John Miller, who is playing and coaching for the Brussels Kangaroos in the Belgian 2nd Division and is a reporter for a big American newspaper, is now also the Little League Commissioner for Belgium. He is also back chronicling the 2010 season in his “Old World Pastime” column on Mister-Baseball.com for a third straight year.
On Sunday, after our 12-to-15-year-old “cadet” game, I threw an hour of batting practice. It was fun and carefree but the kids weren’t focused. Let’s play a game, I said: You get 10 swings and we’ll count how many you hit hard. The kids were transformed. They squinted and swung harder. Outside the cage, others stopped to watch.
This phenomenon, which I touched upon last week, is the subject of Tom O’Connell’s excellent new book “Play Ball: 100 Baseball Practice Games.” Conventional coaching, O’Connell writes, “puts too much stress on direct instruction. The coach tells the players what to do and how to do it.” It’s an approach that is heavy on adults “teaching” but sometimes light on kids “learning.”
Drills end up happening “outside the context of the game.” The result is hitters who sting in BP but stink in competition, fielders who “can field every ground ball flawlessly in practice but [bobble] easy grounders in a game or let them go through his legs.”
Wisely, O’Connell points out that coaches often err in tagging these players as “choking.” The truth is that they’re simply uncomfortable with competition, with having to perform with something on the line, and they’re afraid of failure. Making kids comfortable with competing, giving them that feeling that they must do their best and accept the result, is the coach’s job.
Here, O’Connell has an answer, and it is the subject of his book. His games are divided into eight sections: throwing, infield, outfield, pitching, catching, hitting, situational and team. And there’s an extra chapter on practice planning.
An experienced coach will recognize the components of almost all these games. For example, we know to drill catchers by throwing them balls in the dirt to block. What O’Connell does is add competitive texture to these drills. Why not, he suggests, mark out a box with traffic cones around the catcher and count how many balls he keeps in the box? Then you can have catchers compete against each other.
Another example: We lecture kids endlessly about the importance of location in the strike zone, but how to make sure they learn it? Here O’Connell suggests giving pitchers a clipboard and making them chart their own pitches during bullpen sessions. Writing it down will trigger a competitive instinct to do better.
My favorite, though, is an adapted baseball game he calls “Keystone Cops.” It’s basically baseball with two bases, second and home. These ideas are great for Europe because they conjure the magic of baseball while requiring fewer players.
O’Connell is a veteran high school baseball coach, writer, administrator and scout from Milwaukee. He’s a warm, friendly man and a great ally of European baseball. As usual, he’ll be at the European Baseball Coaches Association convention in Cologne this November 19-21. (You should go.)
Tom also knows what he’s talking about. “The trick,” he concludes, “is to get players to handle each situation in a game the same way that they deal with it in practice. The more skilled they become in challenging situations, the more confidence they gain in their ability to carry out their responsibilities and just play the game.”