Baseball EDU

As we go from Spring to Summer the transition for a new season is upon me and my coaching staff. The change excites me! Not to say that I was getting stall with baseball in the first place. The switch to a new team to learn from, teach, manage, and just enjoy is an exciting time for me! I know that I speak for my whole coaching staff when I say that the thought of baseball during the summer is a very exciting one for all of us. Not only are we back together as a staff but the enjoyment that we get out of discussing, dissecting, improving, and solving problems is really what drives us as coaches.  The start of the year is always an important moment for the team. It is the first time that we come together to see what we are capable of. It is important for coaches as well because this is our moment to show the players what we are expecting, what we want to accomplish, and what our goals are for the season. The plan is always to lay these rules down with the team prior to th...

This much is clearly obvious when coaching, you will make tough decisions. What needs to be most obvious is that those decisions needs to be focused on what is best for the TEAM. When any decision is being made the coach must always be concerned with what is best for his team in the short term and try to balance it with what is best for the long term. I have faced this recently with the Legion program that I am coaching. As a coaching staff we need to narrow the squad down to 16 or 17 players for this summer. The difficulty comes from the process or narrowing this number down. First off tryouts were clearly more difficult than I had thought. Getting a good look at players in the field as well as at the plate is a difficult thing to do with only a couple of hours to spare.  Decisions need to be made and I find myself dreading the idea of telling a player that he is not good enough to play on my team after only seeing him for 4 hours and potentially 40 swings again...

Swing Analysis Miguel Cabrera Miguel Cabrera Inside Swing Today I am going to be analyizing Miguel Cabrera's swing. More importantly I will be looking at a couple key parts of effective hitters swings over the next couple of weeks. I am extremely interested in looking into what makes these hitters so effective and trying to take what they can do and pushing these concepts onto my own teams.  After looking at Cabrera's swing a couple obvious things pop up right away. 1. He is an absolute stud 2. He is super calm with his swing. 3. He is a monster when it comes to attacking the baseball. In the Gif above you can see him just pulling in his hands to make room for inside fastballs. What is interesting about this is what he does not lose power when he does clear his hands for the baseball. Head is down on the ball, and he uses his hips to clear out for his hands.  Here is another view of his swing. This time from the side of it. Notice how he is able to l...

Managing a pitching staff is going to be the most difficult thing that any manager does on a given day. For High School Baseball this can be even more difficult to think about and manage. As pitchers progress to higher levels in baseball they are asked to specialize at one particular job. You will not get many pitchers who are also playing the field come freshman year of college. High School baseball brings any difficult and specialized problems for managers to deal with. For the most part pitchers in high school can be some of the best athletes on the team. These players can often times play some of the most valuable positions on the field. The problem is exacerbated when you consider pitch counts, multiple games in a week, and a small and relatively ineffective lower end of the "staff". I have noticed that pitchers do struggle to go deep into games making this problem even worse for the pitching staff. To manage an effective staff I would suggest that you need at ...

Playing on the edge can often be seen as a great thing for athletes. Pushing themselves, challenging their own team, playing almost reckless but still in control. In many other sports this can be seen in much more obvious fashion. In baseball this is much more of a subtle thing. I think that is what is so different about baseball. Many of the other sports praise and can even promote the idea of playing recklessly. In baseball players this is so much different and can often times not be seen. Playing on the edge in baseball in my own opinion, is nothing more than being ultra aggressive in all phases of the game. At bat it means attacking pitches that are over the plate. On the basepaths it means getting an aggressive lead, being even more aggressive in your secondary leads, and lastly fearless on the basepaths. In the field it means hard to the ball and giving up the body when it is needed. Pitchers can always live on the edge and a lot of it has to do with being ultra aggressive ...

Coaching Freshman Baseball is probably the most difficult job which I have had while coaching. There are a bunch of different things which make it difficult none of which are truly "problems" as you would normally think of them. The biggest struggle which I face on a daily basis is the competitive nature which I naturally have. It is normal to line up on a baseball field or any field for that matter and want to compete and win each and every game. That is not the problem with freshman baseball. The problem is that the goal of Freshman baseball in my own eyes is to get each player repetitions, at bats, and make it so each player can eventually compete at the varsity level. Sometimes that goal is meet with the fuel of my own competitive spirit. The biggest question which I face on a game day is how do I balance building a winning baseball culture vs. what is best for all players.  Building a winning culture is difficult for any baseball program. A loser's mentality...

Rain Delays and Keeping Players Sharp Struggles of rain delays and rainouts can do huge amounts of damage to players who are use to playing a good amount of games in a short period of time. High School and College baseball teams are use to having a large amount of practice time to start the year, and then are forced into games and to adjust on the fly throughout the season to any problems which might be popping up. Weather can throw a huge monkey wrench into those plans. Rain and bad weather can make it so those plans. Weather can make it so that you have large amount of down time between games. This can result in too much down time to fix problems. This can also lead to players who haven't faced game situations in a week or two. Players can also be forced to practice the basics for almost too much time. Working on the basics in my opinion is not the problem of large layoffs for players. The biggest problem that I have seen with large layoffs is the timing, and problems...