On Thursdays and Fridays, I suit up in a baseball uni and run out to the communal ground to hit fungoes to the players in the baseball club. The students like to see me dressed up and don’t hesitate to ask for my hat or my pants. Not sure what they have in mind with the latter request.
I enjoy helping out, and I don’t do much actual coaching as I am not the manager or even an official coach. I offer encouragement, and I see the players doing things I don’t like or agree with, but I only speak up if something is truly awful or wrong.
They have to run anywhere from one to five miles before practice, and the coaches typically run with them. I say that I’m grading papers or helping students to duck out of that, but I go home and change clothes and then jog to school (almost a mile) so that I show up sweaty like everyone else.
They do some very strange drills, like fielding ground balls with a rubber tire strapped to each infielder’s back, pushing said tires back and forth across the ground after fielding, playing leap frog, and carrying each other on piggyback across the ground. The point is to get exhausted, and they succeed at that every day.
The players are out there until 7:30 or 8:00 every night, and I have never stayed that late, but I have passed by on my bike and observed them in the fourth hour of practice. About half of all that time is spent doing nothing, screwing around, or “preparing” for the next activity. “Preparing” consists of pushing dirt around with a wooden stick and playing grab-ass until the coach yells at them to get back to work.
The other half of the time, they are swinging bats and fielding balls, but it’s done without much energy or enthusiasm. I can’t blame them, I wouldn’t want to move if I had to run three miles and do a hundred sit-ups before practice, either.
Certainly not how I would use practice time, but I don’t think many high school kids would like my idea of good use of practice time. I just show up, hit fungoes, and run back home in time to catch the pro games on TV.
Today, we couldn’t use the deeper reaches of the outfield because some seniors were practicing their cheers for Sports Day coming up in a few weeks. Batting practice offered a familiar scene - ten outfielders clumped together in three groups, standing back on their heels and arguing over whose turn it was to chase the ball that just went by.
I decided to walk out there and teach them what I think position players should be doing during BP. It’s not a difficult concept and very easy to employ if you decide you want to become a better player.
If you stand at your position every day and watch a couple hundred balls coming off the bat, you begin to build a library of batted balls in your mind. If you’re a smart bear, you’re paying attention and acting like it’s a game situation on every swing, expecting the ball to come to you and moving to the ball when it is hit.
Do this ten thousand times over the course of a season, and you are bound to have sharper instincts. You begin to recognize which swings produce which kinds of batted balls to the point that you know where it’s going to be hit before it’s hit. We’re talking millionths of a second before the ball is struck, but that’s all the time you need to turn a double into an out in the outfield.
It’s conceivable that this instinct could come about after enough time observing passively in the field, but putting yourself in game situations over and over again builds good habits and you’ll get that instinct more quickly.
I suggest that kids focus for five consecutive pitches and take two pitches off, just like a work week. I still think it’s possible to concentrate more, but 5-2 is better than pounding on your cup, staring at the sky, picking dandelions, or talking about who you’re taking to the Prom.
I told all of this to each group and felt that two players understood it. When those seniors stopped their cheering practice, the outfield opened up and I got those same two players for fungoes. Reading a fly ball off a fungo bat is much different than studying BP, but excuses aside, I hit them a whole bucket of balls and they couldn’t have caught a cold.
I walked out there to help them collect the balls when some seniors rode by on their mamacharis. The outfielders snapped to attention, doffed their caps, and bowed to the boys. I recognized them as former baseball club members who, according to custom, “retired” from the club after the summer to focus on getting a job or getting into college.
How long do you have to call them ’superior’ and take off your hat for them?” I asked the outfielders.
“They will always be our superiors,” they said, almost in unison.
“So you’re at a party in 50 years, and you’re still going to call him ’superior’?”
“That’s right, ’superior.’ Say, Mac, do you like boobs?”
I should interject here and explain that the end of the word “superior” and the end of one of the words for “breasts” is the same. So this wasn’t as weird a segway as it seems.
The manager (a sophomore girl) is standing right here, you shouldn’t say stuff like that in front of girls,” I said.
“Oh, sorry. Well, do you like boobs?” the boy persisted.
“I’m not going to answer that.”
“OK. Mac, why isn’t there polygamy in Japan?”
Now things were getting weird. First of all, I didn’t understand what the kid was saying the first time he said it. When I asked him to break down the word for me, I got it: one-husband-many-wife-system. Technically polygyny, but I wasn’t prepared to split hairs with this guy.
Sheesh, kid, I don’t know. Why do you ask?”
“Well, I wanted to know. I heard that polygamy is OK in Africa and wondered why it isn’t anywhere else.”
“…”
That’s me scratchin’ my melon.
Where did you hear that?”
“Junior high world history, I think.”
“Well, what makes you think I would know the answer to that?”
“I don’t know. I just think about this kind of stuff when I’m out here in the outfield.”
So much for my message getting through. I told him that I thought the courage to ask questions was a great trait as a person, but that letting the mind wander in the outfield was not a characteristic becoming a good outfielder.
This is why I keep going to school.
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