- Joined
- Aug 26, 2011
- Messages
- 87,839
- Reaction Score
- 328,503
Nice read... same sentiment as many basketball/football coaches.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/...er=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 (edited out paragraph breaks for space)
>>In the 40 years that Jack Thomson has been coaching high school baseball, he has seen a noticeable rise in the talent of players trying out for his team. They scorch line drives, they hurl blazing fastballs. But something is often missing. “They can’t play catch,” said Thomson, a coach in California, one of the more fertile grounds for future major leaguers. “They’re bad at it. You’d be surprised how bad it looks. We have to teach them how to play catch.” In modern youth baseball, where the culture has been transformed by the pursuit of the holy grail, a college athletic scholarship, the fundamentals are falling by the wayside in favor of flashier skills like big-league-style hitting and pitching.<<
>>At Tufts University, a Division III power in New England, Coach John Casey gathers his new players on the first day of practice and makes this announcement: “You’re no longer in the showcase world of display, display, display. We play baseball here — hit the cutoff man, do the little things that win games.” Casey, the former president of the American Baseball Coaches Association, sometimes adds: “You have been hitting off a tee in an indoor cage way too much. You could teach a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette to hit a baseball off a tee.”<<
@kris1
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/01/...er=rss&emc=rss&smid=tw-nytimes&smtyp=cur&_r=0 (edited out paragraph breaks for space)
>>In the 40 years that Jack Thomson has been coaching high school baseball, he has seen a noticeable rise in the talent of players trying out for his team. They scorch line drives, they hurl blazing fastballs. But something is often missing. “They can’t play catch,” said Thomson, a coach in California, one of the more fertile grounds for future major leaguers. “They’re bad at it. You’d be surprised how bad it looks. We have to teach them how to play catch.” In modern youth baseball, where the culture has been transformed by the pursuit of the holy grail, a college athletic scholarship, the fundamentals are falling by the wayside in favor of flashier skills like big-league-style hitting and pitching.<<
>>At Tufts University, a Division III power in New England, Coach John Casey gathers his new players on the first day of practice and makes this announcement: “You’re no longer in the showcase world of display, display, display. We play baseball here — hit the cutoff man, do the little things that win games.” Casey, the former president of the American Baseball Coaches Association, sometimes adds: “You have been hitting off a tee in an indoor cage way too much. You could teach a chimpanzee smoking a cigarette to hit a baseball off a tee.”<<
@kris1
