Day 2

As I said yesterday today was to be a fielding and pitching practice. Steve’s younger brother, Scott, who plays high school varsity baseball was there which was great. At the start of practice we only had 9 of 12 which was a bit of an annoyance. One showed up late, but he’d told us that he was going to be late and we’d forgotten, and one, I don’t know what his story was. Anyway Steve and I had divided them into three groups:

1. People who weren’t here yesterday
2. People who were here and not so hot
3. People who played travel

With only 9 there at the start of practice, I used some quick thinking and we quickly had three new groups. Group 1 was Fuller, who we didn’t see yesterday, and Jim, Ethan, and Kelvin who were all weak hitters. Group 2 was our travel players with Everett, Trey and Percy and group 3 was Bobby and Brendan. Group 1 went with Scott for hitting, Group 2 with Steve for grounders, and Group 3 with me for fly balls.

Fly-Ball Practice
Once again Bobby impressed me with his strong grasp of fundamentals. Before we started shagging the balls I asked them what the first thing they had to do in order to catch a flyball. Most kids said something like “call for it” or “square to the ball” or “take a step back” of all of which were great answers but not what I was looking for. After giving a guess Bobby was the only one to realize that I was looking for “Focus on the batter”. As I mentioned yesterday focus is a huge issue here and it was something I wanted to stress from the start. All-in-all, they did a very good job at my station with catching and communicating for fly balls.

At this point I should talk about Avi. He was in my last group for fly balls. He was a Hebrew kid from yesterday and I’m not quite sure when he showed up. Anyway he came over and immediately there was something I didn’t like about his attitude. We were going over the reminders of how to catch a fly ball and he just blurts out “Can we start doing it?” As I have been asked similar sorts of questions during class I was not phased, but it hardly endeared me to him.

As we are walking about to rejoin the other groups before we split into pitchers and catchers he tells me how he pitched last year (in the lower age group league which is called “Triple A”) and he and his dad have been practicing this year. Now at this point I missed a chance to be good. What I should have said was something along the lines of “That’s great! I can’t wait to see you pitch!” I don’t recall quite what I said, but it was far more muted. His brusque nature got in the way there, which is unfortunate.

Pitchers and Catcher

Steve used to be a catcher and so after a brief talk about how if there were any positions a player was dying to try or wanted to avoid to talk to us, we asked who had an interest in being our catchers. The kids who were most enthusiastic were Ethan, Jesse, Fuller, and Brendan. Brendan is a Red Sox fan and evidently he told Steve that he kind of thought of himself like Jason Veritek, which was amusing in a good sort of way. Everett also explained that he had done a bunch of catching last year in the Triple A, but that he didn’t play that for travel. After practice I asked him if he played catcher last year because his coach told him to or because he enjoyed it and found out he enjoyed it.

The rest of the team, including Everett, came with myself and Scott. Scott, who had pitched for the High School team, led them through the five basic steps of pitching. At that point it was our turn to take the diamond and so I went and caught while Scott stood next to them as they pitched off the mound. After Steve had done his spiel with the catchers they took my space and after everyone had gone through the pitching once, throwing five pitches, we put the team out in the field and put in a batter. Ostensibly this was to do live batting practice, but was really my idea to see how the pitchers did with a kid in the batter’s box.

Evaluating the Catchers
We learned that Jesse, Everett, and Brendan are all serviceable catchers, though Ethan has no arm strength, partly I think because he has a poor throwing mechanic which we can work on, which will limit his time behind the plate. Fuller, I have the feeling, was with the catchers not because he wanted to catch, but rather because he didn’t want to pitch. He will not be seeing much time behind the plate. With Jesse and Brendan being serviceable or better catchers, combined with what I am presuming is Everett’s ability to be at least a serviceable catcher, we’re in unbelievable shape.

In our league you have six inning games. The rule is that you can’t play the same position for more then two innings EXCEPT for catcher, so you need at least two catchers. Having three is great incase somebody gets sick or otherwise can’t make a game. We lost two games, and those are just the ones that I remember, last year due to our putting kids who couldn’t really catch behind the plate. Not only do your pitchers get robbed of strikes when the catcher can’t catch the balls, but players can only steal after the ball passes the plate. So basically a catcher who can’t catch turns a single into a triple if they allow passed balls and it can even be a homerun with a long at bat.

Evaluating the Pitchers
As for our pitchers there was little that was surprising. No one kid pitched long enough to see much of anything, but it seems that Trey will be our Ace pitcher. Everett seems pretty good.

After that the talent drops off substantially. The 5th graders, except for Everett, in particular struggled. The distance between the mound and the plate is longer in the Majors then in Triple A so this isn’t surprising or a particular cause for alarm for me. From an early impression it seems that Jim, who if you recall is the adorable kindergarten sized player, can consistently get the ball over the plate. If this holds true he’ll get quite a few innings at least early on. Despite the fact that the fielding is often terrible, I would rather have a kid get hit repeatedly then walk kids. This is partly because our league has, thankfully, rules about how many walks a pitch can throw before he is yanked, but also because walks cause the defense to lose focus. Having balls hit keeps the players in the game and can help lead to better plays. And partly because a lot of kids in the league quite simply can’t hit and so they’re likely to strike out, ground out, against even a poor pitcher and an out is an out. All this means we preach “Greg Maddix” pitching to all but our best pitchers: “You don’t have to be fast to be good”.

Percy who is a travel player, looked like he had some good heat on the ball, but had some control issues. When I reminded him about our desire for control over speed, during his second go round he dropped some speed off the pitches but had more consistency with control, so that was good. Avi was clearly frustrated with himself and what he was pitching as was Bobby. The rest of the kids were largely unremarkable, though there could be talent there that just didn’t come out in the time we had today.

While we can do pitchers for more innings we will likely do each pitcher for 1 inning during our first game, which isn’t until a week from Saturday (I’ll explain more below).

In Conclusion

All in all Steve and I were very heartened by today’s practice. Granted it wasn’t a game situation, but they performed pretty well. We didn’t get to play a game today which is a minus, but otherwise it was a very successful practice.

Jodi, our girl, still hasn’t showed up despite supposed to having been there today. I will be calling tomorrow to see why not and see if I can’t get her to come to some of Tuesday’s practice so we’ll see her before the first game.

We haven’t yet discussed our next practice yet but as I normally do the idea generation, with Steve suggesting tweaks, I think we’ll start introducing bunting, work on throwing (as in fielding) and do some extended player to player batting. Our next practice isn’t until next Tuesday as Saturday is uniform pick-up day. Our first game isn’t until a week from Saturday, due to Passover starting Wednesday night, which is a tortuously long time away.