Chimps and Tees

The New York Times had an interesting page 1 story yesterday (Sunday):  “They Can Hit a Ball 400 Feet.  But Play Catch?  That’s Tricky.”  It seems that college baseball coaches are coming across ever-more players who can hit the ball or throw the ball hard and little else; all the fundamentals that used to mark the college-ready player are in eclipse.  How come?

According to the story, it’s the fault of travel ball and parents’ quest for the Holy Grail of an athletic scholarship.  Softball gets mentioned in passing, and I’m guilty as charged.  The story notes that parents will send their athletes off to see the hitting or pitching coach, and that’s it.  The head baseball coach at Tufts is so aggravated he feels like telling new players, “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.”  Or a 12-inch softball.

Players, of course, swear by private lessons.  As one college-bound pitcher put it, “There is only so much the average dad can teach a kid.”  For me, that was getting my daughter to lay off of sliders down and away and to stop fielding grounders off her front foot.  I don’t know what the hitting coach taught her all those years—the 22-year old had the same vicious swing as the 14-year old and the 4-year old, for that matter.  But I do know what travel-coach Harry did.

Harry used to be the head softball coach at an area girls’ Catholic high school that had; teaching was in his blood.  All fall and winter of Clare’s sophomore year of high school he worked with her before or after regular Sunday practice: Position your body like this, hold the ball here to make your throws.  Back and forth they went, month after month.  I think Clare came to hate Harry nearly as much as she did me all those times I’d ask her after she went fishing for an outside pitch, “And exactly where would that’ve gone had you managed to get your bat it?”  Clare played a beautiful second base her last two years of high school.

.And when the college coach said she didn’t need a second baseman but a right fielder, Clare volunteered, not because she wanted to learn a new position but because she realized a complete ballplayer plays the field as well as hits.