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Flip A Coin
by Dave
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The following bit of minutiae is not posted merely for entertainment value nor because your intrepid author has nothing of value to say this fine day. The issue concerns a matter of huge importance in somewhat limited circumstances. A question regarding it was posed at a very important coaches seminar recently and answered by a Hall of Fame college coach. It may be a trivial point but I believe that, like many fastpitch softball issues, it is worthy of your concern and careful consideration. You should not merely flip a coin and determine your choice based on chance. The question concerns the choice of "home or away."
Recently, at a coaching seminar, a travel ball coach asked a college coach for his opinion regarding the choice of home or away when a team wins the pre-game conference coin toss. The college coach replied that he would always, absotively, posalutely, always, always always choose home. I suppose it is relatively easy to guess at what his motivation might be. It is also easy to follow suit. But I'm going to have to disagree with this coach despite his being far more well seasoned than I.
In football, the winner of the coin toss almost always chooses to receive the kickoff. I say almost always because under certain weather conditions, it is more advantageous to be able to choose the side of the field you have to defend in which quarter of the game. Each team gets basically the same number of posessions. Each team gets basically the same number of quarters defending each side of the field. But given strong winds in a certain direction, sometimes teams want to be pointed away from the wind in the final quarter. So, when they win the toss, they choose to trade the privilege of receiving the opening kickoff and being on offense for the ability to have the wind at their backs in the final quarter of the game. Those are rare circumstances but they do happen enough to take note of them. The rest of the time, the "winner" says, "I'll take my chances to score first."
In baseball and softball, the most frequent choice in the home vs. away debate is home. We won the toss and we would like to bat last so that if the game is tied in the final inning, we at least have the opportunity to walk off with the win. I do not recall many instances in either baseball or softball in which the winner of the toss has chosen to be "visitor." But think about this, when comparing football and softball, why does the football coin toss winner always elect to go on offense first while the softball winner chooses to play defense?
Of course, this issue does not show itself in all types of play. In rec league, it is customary for the schedule to show home and away teams except, possibly, in the playoffs. In high school, with limited exceptions, the home team is always, well, the home team. In high school playoff tournaments, generally there is a seeding and the better seed is the home team or has the choice of being home or away - and I do not recall any teams choosing away although it probably has merely escaped my notice. A similar situation occurs with college ball. The home team is the home team except for those early season tournaments in warm climates or, presumably the post-season tourneys. Even in travel ball, elimination play is generally conducted in accordance with seedings. Preliminary rounds are a different story, of course. So I offer up this analysis for anyone who must make a choice after winning a coin toss, be they rec contenders, high school or college teams in some sort of tourney, or travel ball teams on the first day of play.
The first consideration of batting or fielding first involves the football analogy. Footballers almost always choose to go on offense first because the first team to strike is in a better position than its opponent and because playing ahead opens opportunities while playing from behind limits your game plan. It is my belief that while the two games are decidedly different, this aspect, for the most part, holds true in both.
If you are about to decide whether to have your runner at first base steal, the decision will be different if you are ahead by 4 runs than if you are trailing by the same amount. The fact is, when you are winning, you can and should be more aggressive, particularly on the bases. You get to force the play and put pressure on the defense to get you out. Most errors occur under pressure, ergo, you force errors more when you lead than when you are behind. When you are up first and score, you have opportunies to steal or try to advance runners on hits. When you are behind, you may not have that runner steal. You may not try to score from second on a basehit to right. &nb sp; You are playing more conservatively.
Secondly, when a team gets out in front of another, the objective percentage of winning vs. losing tells us that the team which scores first wins more often than not. I can say nothing to convince you of my "fact" on this so please check it out for yourself. If I am wrong, I suppose you can chuck the rest of this. But I'm almost positive I have it right. The friend who wrote me with the issue pointed out to the coach who answered it that his team won at a ratio of 4:1 when leading after 1 inning and lost at a rate of 1:3 when losing after one inning. Of course, "after one inning" assumes both the home and away team have batted. But the inference is clear. Getting off the schnied helps a team to win.
To me, the getting-off-the-schnied argument is fairly powerful but I can see how it can be refuted by what I noted about both teams getting up by the "end of the first inning." That's OK with me - I have other arguments.
In games in which there is a "drop dead" time limit, being the first to bat has other advantages. For example, a team which is up first generally uses its pitchers less than the home team. If they are batting when the ump's alarm goes off, their pitcher has seen about one less inning. If they are in the field, she has again seen about one less inning. In the tournament game in which a team may play as many as 5 games in a day, this has huge advantages. You could theoretically require 5 less inning to be pitched in one day!
Also, if a team loses a full-length game not ending with a home team walkoff, it usually doesn't have to play the bottom of the 7th, ergo, one less inning pitched. The home team has to pitch to seven sides, 21 outs, regardless. And the visiting team gets 3 more at bats for its hitters which is usually a good thing in a game where no amount of batting practice can replace facing real, live pitching.
In addition to the benefits of batting more and pitching less, I don't know about you but there are two realities of tournament ball which often irritate me. The first one is that every team I have ever been associated with carries the same curse - the first game of the day curse. That does not mean we play poorly our first game of the day. It means we always play the very first game of the day. Typically, that is scheduled for something like 8, 8:30, or 9:00. We almost always have our kids show up one hour to one and a half hours before our first game. Many of our tournaments are about one hour's drive from most kid's homes. So on the typical prelim day, that means everybody has to roll out of bed by about 5:00 am or earlier, before my pet rooster or his friend the sun awaken!
When it is finally time for the umpire to exclaim, "play ball," sometimes more than half our team has fallen back to sleep. I'd rather that we be woken up by some absurd cheer, the ump exclaiming "strike" or some other such happening while we are in the dugout rather than by a screaming grounder going through our SS', CF's, or both's legs. I'd rather get in the mood to play a long day of defensive softball while watching somebody else make errors rather than my team.
Many tournaments give teams travelling from far a one game hiatus, allowing for an additional hour or so of beauty sleep. But most everybody has to play at 8:00 am from time to time. Maybe this is a weak argument for batting first but the second reality is indisputable. In tournaments, teams often play back to back games with little time in between.
We always warm up at least two pitchers, usually all of our pitchers, before the first game of the day. But by the end of that game, the kid who is starting game 2 has generally gotten cold and needs to throw at least a bit before heading into the circle. We often counteract this problem by having the starter for game 2 relieve at the end of game 1 but sometimes that is just not possible. And, if given about 5 minutes for the top half of the first, we can usually have our starter good to go by the bottom half of the inning.
The final reason to choose to bat first after winning the coin toss is much more subtle. For this item, I need to use anecdotal evidence. I realized the importance of the issue one game as I sat in the dugout with the rest of the team and our game "captains" came back with hunched shoulders and downtrodden expressions. The girl who had called the toss for this game as well as the previous two games said sadly, "I lost again. I guess I'm no good at this. We're up first."
For whatever reason, the girl actually felt like their were winners and losers on the coin toss. Sure, there are in absloute terms but it should not make such an impact on a kid. Who really cares? Does the winning team start jumping about and cheering that they actually won something after winning the coin toss and chose to be home? No, they just yell to their teammates that "we're in the field first!" Everybody seems to choose to be home team. If you choose always to bat first, your team will become accustomed to it and never consider themselves to be "losers" of any kind merely because they lost the coin toss. Instead, they'll probably be amused about the fact that when they win the toss, they bat first and when they lose it, they bat first. Yes, some teams, especially those that see things the same way as I do, will choose to hit first. But most of the time, your team will be up to bat at the beginning of its games. And if that doesn't work for ya, you can shoot me.Labels: attitude, game strategy, relaxation
 
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