Here’s a situation that is common in youth baseball games. The coach is sitting on a bucket outside his dugout calling every single pitch. The coach may even be yelling at the pitcher for throwing the wrong pitch or shaking off the coach.
While this approach has the potential to make the coach look really smart, there’s a problem. Looking really smart is not the purpose of youth baseball. The purpose of youth baseball is to teach the sport to kids. If a coach does all the thinking for the players then the players don’t develop, they become robots and this limits their usefulness at future levels of the sport.
Before I outline the rest of the post, I’ll make a statement: youth catchers should call pitches. This should start with nine year olds when the kids are just starting to pitch and have one really bad pitch and it should continue from that point on.
This post will cover four ideas on how to implement this:
1. In batting cages and pitching practice set up some rules: These practices are a great time to set up approaches to different batting situations. For example with older pitchers we only attempt breaking balls when the count is 2-2, 1-2, or 0-2. We NEVER attempt a breaking ball when there are three balls. Other rules are things like if the batter stands here, we pitch here. If we have three balls then the next pitch needs to be down the middle and we’ll trust our defense to get the out. Things like this.
2. Set up some rules for situations: The catcher has to consider the whole field when calling pitches. For example, when there are runners on second and third we don’t need a powerful hit to the outfield so we want to avoid that pitch down the middle.
3. Set up rules for individual pitchers: All pitchers have strengths and weaknesses. Some have great command of their two-seam and lousy command of their change ups. We adjust our “rules” to the strengths of those players.
4. We don’t learn if we don’t make mistakes! You have to let young players make mistakes with this, it’s the only way they learn! After the mistake coach them through it and make it a learning opportunity to make them better!
