The annual convention of the European Baseball Coaches Association takes place in Brussels, Belgium this weekend. John Miller, who you might know from Old World Pastime, is on hand and blogs about it for Mister-Baseball.
UNCONVENTIONAL CONVENTION
Saturday is the core of the convention, when the bulk of the learning happens. It’s also when the eyes glaze over around three in the afternoon, as speaker 7 goes on and on and on. Luckily, this is baseball, and you can always dream away, of warm afternoons and two-hop groundballs, or take a walk to the equipment area — or to the bar, where in this case you were likely to find Jim Lefebvre discussing his cameo appearance in the Batman show.
CORE OF COACHES
The charm of the EBCA and its supporters is that this is a small group of men who work incredibly hard to introduce coaches of all stripes to the European baseball scene. It’s a credit to guys like Germany’s Georg Apfelbaum and Jim Jones, a former Wyoming and St. Mary’s college coach who’s been involved in European baseball for 20 years. Mr. Jones is still going, and on Saturday served up a pro talk on medicine ball workouts.
ODD BALLS
The choice of convention speakers is refreshingly unconventional. Last year, the EBCA brought over a sports psychologist who lectured on the hidden psychological pain inflicted on young players by their overbearing parents. His meditation technique involved tapping yourself on the forehead.
STRONG
This year, one of the more interesting guest speakers was a 28-year-old Arizona Diamondbacks strength coach named Vaughn Robinson. Until the spring, he’ll live in Amsterdam and work with top European baseball prospects. We should differentiate soreness from pain, he said. The first is a healthy side effect of hard training; the second a sign of injury. Players don’t necessarily need to work out for more than an hour at a time, he said.
Interestingly, his science is not exact. For example, one question is why pitchers seem to pick up velocity in the days before an elbow blowout.
RUN
Steve Janssen is as good as any European coach at lecturing on fundamentals. The problem with base-running, he rightly pointed out, is that nobody ever practices it. He offered a useful acronym for getting runners’s heads in the right place as soon as they get to first base: BSBD, pick up BALL, see SIGN, check scoreBOARD and be ready to DIVE back to first.
MORE STORIES
And of course, there was Mr. Lefebvre, cooking up a lecture that combined stories, teaching points and advice on life:
- They call it hand-eye coordination, so obviously your hands should start out near your eyes.”
- A drill: Strap socks to beginning player’s wrists to allow them to practice throwing without losing any balls.
- Major Leaguers hit .700 on line drills and hard groundballs.
- “Players have to have FUN at the entry level” to get them to keep playing.
EAT EAT EAT
Then it was on to my wife’s restaurant for hours of fine pasta and wine. You can do worse than a high-level 28-headed baseball conversation at your family eatery. The baseball gods are good.