| SOFTBALL TIPS |
|
|
|
| SITE STUFF |
|
|
|
|
ARCHIVES
|
| • |
June 26, 2005 |
| • |
July 03, 2005 |
| • |
July 10, 2005 |
| • |
July 17, 2005 |
| • |
July 24, 2005 |
| • |
July 31, 2005 |
| • |
August 07, 2005 |
| • |
August 14, 2005 |
| • |
August 21, 2005 |
| • |
August 28, 2005 |
| • |
September 11, 2005 |
| • |
October 02, 2005 |
| • |
October 09, 2005 |
| • |
October 23, 2005 |
| • |
October 30, 2005 |
| • |
November 06, 2005 |
| • |
November 13, 2005 |
| • |
December 04, 2005 |
| • |
December 18, 2005 |
| • |
December 25, 2005 |
| • |
January 08, 2006 |
| • |
January 15, 2006 |
| • |
January 29, 2006 |
| • |
February 05, 2006 |
| • |
February 12, 2006 |
| • |
February 19, 2006 |
| • |
February 26, 2006 |
| • |
March 05, 2006 |
| • |
March 12, 2006 |
| • |
March 19, 2006 |
| • |
March 26, 2006 |
| • |
April 02, 2006 |
| • |
April 09, 2006 |
| • |
April 16, 2006 |
| • |
April 23, 2006 |
| • |
April 30, 2006 |
| • |
May 07, 2006 |
| • |
May 14, 2006 |
| • |
May 21, 2006 |
| • |
May 28, 2006 |
| • |
June 04, 2006 |
| • |
June 11, 2006 |
| • |
June 18, 2006 |
| • |
June 25, 2006 |
| • |
July 09, 2006 |
| • |
July 16, 2006 |
| • |
July 23, 2006 |
| • |
July 30, 2006 |
| • |
August 13, 2006 |
| • |
August 20, 2006 |
| • |
September 03, 2006 |
| • |
September 10, 2006 |
| • |
September 17, 2006 |
| • |
September 24, 2006 |
| • |
October 01, 2006 |
| • |
October 08, 2006 |
| • |
October 15, 2006 |
| • |
October 22, 2006 |
| • |
November 12, 2006 |
| • |
November 26, 2006 |
| • |
December 31, 2006 |
| • |
January 14, 2007 |
| • |
January 21, 2007 |
| • |
January 28, 2007 |
| • |
February 04, 2007 |
| • |
February 11, 2007 |
| • |
February 18, 2007 |
| • |
February 25, 2007 |
| • |
March 04, 2007 |
| • |
March 11, 2007 |
| • |
March 18, 2007 |
| • |
April 01, 2007 |
| • |
April 08, 2007 |
| • |
April 15, 2007 |
| • |
April 22, 2007 |
| • |
April 29, 2007 |
| • |
May 06, 2007 |
| • |
May 13, 2007 |
| • |
May 20, 2007 |
| • |
May 27, 2007 |
| • |
June 03, 2007 |
| • |
June 10, 2007 |
| • |
June 17, 2007 |
| • |
June 24, 2007 |
| • |
July 01, 2007 |
| • |
July 22, 2007 |
| • |
July 29, 2007 |
| • |
August 12, 2007 |
| • |
August 19, 2007 |
| • |
September 02, 2007 |
| • |
September 16, 2007 |
| • |
September 30, 2007 |
| • |
October 07, 2007 |
| • |
October 14, 2007 |
| • |
October 21, 2007 |
| • |
November 04, 2007 |
| • |
November 18, 2007 |
| • |
November 25, 2007 |
| • |
December 02, 2007 |
| • |
December 09, 2007 |
| • |
December 16, 2007 |
| • |
January 13, 2008 |
| • |
February 17, 2008 |
| • |
February 24, 2008 |
| • |
March 02, 2008 |
| • |
March 09, 2008 |
| • |
March 30, 2008 |
| • |
April 06, 2008 |
| • |
April 13, 2008 |
| • |
April 20, 2008 |
| • |
April 27, 2008 |
| • |
May 04, 2008 |
| • |
May 11, 2008 |
| • |
May 18, 2008 |
| • |
May 25, 2008 |
| • |
June 01, 2008 |
| • |
June 15, 2008 |
| • |
June 22, 2008 |
| • |
June 29, 2008 |
| • |
July 06, 2008 |
| • |
July 13, 2008 |
| • |
July 20, 2008 |
| • |
August 03, 2008 |
| • |
August 10, 2008 |
| • |
August 17, 2008 |
| • |
August 24, 2008 |
| • |
August 31, 2008 |
| • |
September 07, 2008 |
| • |
September 14, 2008 |
| • |
September 21, 2008 |
| • |
September 28, 2008 |
| • |
October 05, 2008 |
| • |
October 12, 2008 |
| • |
October 19, 2008 |
| • |
October 26, 2008 |
| • |
November 02, 2008 |
| • |
November 09, 2008 |
| • |
November 16, 2008 |
| • |
November 30, 2008 |
| • |
December 07, 2008 |
| • |
December 21, 2008 |
| • |
December 28, 2008 |
| • |
February 15, 2009 |
| • |
February 22, 2009 |
| • |
April 12, 2009 |
| • |
April 19, 2009 |
| • |
April 26, 2009 |
| • |
May 03, 2009 |
| • |
May 10, 2009 |
| • |
May 17, 2009 |
| • |
May 24, 2009 |
| • |
May 31, 2009 |
| • |
June 07, 2009 |
| • |
June 14, 2009 |
| • |
June 21, 2009 |
| • |
July 05, 2009 |
| • |
July 12, 2009 |
| • |
July 19, 2009 |
| • |
August 02, 2009 |
| • |
August 30, 2009 |
| • |
September 06, 2009 |
| • |
September 20, 2009 |
| • |
October 04, 2009 |
| • |
October 11, 2009 |
| • |
October 18, 2009 |
| • |
November 08, 2009 |
| • |
November 15, 2009 |
| • |
November 22, 2009 |
| • |
November 29, 2009 |
| • |
December 27, 2009 |
| • |
January 03, 2010 |
| • |
January 10, 2010 |
| • |
January 17, 2010 |
| • |
January 24, 2010 |
| • |
January 31, 2010 |
| • |
March 14, 2010 |
| • |
March 21, 2010 |
| • |
March 28, 2010 |
| • |
April 04, 2010 |
| • |
April 18, 2010 |
| • |
April 25, 2010 |
|
|
| SOFTBALL LINKS |
|
|
|
Versatile!
by Dave
Friday, July 11, 2008
Does it occur to anyone that Andrea Duran, a slapper, hits a fair number of home runs? Does it occur to anyone that Jessica Mendoza, possibly the best overall hitter in the game today, is equally comfortable dragging, slapping one to the outfield corners, or drilling one well over the fence? Have you seen Crystl Bustos play third? She has a rocket arm and lightening quick response to balls hit at her. By the way, she may not get down to first in 2.6, but she is NOT a slow runner by most human standards. Jennie Finch knows her way around the bat rack - she is a very good hitter. One of the elements of this game which differentiates it from baseball is the versatility of its top players. Ignore that at your own risk.
I once knew a girl who was a true peanut. She was smaller than girls two years younger. She was a quick runner so her parents decided to turn her into a slapper because "she was never going to hit the ball out of the infield." They followed this approach to the exclusion of any other kind of hitting. She's startiung to grow now and her strength is on the upswing. She may not ever be tall but she is probably going to be around average height once her body gets in gear.
There was a girl who, at the age of ten, was a "better athlete" than any of the girls in her rec league. She was good enough to play with the older girls and often did just that. By rec league standards, she was a good fielder with speed and a strong arm. She often played short, even when playing with older girls. Her parents saw her exclusively as an infielder even going so far as to exclude from consideration any travel teams on which she was not guaranteed starting time at short or another suitable infield position. Yet, anyone who watched her recognized that her throwing mechanics were not well suited to infield play and her instincts in the outfield were among the very best around - that is, best around travel circles, not merely in the rec league. In short she was a "B" infielder and an "A" outfielder.
My kid claims she wants to play second base. She has voiced some desires to see more time at 2B on the team I coach. But her load up on throws is a bit long for an infielder. She has a quick release when compared to her peers. But I can see that her throwing mechanics will be better suited to outfield if she is unable to change them. I've tried to correct this and perhaps we will one day but, you know, she's a very good outfielder who threw three people out at first in this her first year of seeing considerable time in right.
My other kid says she wants to play third. But when no action comes her way over say ten pitches, it is apparent to me that her attention wanes. We've talked about this but I have yet to see any improvement. She is a very good 3B on balls hit in front of her and her arm is suited to oplaying the position. But aside from the attention thing (which scares the heck out of me), she doesn't move laterally all the well on liners. She moves well to her left but her quick movements to the right are at or below average for all players and not as quick as they need to be at third. She can play outfield well enough. She's also not bad around 2B but hates the position.
We have a girl on this year's team who is an overall very good player. In the fall, we used her as a catcher. She was outstanding at the position. But she insists that she never again wants to go behind the plate. We used her some at first because she is tall, long in the arm, and scoops just about anything out of the dirt. It is pretty difficult to throw anything over her head and anything to either side is usually easy for her to get to. Once a throw pulled her off the bag and she quickly jumped off, caught it and tagged the runner before she made the bag. Nobody had ever taught her to do this. Her instincts fot her there. On another play, our infielder held a very fast runner at third and then made the play to first. The runner at third broke immediately to home. Everybody in the place froze. Nobody on the team, including coaches, found the voice to yell "throw it home." This girl made a great catch, pivoted immediately and threw the kid out by about three steps. Her throw, under pressure was about a foot off the ground, and a half foot off the plate. The catcher had only to make the catch and the tag was applied for her. This girl doesn't like first and would prefer to play third where her reactions are not quite as stellar.
We had a girl who insisted her one and only position was third. She was pretty good at it. But we needed a SS. This 3B was one of the fastest and quickest kids on the team, knew the game well, and could make any play required of a shortstop. We put her out at short one scrimmage game and she did quite well. But after that experience, she told us that she much prefers third. "That's my position." Anyone could see that this girl had the potential to be an "A" shortstop, anyone except her school and rec team coaches. Those folks had pigeon-holed her into the role of third baseman. It took everything I learned in the Dale Carnegie "How to Win Friends and Influence People" class I took in my late teens to finally convinve this kid to stick to short with us and play third wherever else she played.
I like girls to be happy in the positions they play. It is a cardinal rule of fastpitch softball that girls. particularly those just entering puberty, must be happy to play ball (the corollary being that boys must play ball to be happy). I don;t want kids out there moping around, cursing their assigned positions. That can be dangerous or a formula for losing and creating disharmony on a team. At the same time, I thoroughly believ that versatility is critical to a player's success in softball.
Many parents have approached me at various times to object to my playing kids at more than one, often more than two, different positions. They would like to know who is playing and hitting where in the line-up the same way they know their favorite professional team. Manny Ramirez never plays SS. Sabathia never is in the lineup as DH. Pudge Rodriquez isn't an outfielder. A-Rod doesn't play third base. Whoops, I messed up there. That last comment is a bit dated.
The parents really get upset when I place a kid at say 2B and she fails to cover first on a bunt. They let me know that "She doesn't know that position. She has never played there before. She doesn't know that she has to cover first on bunts." I like to respond to that oft-recited rant, "now she has and does."
Many very successful teams follow a principle of one player, one position, or, in the case of pitchers and catchers in particular, one kid, one primary position and one secondary one. In this manner, they have kids who "know their position." They avoid circumstances in which the girl out at second isn't playing the position for the first time and then fails to get over to cover first on a bunt. They avoid situations in which the LF doesn't know where to stand on back-ups. They are coordinated and their kids know what to do with the ball when it comes to their one position. But those kids lack verstility and often don;t have well-rounded senses of the game. They get on a team where there is a better SS, 3B, etc., find themselves trying to learn something new, and struggling in the field to learn this "new position."
I've told you before that I was a catcher who found himself on a team with another catcher who would go on to have a fairly long major league career. I had a stick so they put me in the outfield. But I was lucky because the team ahd a coach who had played outfield in the minors and he taught me how to do it. I had played outfield for exactly one inning to that point in my career. I had no idea where to begin. Had this guy not been there to school me, my bat and I would have spent that season getting acquainted wiuth the bench.
Jessica Mendoza tells the story of how she became an outfielder. She went to Stanford on an athletic scholarship and when she got there found the team already had a sophomore All-America playing her position. Stacey Nuveman tells of how much of her early career involved playing exclusively SS. I'd be willing to bet that very few Div I college players played their predominant college position when they were 12, maybe even 14 or 15. Doesn't Cat Osterman say that she began pitching at 12?
It occurs to me that several pitchers I know were also pigeon-holed in their youth. One girl was pretty slow so her parents focused on her movement pitches rather than speed. I remember her 11 year old year. She was the smallest kid on the team. She threw maybe 40 mph with a tail-wind. I saw her yesterday. She is easily 5 feet 10 inches tall with very long arms and will possibly reach 6 feet within the year, right as she enters her freshman year of high school. She's about ready to give up pitching however because she gets tagged pretty good. She throws too slow for top level competition. her mechanics are wrong and her parents still believe the secret to her success is the movement pitches. (Don't take me wrong here - movement and location are critical but anybody can hit a 45 mph curve if it comes anywhere near the plate.)
Another pitcher I know was very fast at young ages. Now I'd say she has slightly below average speed. But her movement pitches are great and she has wonderful command. That's thanks to her parents and pitching coaches' recognition that she was not going to be particularly long or bulky as she aged. Early on the focus was to be well rounded. If she maintained speed, fine. In that event, she would be a fast pitcher with great control and movement. She's happens to be an outstanding infielder and, for that matter, outfielder. She also hits the stuffing out of the ball. This kid can play anywhere and does because nobody would ever leave her bat out of the lineup.
I watched some very young team play a tournament recently. They had a very good 10 year old pitcher. But she was kind of small. You could see her parents pacing the sideline as she pitched her way through every game that team played. Her stamina was as big as her parents were small and nervous. She pitched 3 games a day without any apparent drop-off in her performance. She played no other position. To be quite honest, I've seen better pitchers at the same age. This kid is supposed to be a plow horse when it comes to practicing and perhaps that will make all the difference for her. But to me, she is getting such a narrow experience that I believe it is harming her. She'd be better served to pitch on or one and a half games, at least on Saturdays and see some action at other positions. Perhaps her team would suffer as a result. Right now the kid suffers though nobody seems to be aware of that.
If you read this blog much, you have undoubtedly noticed I have a penchant for criticizing the "rotational" style of hitting. Today I'm going to let you in on a little secret. I don;t actually think it is wrong. What I think is wrong is teaching young kids to hit with the hip-trigger method in order to have them record extra-base-hits and homeruns in youth travel ball. What really gets up my ire is when I hear all those myths promulgated in the name of convincing everyone that rotational is the preferred method of hitting, is what all the colleges teach, and is what the Olympic softball players use. Another part of the myth is that all the big name sluggers in MLB use rotational hitting mechanics.
Recently somebody wrote something to me which included a reference to a piece of the rotational mechanic, wondered why I didn't focus on that, and criticized me for not talking more about it. When I replied, the complainer wrote me back repeating all the common myths about rotational hitting and had a link to one Olympian hitting in what appeared to be the rotational manner. I explained to him the error of his ways and I won't repeat all that again here. But suffice it to say that every truly great hitter is a rotational hitter (or appears to be one) on inside pitches and a linear hitter on outside opitches and balls up in the zone.
The Olympic team may very well teach roptational hitting mechanics but head coach Mike Candrea's hitting videos are pretty much all decidely linear in nature. Michele Smith's (she was a great hitter) advice on hitting is decidedly linear. All the major leaguers cited as rotational hitters are to a man disciples of Charley Lau, an anti-rotational voice. And if you examine tape on say Stacey Nuveman or Bustos, you will see them never let their hips fly open as the trigger to their swings unless somebody tries to jam them.
The link the fellow sent me involved a top hitter being jammed. She did look like a rotational hitter on that one. I sent back links to a dozen or more video clips which showed her to be more of a linear hitter than a rotational one and obviously demonstrating her versatility as a hitter.
The same feelings I have about rotational swing mechanics are true of slap hitting though I admit being totally in awe of what a slap hitter can accomplish in a softball game. It annoys me when I'm in the other dugout but I have to admit a grudging admiration for a girl who can chop a ball into the air and then reach first before the ball comes back to Earth.
Those circumstances are pretty rare. There aren't that many girls who can pull that off. Most slap hitters I see merely tap the ball into play. And they can't do much more than that because they have been doing only that since they were 9. The sickest feeling I get as a coach is looking at the on-deck circle and realizing our girl who can only slap is coming to the plate with the bases loaded and us trailing by a run with nobody available on the bench to hit for her. We've never won a game in those circumstances. If only the girl could pull a Mendoza and hit one hard down the line or drive one over the outfielder's heads, then things would be exciting! We have a slapper in the lineup who can drive the ball to all fields. She is always in the lineup. The one who merely dinks the ball into play is not.
A final area of consternation for me on this day is the big time, number 3 or 4 hitter who cannot lay down a bunt. I understand that on most teams, in most circumstances, you don;t want the kid who hits 5 or 600 with power to put one down. But it isn't difficult to imagine circumstances in which you might want her to do exactly that. I have interacted with coaches and parents who say, "We never want Sally to bunt. She's too good of a hitter for that." All I can say in response is "Mendoza."
Every kid who ever steps foot onto a softball diamond ought to learn to play every position on the field excluding one or two. Nobody should ever be limited to just one position. No youth team should play all of its games with one kid at a particular position, especially pitcher or catcher. It benefits everyone if every kid learns what is involved with most positions. The team benefits at times of injuries and illness. The kid benefits when, later in life, she wanst to stop pitching because she stops growing at 4 feet 11 or when her speed peaks at 53 mph. The all-star rec SS benefits by learning to play a little outfield, a little first and maybe seeing some action behind the plate. Our society is far too focused on specialization. Sure, most scientists aren't brauny enough to work a jackhammer. But that doesn't mean they should never leave their computers or laboratories.
Versatility is good.Labels: attitude, coaching, parenting, players, playing time
 
|
|
|
