PREPARATION - Practice Is What Makes You Better

Baseball is a game that requires acute physical skill performed with controlled aggression. That sounds pretty but it’s not so easy. Consider that hitting and fielding are reactive and you begin to understand why failure is such a frequent component in baseball.

There is certainly much to be learned from playing games, but players do not improve their skills during competition. Practice is where players get better and the game is the place and time to execute those embellished skills.

Baseball is a unique sport in that effort can often be an enemy. You can’t take the field with a football mentality and say “I’m going to swing and throw harder than ever before.” Your bat speed and barrel accuracy will diminish and your velocity, command and feel of your pitches will be lost. Because the sport requires such fine skills, players must relax to attain optimum performance. And in order to relax, the player must feel prepared.

Preparation is what builds confidence and playing confident is what breeds success. Taking ground ball after ground ball allows the infielder, for example, to realistically think, “I want the next ball hit to me.” Coaches can preach this simple ideology to players and it is accurate in words, but for the player to really want the ball hit to him, he has to believe he’s prepared to catch it void of any doubt. To attain that true confidence, a player must feel prepared through practice. That will allow him to relax and play offensively.

In today’s youth game, players compete in 50 … 75 … even 100 games in a season. When do they have the opportunity to practice? If a bad habit creeps into their swing or pitching delivery, when do they have the chance to rebuild good habits? How can they really eliminate weaknesses in their personal game? If a catcher, for example, struggles with his footwork and release time throwing to second base at the start of a season and plays 60 games, it will remain a weakness at the end of the season. Not only that, but he will have spent 60 games reinforcing bad habits (or poor technique) along the way.

A baseball custom that has evolved for today’s player is winter training. They spend the months leading up to the season to refine their fundamentals. And that’s the lion share of their training for the baseball year. But as most would agree, things change when the player encounters game competition. Emotions factor into the equation and often cause disruption. That balanced swing or fluid pitching delivery is not reminiscent of how they executed in a controlled environment. Rather than ironing out wrinkles in practice, they are thrown back into the next game with the hopes that things will work themselves out. Typically, they don’t and this is how extended slumps, struggles and battered confidence evolve.

Many will argue that game experience develops instinct. That’s a fair argument, but can this generation of players really be labeled as instinctive? Absolutely not and much of it is not their fault. The adults run the game … “Move here, throw this pitch, run on this pitch, bunt, stay, go …” In many cases, players are mere puppets on a field of play orchestrated by adults. That doesn’t allow instinct to develop. In fact, it suffocates it.

If a player competes with a team that rarely practices and packs the game schedule, he must take it upon himself to practice. Don’t depend on anyone else to get you better. You have to take responsibility for your own career. Set up a tee in the basement, take ground balls from your father or brother, run sprints in the backyard and throw to your buddy. The residual impact will be polished skills, consistency, and above all, confidence. It is only then you’ll be able to relax on the baseball field and perform at your very best.