swing for the fences!

[29dad]

A thousand apologies if this article has already been discussed, but I just read it and was curious to get your thoughts/opinions. The title of the article is "why baseball player development is on the decline, and why very few realize it" by Brian Hamm. Saw it posted on another forum by someone who runs the Tulsa Elite program, and he raved about the article.

Why baseball player development is on the decline, and why very few realize it – Baseball Toolshed

 

[Lenski]

I'd be curious to know how old Mr. Brian Hamm is. Although he makes some decent points in his article, to say that baseball player development is on the decline is a ridiculous statement.

 

[newsoftballdad]

I have always taught my DD to think about hitting to the LC and RC gaps based on pitch location. In fact when I see her struggling my verbal cue to her is "pick out a gap". Not sure she was ever taught, by any coach, to try to hit it to 2b. Very odd.

 

[slugger3]

I agree with many points in the article.

First off, there have been so many societal and cultural shifts when it comes to raising kids, in our nation in the last 30 years, it's easy to see how this "over coaching" came about.
Think about how much life has change for American kids in the last 30-40 years. As kids, alot of us were allowed to go play around town or in the neighborhood freely. Whether it was just riding bikes around, or getting all your friends together to play, football, baseball, fastpitch or basketball.
Now America has turned into a "Playdate Society" when it comes to letting our kids go out of the home. Whether it's just going to play at the playground or it's playing sports with their friends.
Our kids nowadays are conditioned, or trained to believe, that it is normal for a parent or guardian to be around them at all times. And with that constant parenting comes constant "coaching". Whether it's generalities in life, or sporting.
Secondly, everyone is looking for their kid to be the next Superstar athlete to rule the world of sports. (I'd say, we wanted our kids to be the next Tiger Woods...but we all know how that worked out.)
And the best way to get your kid to be that next Superstar athlete is through individual private coaching to give them a head start, or advantage over the competition. Does, it really give your and advantage?...It must because so many people are doing it.
Think of the money that is spent in our country on an annual basis for private coaching...it is staggering.
As a kid, growing up in a town with 230 people in it. The whole town was our playground. With a State Hall of Fame fastpitch pitcher living 3 houses down from me, and being friends with his 2 sons, it was hard not to play and love the sport.
The only thing we were every taught by him was how to pitch, and the basics for batting. ( no slo-mo GIFs back then) Since I sucked at pitching, his 2 sons did that and the rest of the kids in would make up the positions for the 2 teams that played each other all of the time.
After the basics crash course that almost every American kid received back in those days at the age of 5, I never had any paid lessons to do anything.
A neighbor girl who played fastpitch, taught me the basics of fielding and would play catch with me.
We refined our throwing skills by throwing railroad track rocks at various "targets" in the town swamp.
Those were the days.

Now you look at our playdate society.
There's an coaching expert on every street corner it seems, when it comes to every sport. How and why is this? Money.
A lot of kids aren't allowed to leave the house by themselves due to the society we live in.
So the parents do the playdate rec leagues. The parents either hire a training coach because they either have more money than time, or they have no idea about the sport their kid loves...oh, but those parents are most certainly experts of the game when they are sitting in the stands at the ball fields...

Another thread was started in the last week on DFP, in regards to a stellar ball player from California, I believe.
One of the first comments was, (I'm paraphrasing here,) " I wonder how long it will take the new college coach to change all of her skills?"
My oldest DD is experiencing this now, in some of the clinics she's going to. And I know the majority of your DD's have too.
At a clinic in the last year, my DD enthusiastically, and sarcastically, tells me after the clinic was over. "Hey dad! I learned how to swing the bat better today! (end sarcasm) I learned 3 different swings, from 3 different coaches, over the course of 8 hours. Each one of them said they were right, and each said the previous guy was wrong."
So ultimately, the only way my DD will be swinging the bat correctly, is if she changes her swing to the swing her new college coach wants? Yes, that's a question.

So like the California girl the thread was about...a .600 batting avg. isn't good enough? A .990 fielding avg. isn't good enough? A home run every 10 at bats isn't good enough? An ERA below 1.00 isn't good enough?
I know athletes, and most people in general, are always striving to be better, but as Brian Hamm stated in his article, when are we going to let our kids learn and play the game themselves?
Versus the coaches playing it for them?

 

[Lenski]

Great post Slugger3. In the summertime when I was a kid there was an unwritten rule. BE AT THE FIELD AT 9AM TO PLAY BASEBALL. We played until lunch time, and after lunch we went back to the field to play some more. If it rained we played on the school parking lot. We emulated our baseball heroes. We taught ourselves. MLB baseball players lived in the same neighborhood as us. The teams the neighborhood kids were on practiced once or twice a week and our games were on Saturdays. From the time I was 7 until 14 the coach did nothing more than hit infield and throw batting practice. There was very little coaching.

In the late 1970's I tried out and made a team that traveled out of town to play games. We were not a TB nor a select team. We were Midland, one of two teams from Cincinnati during that time that went out of town to play baseball. It was with Midland that I truly received any form of coaching, and that coaching did make us better.

Since then I have been to many camps, clinics, etc. with my daughter and I can say without a doubt that overall instruction is better. Mr. Hamm claims that kids today are being taught to swing down, squish the bug, knob to the ball, etc. by coaches. Where does he think these coaches learned this crap? FROM THEIR COACHES IN THEIR YOUTH! That is old thinking from decades ago! With the advent of slow motion video, the old coaching theories are being squashed, and instructors are gaining knowledge of what the pros do. Sure, there are instructors that are set in the old ways, and there are other instructors that are putting their own spin on things. But overall, I would say that instruction is better, not on the decline. The main problem is that kids today do not put in the time like we did in our youth, and that time we put in was playing every day for hours with the other neighborhood kids emulating our baseball heroes.

 

[CoogansBluff]

The main problem is that kids today do not put in the time like we did in our youth, and that time we put in was playing every day for hours with the other neighborhood kids emulating our baseball heroes.

Not sure what you mean by time put in. ... By my estimation, baseball players today are investing far more time playing and training than kids in my day. My high school team was decent for its time but would be a joke compared to many of the teams I see today. I see HS teams now that have year-round players that can't make varsity. We didn't have any year-round players, maybe just 3-4 that played legion ball in the summer. We played more on our own, but it was largely softball in the summer. I don't remember anybody playing baseball all day when I was growing up.

 

[Angus]

I think it is human nature to want to continue to be better than the person before you, and that's why Softball, and every other sport, continues to evolve and the quality of play continues to improve. So, the "price of admission", if you will, to play at a high level has gone up and will continue to go up until it can't go any higher (which will probably never happen). There are physical limitations around time, but how that time is spent (and how much money is spent) will continue to change. I can't imagine learning to play golf without private instruction (even when I was a kid learning to play in the 80's), and I don't think I've ever met a good golfer who did not have private instruction. There's really no reason why baseball or softball should be any different - it's a very technical sport and learning the right mechanics makes a big difference. Kids who learn the right way will generally be better than kids who learn the wrong way.

I spend a lot of time with my DD doing the best I can to help her, including video (and recently investing in Zepp), and I think I've done a pretty good job but no matter how much I read on this board, I'll never be an expert. She has turned out to be very good and rather than teaching her the wrong way, I'd prefer to have an expert to teach her the right way. Everybody complains about the time and focus kids spend on a specific sport, but then everyone who is good does it. Coaches say that they like multiple sport athletes . . . as long as it's the "other sport" that is sacrificed when there is a conflict. Ultimately, each kid and parent needs to decide if they have the desire (and ability, and perhaps money) to play at the highest level of the sport, or if they are content to just be "good". My philosophy has been that I want my DD to be as good as she is capable of and desires to be, and I'll do what is necessary to facilitate that.

 

[Lenski]

Not sure what you mean by time put in. ... By my estimation, baseball players today are investing far more time playing and training than kids in my day. My high school team was decent for its time but would be a joke compared to many of the teams I see today. I see HS teams now that have year-round players that can't make varsity. We didn't have any year-round players, maybe just 3-4 that played legion ball in the summer. We played more on our own, but it was largely softball in the summer. I don't remember anybody playing baseball all day when I was growing up.

We averaged 6+ hours of baseball every day Monday through Friday, team practice was 2 hours (normally once a week), and games were on Saturday. Saturday after dinner we would congregate at the school (elementary school) parking lot and share stories of what happened in the games, then play something like tag. We were putting in over 30 hours a week during the summer. Once football practices started we stopped baseball and played a ton of touch or tackle football, along with Smear the Queer.