D.R.I.P.

 The Major League Baseball postseason starts this week with the wild card series and it is my favorite part of the long MLB season. I will admit, I do not watch as much MLB as I used to for various reasons, but I love the postseason.  My favorite baseball at any level is post-season baseball.  Some may say that winning isn’t all that matters... it may not be ALL that matters, but it’s pretty dang important. Why play if you’re not playing to win? Playoff baseball is where winning takes precedence... or should at least.  So what makes playoff baseball the purest form of the game? Win and move on. Survive and advance. Lose and go home. Winning takes execution. Execution takes an approach. Approach takes knowing the situation and it takes awareness. Situational offense is magnified in the post-season, much more so than in the regular season. When it comes down to it, which team executes the fundamentals of the game at a higher level will win. And again, winning is what m...

 As a coach or parent, have you ever seen a fielder who could make outstanding plays when he/she had to range right or left, lay out for a ball, or stick it on the run... but struggle on routine balls right at them? As a player, is that you? If you've seen or experienced this, it probably means one of two things: 1) The player lacks confidence on those balls right at him/her.  2) Dead feet. Maybe it is a combination of both. Here are my thoughts and I am mainly speaking about infielders... on the balls a player has to range for, there is no time to think, just react. Trust and use your athleticism. On balls right at you, many players freeze and lack trust in how they have prepared to make that play. Perhaps they have not prepared to make that play at all and rely fully on the glove being in the right spot at the right time by chance. Fielding a ground ball requires so much more than the ball going in the glove. There is a prep step, footwork, timing, glove presentation, buryin...

 As coaches and parents, we love our players and our children. That is why we do what we do. We care about them and want what is best for them. Because we want what is best for them, we have to be honest with them even if the truth is not what they want to hear-- it's probably what they need to hear.  We have to have honest conversations with our players about their ability level, where they stand, where they need to improve, etc. The best way I have found to approach these situations is to give them honest feedback, but to drive home the point that each player can make a difference... no matter what his/her ability level is or what his/her role is. Intangibles (things that take no exceptional talent) can be a separator, a difference maker. I have coached many teams in which we had a lot of players with the same ability level. They threw the same, they fielded the same, they hit the same, they had similar speed. That is not a bad thing, but there are only so many spots in a li...