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Throwing It Around
by Dave
Friday, June 02, 2006
Have you ever been plowing through a tournament, beating down every team you face, when all of a sudden the wheels just seem to pop off your team's cart? One bad play leads to the next. You end up run ruled after three or four innings by what you thought was just an average team. You sized them up earlier in the day and there is no reason they should have been able to beat you this badly. These are hard games to watch and even harder to coach.
It starts with one bad play and all of a sudden everything seems to go wrong. Your best fielders cannot pick up the ball. Nobody can throw. Nobody can catch. Your pitcher can't find the strike zone. That plate umpire seems to have it in for your team, shrinking the strike zone on every pitch when you're in the field and broadening it when you're at bat. Girls who always get hits stand there looking at strike three down the middle of the plate. No matter what advice you give your team, they just can't seem to get it back together. You can't wait to get this one over with. Finally it's over so you pack up the car and prepare for the long ride home wondering why things went so badly.
During the drive home you wonder what the heck can you do in practice to put humpty dumpty back together again. Hopefully your next tournament will be better. Hopefully the teams you face won't be as good as that team was. But before you get despondent about your girls' inability to play on the level of the competition, think back to what started off this downward spiral of your otherwise pretty good team.
Most of the time the really bad games begin with something innocuous like a base on balls with two outs. The girl who walked steals and your catcher throws the ball into center. It happens. But when the centerfielder retrieves the ball and tries to get the runner out at third, the ball sails over your third baseman's head and the first run crosses the plate. That's OK. Shake it off.
The next thing you know, they've got one or two more girls on base and your kids have that look on their faces. The batter hits a grounder deep to short, she fields it and looks to second but nobody is covering. She pivots and fires over the first baseman's head allowing two more runs to score. Now it's 3 - 0 with a runner on third and still two outs. The next batter gets a hit and when the throw-in gets loose, she takes second. The next batter hits a pop fly between the outfielders, they crash into each other, etc., etc. and the inning finally ends up sometime after that with your team down 8 - 0. The other team barely got a hit. How can they be leading 8 - 0? Of course your team goes down one, two, three on two looking strikeouts and a harmless grounder back to the pitcher. Now they're back in the field and making errors again.
Let's take a step back and analyze the situation. This all started with bad throwing. The catcher made a bad throw to second and that hurt but what really compounded it was when the centerfielder threw a ball she shouldn't have and then your team discipline went out the window. Before long the girls began to doubt each other. Throws which shouldn't have been made, were. Throws that should have been made, weren't. Your girls couldn't even get the ball back to the pitcher's circle without incident. The common denominator in all this was throwing.
There can be a few factors which influence this sort of incident. One is fatigue. You cannot prevent fatigue but you can plan for it. This involves thinking your practices out and planning to condition the girls for making difficult throws when they are tired. We'll get back to that in a minute.
Another factor in throwing the ball around can be nerves. Nerves should be dealt with by conducting adequate warm up throwing before games. Often you cannot warm up on the field at tournaments because the period between games is just long enough to line the field again. You may be able to have your girls throw in the outfield or in a space adjacent to the field. The important thing is to spend as much time as humanly possible throwing the ball to each other in as complex a manner as possible. You ought to devise drills your kids can use in a confined space. There isn't enough room to address that here. But no matter what you do, rest assured that if they don't throw the ball around before and between games, they will during them.
The place to get your kids conditioned for throwing when they are tired is towards the end of practice. A well planned practice can alleviate a team's tendency to throw the ball around. First off if you play a lot of multi-game tournaments, get them out in the heat of the middle of the day. Secondly, plan for at least some long practices of three or more hours. If likely game conditions call for three a day games during the midday sun, you should practice outdoors in these conditions. Make sure the girls drink water but get them hot and sweating to mirror real game conditions.
Next, make sure that before you run complex throwing drills, you get them at their hottest, most tired conditions. Get your batting out of the way early. Move on to general defensive drills. If you run wind sprints, plan to do them right before a general, complex and prolonged infield drill. When the girls are winded, tired and sweaty, get everyone out in the field and talk through situational defense. Then start the drills.
One good drill sequence involves hitting grounders and then following up the initial play with throws all around the diamond such as follows:
1) Hit a soft grounder to third. Third throws to first, first to home, home to second, second to third, and third to home.
2) Grounder to short, short to third, third to home, short covers second for throw from home, short throws back to first, first to third, and third to home.
3) Do the same drill with your second baseman.
4) Grounder to first, first throws to short covering second, short throws to first with the second baseman covering, second baseman throws to third, third to home, home back to second, back to home.
You can mix this up anyway you see fit. You don't need me to tell you how. The point is make at least 5 throws and get your fielders moving and pivoting.
Another drill you can work involves players running to cover bases. Start with a player at each base and one standing behind the catcher who'll take her place shortly. The catcher initiates the drill. Catcher throws to second and then runs to second for the next throw. Second throws to first and runs to first. First throws to third and runs there. Third throws to home and runs there. The drill continues, if the ball stays in play, until you say it is over. If your girls cannot play this drill error free for at least three turns around the diamond, keep them at it until they can. If they can do it three times, make them do it until they can reach 6 times. Eventually they'll be able to keep things moving along for ten minutes. That should suffice.
You can run this drill with as few as four girls by cutting out one of the bases on each iteration but because yout want the girls to experience throwing to all the bases, change the base you skip each time. Your girls should be running hard enough that this serves the purpose of wind sprints if you don't generally do those. But more importantly, it teaches them to make good throws when they are winded and sweating.
I assume that while you are running these infield throwing drills, your outfielders are busy shagging flyballs or doing other things. Now bring them into the throwing drills by positioning them for cutoff drills. Have players stand in position for normal play - don't let your third baseman or shortstop lazily hang around the base. It isn't too much to ask that they pretend these are game conditions. Now toss or hit the ball to each outfielder in sequence and have them throw to each base excluding first. The drill can begin with the outfielder throwing to second, then third, then home, but after one iteration of this, have someone call the base after the ball has about reached the outfielder. This gets both infielders and outfielders to make quicker responses to baserunners and more closely simulates game conditions.
Make sure during these sorts of drills that your fielders are talking to each other. If mental lapses occur, stop the drill and correct fielders who are out of position. Let them know that this drill is not going to end until they do things right. If you outfielder misses the cutoff person on a throw, let them know that this is not acceptable and, again, this drill is not going to end until they do it right. You might feel like you are being overly harsh but no inning ends until players get the outs. Your harshness is gentler than one of those long defensive innings at 1:00 pm in 100 degree heat which just won't end.
If you want to conduct a really involved defensive practice, get some runners and put them on base. Don't tell your fielders where to throw. Just explain the situation and see how they react when you hit the ball. Tell them how many outs there are and place the runners where you want them. If you've got someone running from homeplate, make sure you tell them what you want them to do. For example, if you start out with runners on 2nd and 3rd and you hit a base hit into the outfield, instruct the runner from home to try to take second when the outfielder throws the ball in. After each play, tell the fielders what they did right and wrong. If, in the previous example, the outfielder retrieves the ball and throws home, missing the cutoff, point out to her that the batter just took second on her errant throw which didn't get the runner from second out at the plate anyways. You want your girls, tired, making throws and thinking. Your instructions after each play are probably at least as important as the play itself. You want them hearing your voice during games even when you are not talking.
As a final consideration for this "live" drill, you may want to station the pitcher on the field in order to simulate game conditions. Play ends when runners are stationery and the ball is inside the circle. If you get your fielders tired enough, sooner or later they'll make a bad throw back to the pitcher allowing runners to advance. I know this sounds far too basic but I have to tell you that I have seen more instances of the wheels coming off begin with a tired fielder throwing the ball badly to the pitcher.
For example, once late in a game I saw a situation with nobody on and two outs. The batter softly lined a single to right which was cleanly fielded but with no play at first. The outfielder was most of the way into the infield so once she saw the runner at first stopped, she decided to throw the ball directly to the pitcher. She threw it clean over her head, the third baseman retrieved the ball in foul territory, the runner from first took second and rounded the bag slightly, the third baseman threw to the shortstop covering second and the runner realizing nobody was covering third took off for it. The third baseman ran to cover third and got there nearly in time but the throw from short was close to the runner and she missed it as it sailed right out of play allowing the runner to score. That should never happen but it does. And something like that can take the wind right out of your team's sails.
As an aside let me say that you must establish a rule which prohibits your outfielders from throwing the ball directly in to the pitcher. They simply must give the ball to an infielder who then gives the ball to the pitcher. I realize play ends when the ball is in the circle and everybody wants to freeze play after a really bad blunder but there is no reason for an outfielder to ever throw the ball directly to the circle. If an outfielder wants to run the ball in to the pitcher and then run back out to her position, fine, but no throwing it in. And your infielders must do one of two things when they return the ball to the pitcher. Either they must make absolutely certain that there is a fielder directly behind the pitcher who is looking in their direction when they throw it or they must trot in and toss it underhand. Don't make your pitcher responsible for retrieving bad throws to the circle. She works hard enough as it is. Give her the ball on a platter.
I've given you some drills to use after you've got your players hot and sweaty in order to condition them for complex throwing in game conditions. The important thing is to make players throw accurately, preferably around the entire diamond, make catches and tags followed byu more throws, and to think things through quickly when they are tired. This will not completely eliminate bad games but it should cut the number down and also permit your players to recover more quickly from bad plays. Remember to instruct your girls BEFORE games that one bad play is not something to get upset about. If you make a bad play, shake it off. Have confidence in each other's abilities and don't let things spin out of control. The mental side of this game is at least as important as the physical.
 
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