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Alone With Your Thoughts In The Outfield
by Dave
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
It is often said of softball players, "if you can hit, they'll find a place for you." Most often the "place" they find is in the outfield. Yet, especially on youth teams, very little is done to teach players outfielding skills. This is a tragedy waiting to happen especially if it happens to be you who the team has "found a place for" in the outfield.
The other day I watched a 14U state championship game. One team nearly mercied the other because they caught a couple breaks and their pitcher was rolling along pretty good. But just past the midway point of the game she began to get tired since it was very hot and humid that night. The other team began timing her pitches well and making solid contact. At first this didn't amount to much as the infielders made some great plays. Then the trailing team began hitting the ball into the outfield. Unfortunately for the team in the lead, their outfielders were very poor. One outfielder misjudged four balls over three innings and that allowed the other team to tie the game and eventually go on to win it.
Four balls into the outfield made all the difference in what ended in a 10-9 loss. I was happy for the winning team who never gave up and felt badly for the losing team because they had played so hard for 7 innings, only to lose. But I felt even worse for the girl in the outfield who made the bad plays because undoubtedly she blamed herself for her team's loss. I suspect it wasn't really her fault. Her judgement was so bad on balls just over her head that I'm positive her team did not give her the right kind of training. They put her in the lineup because she is generally a good player and probably a good hitter but they did little to prepare her for the position. I know. I've been there myself.
If you are a solid hitter but your defensive skills are not particularly sharp, you may want to work on the skills which make you adequate in the outfield before some coach puts you there with little or no preparation. You will need to work on different kinds of fielding and throwing skills and you'll need a slightly different perspective on situational plays. But you can work on these with some help from your friends and family.
Fielding
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of moving from the infield to the outfield is judging fly balls and line drives. Often outfield practice is limited to a bunch of girls shagging flies 15 minutes or half an hour once a week or every other week. The only other practice is during live hitting drills. But that's just not enough. Good high school and college programs realize how different and important judging balls in the outfield is, so they spend far more time working outfielders.
Outfielding is different from other positions because you have to really run for balls. If you are like most other human beings, when you run, your head bobs up and down. If your head is bobbing up and down, your eyes are constantly moving. If you try to judge where a ball is going while your eyes are jerking up and down, you are fighting a losing battle. That is the first thing you need to correct.
Your natural head bobbing can be overcome with experience and some running drills. Basically, the more you do of the right kind of running, the less your head bobs. Simply running miles and miles on a track or in the street does not do enough to correct this. Any running helps but you really need to run on outfield grass which is usually slightly uneven. You don't need to run miles and miles but you do need to run while focusing your eyes on objects. If you have a practice field near you with a street nearby, try running while focusing on the cars. If you don't have a road near the field, try a little bird watching during your runs. In any event, run while focusing your eyes on objects whether they are moving or not. This will train you to run while holding your head as still as possible. Over time, your running mechanics will correct themselves quite easily to keep your head still. This aspect of working out for the outfield will have the biggest single impact on your defensive game - don't ignore it.
Practicing the judgment on hit balls is a lot like batting practice. The more you get of it, the better you will be able to judge trajectory, speed, and spin. You need to find someone bigger and stronger than the girls in your league to hit you balls. If you have a big brother who plays baseball or a big sister who plays softball at a good level, enlist his or her help. The idea here is to have someone who can hit the ball over your head. You don't want a bunch of ground ball practice. You're looking for trajectory practice. You're training your eyes for hard hit balls.
Baseballs can be hit a lot harder than softballs. They're also harder to judge because they are smaller and usually darker, especially if they are dirty. So you may want to try practicing with them. If you do, I suggest using a fungo bat because it is far easier to hit airborn balls with a fungo than with a conventional baseball bat. You are working at training your eyes as much as anything else so don't get frustrated if your practice assistant is hitting balls way over your head or drilling line drives you have no hope of catching. This is good for you. Challenge the hitter to hit the ball past you in the air. Make a game of it. Count how many balls your big brother or sister has hit past you and how many you catch. Half an hour of doing this is probably the limit for the hitter and should be sufficient for you. But keep in mind that I'm assuming you and you alone are fielding the balls. In a good half an hour of shagging flies, you can probably field over one hundred. Make sure to bring a bag of balls. You're not working on your throws. You don't want to waste your valuable practice time with the batter retrieving the ball.
Finally your practice of shagging flies should be in as many different sun fields as possible. You want to make sure to work with the sun in and out of your line of sight, on mostly and partly cloudy days, with crystal clear "high sky" days, etc. If you can practice under the lights, great. Balls appear very different in the various sky and lighting conditions. Practice shagging flys in as many different conditions as possible. If your team plays under the lights, see if you can stay after a game one night and shag some flies.
Real speed may be God-given but raw speed does not make the outfielder. If you watch two outfielders of equal speed play centerfield, I think you will quickly see that one seems to get to the ball a lot faster than the other. And more importantly, the better outfielder is in better position when she makes a catch. This is due to a couple of things. First off, the better outfielder has quicker judgement which comes from lots of experience shagging flies. Secondly, she makes a point of getting to the spot where the ball is hit as quickly as possible. She does not drift to the catch spot so as to time her arrival with the arrival of the ball. This is the most common mistake newly minted outfielders make. Get to the spot, position your body, make the catch. Don't be casual or lazy.
Outfield speed comes with confidence of knowing where balls are going. We've covered the need to shag as many flys as possible in order to gain experience at judging balls. But there is another consideration. The moment the ball is hit, you need to use your eyes first, your brain second and your feet last. Put simply, before you can move to the ball, you need to assess where it is going. Balls hit far to your right or left are easy to assess. This is because you get a good view of the trajectory immediately. Balls hit more closely to your position are more difficult. You must hesitate before moving your feet because there is nothing worse in the outfield than making the wrong move first. We've all seen outfielders turn one way, then the other, sometimes even back to the original position. This happens when an outfielder is said to misjudge the ball. But I think of it as the outfielder moving before she knows where the ball is going. We all like to get a jump but jumping the wrong way costs you double because you not only have to switch direction but you also have to make up the lost ground from moving in the wrong direction first. This often manifests itself when an outfielder takes a step in on a ball destined to go over her head. The last thing you want to do is step in first. See first, think, then move. As you gain more practice, you will be a better judge and the moment of seeing then thinking will become shorter and shorter. If you are a beginning outfielder, take your time judging balls.
Here's one final thought on fielding hit balls in the outfield. Remember that if you are in left, a ball hit by a righty probably has top spin on it while one hit by a lefty most likely has side spin towards the line. The opposite is true of rightfield. And in center, most balls are either knuckled or have top spin. Particularly when judging balls which drop in front of you, you need to consider this as you approach to make your play. You've practiced a lot of shagging balls in your practices but real game situations are different. Balls are hit a lot harder in games because the pitcher is throwing harder. You need to always be mindful of potentially bad spins which end up being bad hops which end up being balls getting past you and running to the fence.
Throwing
Outfielders generally make fewer throws per game than infielders but their throws are more varied. You may have plenty of the typical throws where you retrieve a pop-up or a base hit and simply get the ball in to the infield. But you may also have to make throws to home on sac flys at a moment's notice. You need to practice throwing in close like the infielders do (60 feet) but you also have to practice making longer throws (at least 60-100 feet).
It alwasy amazes me to see teams coming out to the field where the outfielders stand next to each other warming up by throwing with bench players on the sideline. They stand 40 - 60 feet apart and throw back and forth like an infielder warming up. Between innings, it is absolutely critical for an outfielder to throw from a good distance of 60 - 100 feet. Throwing long distance tends to lengthen the muscles of the arm and stretch the tendons and ligaments. If the first time you throw the ball 140 feet is in the seventh inning, chances are pretty good you are going to make a bad throw. You may even injure yourself. Of all the arm injuries I have seen over many years, most involve longer throws. Please make a habit of practicing making long throws and, before and during games, make at least a couple of long throws.
When you are playing outfield there is one thing more important than the strength or conditioning of your arm. Your footwork is critical to making good throws. This is intertwined with judging the ball well and getting to the point of the catch quickly. I'm not going to go over proper body position here as we'll have to cover that another time. But you need to be moving towards your target at the moment you catch the ball. In order to do this you simply must get there before the ball does. If you do this the fotwork will come easily. The main difference between making a throw from the infield vs. the outfield is you have to throw a longer distance. In order to throw a longer distance, you need to take a good step. So an outfielder must catch the ball right at her head while moving towards her intended target, take a good step and throw.
Finally, it is absolutely imperative that you work on hitting the cutoff. A few weeks ago I watched a major league baseball game in which Vladimir Guerrero caught a ball on the warning track in right field and threw it all the way to third base on a fly. The game announcers marvelled at how strong an arm Vlad has. That's 100 yards, 300 feet! I agree, he has a strong arm. But that was a terrible play. The runner on second tagged up and Vlad had no chance to get him out at third. He threw the ball all the way to third on a fly which means it had a looping trajectory. This allowed the runner on first to move up to second. Huge mistake. Huge!
When throwing a ball in, you must keep the trajectory low. The best outfielders are not the ones with the strongest arms. They are the ones with strong, accurate throws with low trajectory. Had Vlad's throw been lower and on-target, an infielder would have been able to cut it off and throw out the runner moving from first to second.
When you are throwing from the outfield to a cutoff person, you must throw the ball where the cutoff person's head should be. I say this in that manner because sometimes cutoff people are out of position. If the cutoff person is out of position and you throw the ball where she should be, chances are good she'll adjust and make the catch if she needs to. To explain what I mean, let's say you are making a throw to home on a base hit or fly ball and the cutoff person is supposed to be between you and home. If she is not lined up properly with the catcher but you throw towards home intending to hit the spot where the cutoff person whould be, it will probably only take her three steps to move and catch the ball. If a cutoff person is out of position and you throw the ball where she is but she misses it, most likely there will not be a fielder behind her to grab it in time to make any play. I say you should throw at head level because, if the ball is allowed to go through, for example, to the catcher, hitting the spot where the cutoff's head should be results in a one bounce hop to the catcher. Finally, when you throw at head level, the ball actually gets there faster than if you use all your might to try to make it on a fly.
In addition to making good strong throws to cutoffs, you need to always be cognizant of game situations. I was watching another game recently where there were runners on second and third with one out in the bottom of the last with the batting team down a run. A fly ball was hit right down the third base line. If you had been that leftfielder under those circumstances and that ball had drifted foul, the right thing would be to drop it and not try to be the hero making the throw to home to nail the runner. In the game I was watching, the ball was fair and the fielder caught it. The runner from third tagged and went to score. The outfielder had a "great arm" and whipped the ball 5 feet over the catcher's head! The runner from second who was also tagging on the play ended up scoring on the overthrow. Ballgame over. Home team wins. Had that leftfielder made the throw at head level to the cutoff near third, I'm willing to bet the throw would have nailed the girl tagging from second. In fact, it might have gotten her before the tying run scored! Ballgame over. Visiting team wins.
As Tom Hanks once said in "A League of Their Own," "you really need to practice hitting the cutoff before next season."
Other Considerations
An outfielder can find herself not fielding a ball for an entire game, perhaps several consecutive games. Yet frequently after a long period of inactivity, often the one ball she gets is the most important one of a game or tournament. If that outfielder is you, you've just got to be ready in mind, body and soul.
It is difficult to keep your whits about you while counting the grass blades or dodging bees in the outfield. You've got to find ways to keep your mind and body active. One exercise I suggest is formulating a book on the hitters. You should keep track of who is hitting anyways but you might try analyzing her swing and judging where you think she is going to hit the ball based on that. You want to create a little knowledge base in your head of which kind of hitters tend to hit the ball to you. And doing this during a game keeps your mind active. Whatever you do, don't let yourself fall asleep. This is invariably when the ball gets hit to you!
When you are out there in left patiently peforming your mental exercises, watching the pitcher throw ball after ball or striking everyone out, you tend to get very tense whether you know it or not. You need to do some jogging and sprinting every couple of pitches in order to keep yourself loose. Move your arms around. Stretch. At least after walks and strike outs you need to do something to do some running to keep your legs moving. At the beginning of every inning, you run out to your position which loosens you up. The last thing you want to do is wait until two outs, bases loaded, and a 3-2 count to run again. Do some stretches and short runs while you are hanging out there in the outfield waiting for your next chance to get up to bat.
Conclusion
If you are one of those good hitters teams will find a place for, you can pretty much figure your home will be in the outfield. Make the best of it. Become as good a fielder as you possibly can. College scouts need to find good hitting outfielders too. And they are more apt to take one with decent to good defensive skills. Run in the field to calm your head. Shag lots of flies, on your own time if needs be. Work on throwing outfielder throws. Then keep your mind awake and your body loose. You never know when the ball is going to be hit to you or ... when those college scouts might show up.
 
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