factors and hopefully you can be outwardly thankful for all of them.

Until next Time

Ernie Harwell like any person who has been involved with the game for an extended period of time could tell you story after story of opportunities taken and missed by ballplayers young and old.

Baseball will give you the opportunity.  Because our game is played so often, the opportunities are increased.  We have to be ready for the next opportunity.  The next opportunity might come on the next play or the next day, but it will always come.

Ballplayers this weekend might be playing in a tournament where they might play up to 30 innings.  Each inning and each pitch allows an opportunity.  You will have your ups and downs during that time period, more importantly you will have many opportunities.

A common complaint when a young player does not succeed is the lack of opportunity.  I rarely believe in this complaint because every player gets many opportunities.  We cannot let one missed opportunity or one bad day get in the way of our next opportunity.

Helen Keller once said “when one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one what has been opened for us.”

Continue to be ready for the next opportunity.  It will come and it is up to us to take advantage.

Be the ballplayer that at the end of your career you can state that you took advantage of your opportunities instead of the ballplayer who complains about the opportunities that you were not given.

Until Next Time

Thus we have home whites and road greys.

Original baseball uniform decisions were based on dirt!  What a wonderful way to make decisions.  A baseball player is meant to get dirty.

Major League Baseball’s all-time stolen base leader Rickie Henderson believed that “If my uniform doesn’t get dirty, I haven’t done anything in a baseball game.”

He was famous for his head first slides into second or third base.  My childhood memories are filled with visions of Rickie Henderson’s dirty jersey and clay filled pants.

There are so many opprotunities to help your team when a ballplayer is willing to get dirty.

* Diving back into first base can only occur if you were aggressive enough to take a big enough lead.

* Sliding into second base, third base or home.

* Diving for that ball in the hole to try and help your team.

A simple goal for every young player is to say that “I want to leave this field dirty.”

If you leave the field dirty then you had a successful day. You were involved in the game.  You were on base.  You were trying your hardest to make that play in the field.  You dove for that fly ball and filled your legs with grass stains.

This is a simple game.  Get dirty and play in the dirt.

Give me a player whose uniform is dirty after a ball game rather than a clean uniform.

Yes – kids – You might have to learn to do the laundry at an earlier age because your parents might be sick of cleaning your uniforms and practice pants, but it is all worth it.

Play this game the right way and get dirty every time you are on a baseball field.

Until Next Time

Although the idea of this process seems understandable.  Parents will state that their son or daughter will receive more challenges and their son or daughter will rise to that level.

But there are fallbacks to this idea and many young player’s abilities might stagnate even more if they do not find success.

Success is key in this game of failure.  We need to find success at every level before we move up the ladder.  Essentially by moving your son or daughter up a level or two, we are skipping that level of success that might be essential towards their progress.

The idea is “sometimes it is okay to be a big fish in a small pond.”  Because that success that we might attain will be essential to compete at a higher level.

When a young player skips a step and they constantly compete against older and many times better kids, then they might start to doubt their own abilities.  They forget that they were good enough in the beginning for a step to be skipped.

If you choose to play up a level or two, make sure your son or daughter is finding success in some way.

It is important in every avenue of life to have success and it is essential for a young mind and body to find that success.

Baseball is not a rush to the top.  It is a lifelong process and it takes time.  Make sure the proper care and time is taken and not overcome by a rush to push and push up the ladder where we might not find success and then regret the decisions.

Until Next Time

So if you want to get better and you don’t have a batting cage, a coach around or a friend to play catch with – here are two simple ways to improve by yourself.

Dry Swings:  Take dry swings in front of a full length mirror or outside.  By not concentrating on a ball and where it flies to, a young hitter can focus on the proper fundamental components of a swing; the load, drive, back leg pivot, and the finish and balance.  Take fifty dry swings a day to improve your bat speed and fundamentals. If you do have a mirror then you can see each component of your swing.  You can see if your load is correct.  You can see if your back leg is pivoting.  You can see if your finish is balanced.

Use a wall for defensive footwork: A tennis ball, a wall and your bare hands is all you need.  Simply throw the ball off a wall and move your feet to catch the ball.  Challenge yourself by throwing the ball to your left and right. Mix in short hops, long hops.  Work your feet back and front.  Catch the ball on the backhand side and the forehand side.  Watch the ball into your hands and transfer into your throwing motion.

This drill can also be done underhand and closer to the wall where you are shuffling to the left and to the right (never crossing your feet) and under handing the ball off the wall.  You can make sure that you are catching the ball in the middle of your body or on the glove hand side.  It is important to be bending your knees and not bending strictly from the back.  This simple drill is known as pick-ups and you can build up your stamina to the point where you can do 100 total pickups – 50 to the right and 50 to the left.  But start with five one each side and work your way up to a hundred.

Remember your hands are only as good as your feet.  Good feet often translates to good hands.

These drills are not only effective but essential to your development as an offensive and defensive ballplayer.  You might not always have a team but you can always practice by yourself.

Until Next time

Watching a young ballplayer strap on the tools of ignorance (catching gear) for the first time can be somewhat comical.
Pads and straps seem to come from every angle completely encompassing the entire body of a young person.  The helmet, seeming so large that it could tip the young player over with just a little nudge from behind.  The waddle out to home plate with this extra-large glove dangling off their little fingers.  It is a sight to behold and one of the true joys of watching youth baseball.

But then when you see a young catcher dripping with sweat, dirt covering their entire exterior uniform drop down and block a ball with a runner on third to save a run in the sixth inning, it is a beautiful transformation.

Catchers are not born – catchers are made and you have to want to be a catcher to become one.  You cannot simply put on the gear and suddenly transform yourself into a catcher.

You quite simply have to love catching to become a catcher.  You have to want to catch more than any other part of the game in order to become a catcher because catching is quite simply the most difficult position on the field.  Below is a short list of requirements needed to become a good catcher.

1. You will never be praised as much as you should be
2. You will almost be forgotten until you mess up.
3. The pitcher’s success is greatly determined by you, but the pitcher will get the credit if the pitcher does well and you often times will be blamed if a pitcher does not succeed.
4. Your offense will be affected in a negative way because you must give so much energy towards your defense.
5. You have to want your pitcher to be great.
6. You have to treat each pitcher differently to find out what makes them tick and excel.
7. You have to get to know every pitcher and what their strengths, weaknesses and fears might be.
8. You have to know every sign for every position.
9. You have to communicate and in many cases become friends with umpires.
10. You have to be the middle man between coaches and umpires.
11. You have to wear ten pounds of gear.
12. Your body will hurt.
13. You will get bruised, battered, and bloody.
14. You will catch more bullpens than you can possible imagine
15. Your knees and legs will hurt almost all of the time

If the above list did not scare you then welcome to the first stage of becoming a catcher.  To become a catcher is to enter a brotherhood unlike any in baseball.

1. You will become a coach on the field.
2. You get to be involved in almost every play.
3. You get to see the game differently from every other position.
4. You will understand the game on a completely higher level.
5. You get to play in the dirt.
6. You get the biggest bag on the team

I wish you the best of luck if you decide to become a catcher.  Enjoy it.  Enjoy all the elements of catching.  Catching is not for everyone.  Only a few get to become catchers.

I recently saw a team of 11-year-olds put on an extreme defensive shift against a big 11-year old left handed hitter.  Almost every player was on the first base side of 2^nd base. The second baseman was playing shallow left field, the shortstop was playing second base and the third baseman was playing behind the second base bag. The hitter ended up walking but it got me to think about the value of defensive shifts in youth baseball.

At a certain age – I believe defensive shifts have become an essential part of the game but I believe we are skipping a fundamental development if we start shifts too early in youth baseball for a variety of reasons.

1.  Shifts involve too much on field coaching from the manager.
2. Kids have not taken enough groundballs in the shifts to where they will feel comfortable fielding a ball from this new and awkward spot.
3. Kids have not thrown the ball enough from these areas that managers are putting their kids in to justify positive results.
4. Pitchers are simply not refined enough to throw the ball to a spot where the sift would work
5. Managers simply do not have enough research on each hitter to justify their defensive shifts.

Most importantly, we have to let kids play the game.  Baseball can already be confusing and by adding these shifts to a young mind might confuse them to the point where success can become limited.

Let your shortstop play shortstop.  If you want to move him or her a step or two to the right or left then that is fine but don’t make a spectacle of the game.  Kids are still becoming comfortable with positions and throwing angles.

Let them understand the fundamental positions on a baseball field and if they progress to the upper echelons of baseball leagues then they will be ready for defensive shifts.

The answer is complicated.

On the highest level of Major League Baseball, defensive shifts are proving to be a very effective defensive tool. This game is about adjustments and this is the latest new wave adjustment to become in vogue.

Defensive shifts in Major League Baseball are effective for a variety of reasons.

1.  A Major League staff has enough statistical data on every single hitter that they can make logical decisions based on hundreds if not thousands of at-bats.
2. Every hitter has strengths and they feel that they must stick to their strength to justify their contract and value to their team. So to make a power hitter think about bunting to beat the shift is essentially limiting their biggest strength.
3. Pitchers and coaches develop a game plan to attack every single hitter and pitchers can often execute that game plan efficiently.  Pitchers can pitch towards the shift and thus make the shift more effective.
4. Infielders and outfielders have fielded enough groundballs and caught enough fly balls to a point where they feel comfortable enough anywhere on a baseball field.
5. Over 162 games, statistics show that if a pitcher can locate the ball where they want to and fielders can field the ball effectively from different locations on a baseball field then over the long haul, shifts are not only effective, but also can produce more wins than adding another player in some cases.

But are they good for the game?

On a professional level, the game is about winning and if shifts help a billion dollar corporation win more ballgames and get closer to the playoffs and eventually winning  the World Series than it is good for that team and good for baseball.

This game is about adjustments and defensive shifts is just another adjustments in the long line of adjustments that have been made throughout the history of the game.

Until Next Time