As the weather begins to turn towards Spring; here, anyway, in the great northwest, Spring likes to tease and flirt rather than show up with a smile and welcoming arms, those of us with a baseball Jones start to scratch that itch with an almost manic enthusiasm. And I'm not thinking so much about the professional boys as the rest of us, from the T-ballers to the geezers long dispossessed of any big league notions. We pay to play whether for ourselves or our kids, watch the weather like hawks; hoping it doesn't case too many disruptions or reschedules ( or drizzly games in low 40's temperatures ), and take pleasure in a simple yet demanding game.
I got back into baseball after getting my sons into it as little kids. Unlike the drop and leave parents content to know their kids are up to something supervised, though the quality of that supervision often merits debate, I tended to stay either to watch or help out, be it prepping the fields, umpiring, doing the score book, or helping to coach. Enjoyable as that was, it's not the same as being out there, and having discovered that there were adult leagues, I jumped right back in.
Jumping in allowed me to renew my love for the game. It also opened my eyes as to the difficulty of playing the game well. I have a very healthy respect for anyone who plays, or attempts to play, at the highest levels. That's not to say that the level of play in my league is a joke; it's not. We have amazing players in our league who are not just out of the MLB or the minor leagues, although we do have guys who did play minor league baseball, but at my age; late forties, there aren't too many would did. Don't kid yourself though; they still stand out. But, it's nowhere near the big league game.
Before this gets out of hand, the result of getting back into the game was to force me to focus more on the mechanics and nuances of the game; in order to be a better player myself, with the result that I came to realize just how hard it is to play well at the big league level, or for that matter, any level. I grew up at a time when there weren't the kinds of year round baseball programs that exist now; baseball was a spring/summer sport, and we played other games the rest of the year. And while there probably were places to truly learn the mechanics of the game, I didn't hear of or know of any. Consequently, my knowledge was rudimentary; the stuff that most people know from playing when they were young, and any gleaned from watching the game. Now, of course, there are a great many resources by which an individual can learn more about the mechanics of hitting, fielding, and pitching; as well as organizing practices and managing games. This has given me a deeper understanding of the game which I wished I had know earlier, both when I was younger and when my kids were younger.
Because of this recently acquired insight, I now appreciate more how hard it is to try to hit off a pitcher who throws hard with movement and control, as well as how hard it is to pitch a ball so that it moves, changes speed, and hit it's spots. It ain't easy. I know; I've been humbled enough. The beauty of this humiliation is that I'm much more understanding, and in many cases much more forgiving ( assuming that's the right word ) of those I watch play; and I'm an inveterate consumer of baseball. I watch my friends kids play in Little League, I go to the HS games, even though my kids weren't quite good enough to make the team, the local college teams, the teams in my adult league; if I pass a field and I've got nothing better to do, I've stop and watch. I've watched a lot of baseball and no doubt will until my dying day.
Here are a few observations:
A lot of people; fans, parents, and sadly, even coaches, don't know a whole lot about the game.
Perennial favorites;
throw strikes. Think about that for a minute; especially for kids. It presupposes that these kids are cognizant enough of their abilities that they can, on any given pitch, throw a strike, but choose not to for reasons unknown. The ones who can throw strikes do. The others are doing their damnedest to do so as well but lack the ability mainly because they don't know how and haven't been adequately taught the body mechanics necessary for the repeatability needed to consistently place a pitch in the strike zone. For better players, those in college, the minor leagues, up to the big leagues, just being able to put the ball over the plate isn't enough. It's why the prodigies we all watched as kids never make beyond a certain level. To pitch at a high level requires velocity, movement, and the ability to change speeds while utilizing the same arm speed and angle because that's what good hitters key on. Even if you throw 95 MPH ( and this is an old baseball saw ); if you put it over the heart of the plate without good movement; say a sinker, a good hitter is going to put it over the fence, and at that level, that's all you're going to face; very good hitters. Good, and great pitchers live on the corners. If they can't, they don't survive. It obviously irritates fans because you hear them all the time complaining when a pitcher walks guys, falls behind in the count ( and then has to groove one ), and gives up a lot more runs than they want or expect him to. If they were pitching to me, I have no doubt they throw it over the plate because they know that I'm not that much of a threat. But then, I'm not Josh Hamilton.
The other big one, for me, is: getting worked up over what a hitter will and won't swing at. There aren't many good instinctual hitters out there, and they're easy to spot early on. They have a natural swing, meaning they have good mechanics naturally, rather than being taught or corrected. They drive the ball. They're the hitters that draw the oh's and ah's; the players that people come to see. However, as with the stud HS pitchers, there are those HS hitters that don't make it because they can't adjust to big league breaking balls; curveballs, sliders, and off speed pitches; split fingers, changeups, etc. Lots of good hitters can drive a good fastball, but flounder against a good split or curveball. I've never heard a coach for younger kids ever talk about having a plan when the kids go up to bat; probably due to a lack of time in practice, or ignorance there of, but any good big leaguer has one because no hitter can hit every pitch well. That's the beauty of the big league game. Hitters looking for and getting the pitch they hit well, to pitchers putting hitters in counts that force them to deal with pitches they don't see or hit well. That's hard to do with kids who are just trying to hit the ball period. Parents throwing out pointless advise serve no perpose other than to teach their kids to tune them out out. Just let them play, or better yet, study the game and then teach them what to do. I don't think the average dad would do any better than his kid, and would probably do worse. And to the fans working themselves up over a player not swinging a pitch down the middle, or flailing at a slider down and away, you wouldn't do any better.
To me the beauty of the game is in the play. I don't have much of an interest anymore in stats. I'm not interested in trying to predict the out come of a particular player or team, or divine the future so I can win a fantasy league. I like to see how the players meet the challange of that game, and other than big leaguers, I'm not going to have any stats to rely on anyway, so it's all in that game at that time. The next game might be different. Some teams improve; some don't. Some players improve; some decline; some never change. That way it stays a game.
hey! this is good stuff!
ReplyDelete