Full Count Baseball

Today I had the pleasure of being part of something special with my team. We didn’t win a championship, but we did play in a tournament this weekend where there was a championship at stake. As a coach, nothing gratifies you more than watching your team perform up to and beyond their capabilities. Sometimes little victories are more than big victories. We beat one of the best pitchers we’ve faced this season.

So we’ve made it through the long winter, the cold spring, the nice weather and finally…the dog days are upon us. By now you have undoubtedly gone through the many phases of baseball-the highs, the lows and the in-betweens. The at-bats are piling up and you are getting a good indication of how your season will end up. It is my wish that all are having a great season.

Slumps. You hate them, but sooner or later everyone has one (or two). Before I get into them, I want to discuss different hitting philosophies out there in regards to pitch selection. The big league approach, “See as many pitches as you can, make the pitcher work,” is a great one. Then there’s the swing at the first pitch. Then there’s the take the first pitch every at-bat approach. There are several to choose from. When a slump occurs, pitch selection becomes very important.

Here is an a-ha moment if I ever had one. I’m sitting around minding my own business, when a thought creeps into my head. “You know,” I say to myself, “The swing happens so fast, you don’t have time to think about. It is all done by muscle memory!” I am…master of the obvious. That’s why I get paid the big bucks, to figure these things out that nobody else can. It lends itself back to my last blog where on the bottom of the article I mentioned a few drills to work on. Boring, yet effective.

You see it all throughout baseball, hitters get hot and hitters slump. Coaches invariably change their lineup according to who’s hot and who’s not. It sounds logical in the major leagues because they have 162 games to get out of their funk. To the majority of us, we have only several games to accomplish this.

Coaches play an important role in the development of their players, both physically and psychologically. The re-arrangement or re-assignment in the batting order is done to benefit the team, regardless of the psychological stress this may impose on the player.

Here’s hoping you all had a chance to watch The Masters this weekend. Golf is such mentally challenging sport only the strongest willed survives. You can look at every golfer’s swing and say they are perfect. What differentiates them? Their mind. Baseball is no different. It is not enough to have talent. You need to know how to not only handle failure, but success as well. Over-confidence can be as big a problem as lack of confidence (As Tiger proved over the weekend). Know your strengths and weaknesses. Understand in what situations you need to apply them and how.