As I wrote yesterday, I caught much of Saturday’s practice. While the team was warming up along the right field line, I overheard Wingnuts’ pitching coach Luke Robertson say, “Do everything with a purpose.” He said this several times, which really struck me as all the team was doing was stretching and playing light catch.
…there is an old baseball term called ‘giving away an at bat’, which basically means losing your focus. this can happen late in a lopsided game when you’ve had a rough night at the plate, or it can just be a simple break of concentration. either way, the fact that ‘doing everything with a purpose’ was something of a mantra on saturday is a great sign. if something as simple as longtoss is taken seriously, you can bet that there won’t be many at bats ‘given away’ this summer…
While doing some work in the radio booth this afternoon, I saw manager Kash Beauchamp running drills on pop flies. After one of the outfielders caught one, I could hear Kash shouting something along the lines of, ‘call for it’. The interesting thing was that the outfielder actually did call for the ball, but Kash wanted to make sure he had called loud enough so that the rest of the fielders could hear, thus preventing a collision, which are all too common on popups
…you have to be excited by this attitude from the coaching staff. it is obvious that kash wants to make sure the ‘little things’ are done perfectly, which is a major trademark of a winning ballclub. these are the types of things that players might find tedious, but payoff big time in the longrun. who knows, maybe there will be a situation during a crucial game in august in which three players converge on a short flyball. someone will take charge, and the play will be made, and we’ll think back to this practice…
