'Just give me a kid who can play the game'

I understand a team wanting able to quantify a player's ability - since they are paying real money.
As a fan buying a ticket with real money, I don't care what a player's VORP or OPS is - I just want to see something spectacular when I go to a game: a HR saving catch, a guy stealing second and third, a towering HR.

 

So, exactly how many times are you going to post on this thread to tell everybody that you don't care about this subject?

 

Get off of my lawn.

 

Hark! I hear a tiny voice off in the distance.
Yelling again.

 

Hahah. In Nineteen Eighty Five, armed only with two years of junior-high baseball play and a few years of sandlot softball/baseball, and a stack of the 1982-85 Baseball Abstracts, I got myself a summer job as a paid youth baseball/softball coach for our local city rec department. The job entailed coaching eight ( 8 ) teams, both genders, ages 8-16, from June 1 until the second week of August -- a total of about 120 games. Five days a week, 10 weeks in a row -- baseball/softball every day from 8 a.m. to sundown.

I immediately instituted Sabermetric Principles on all the teams: always put the best athletes at SS and CF, made all my defensive changes as dictated by James's Defensive Spectrum (SS-2B-CF-3B-RF-LF-1B), arranged the batting order in straight descending order (best hitter to worst), told pitchers to throw strikes, get the batters out and don't worry about baserunners, and never ever ever once used a sac bunt or intentional walk. (Well there was one time but it's a long and aggravating story which involved a bitch nun demanding that kid umpires call a textbook-tight strike zone on 12-year-old softball pitchers, but never mind.)

Some of the other coaches (including a couple who were college players slumming around town for the summer) thought I was nuts, doing stuff like leading off with my best power hitters or putting lefthanders at shortstop. A couple of the old-lady softball coaches rebuked me for never calling for sac bunts when "everybody knows you should sac bunt with a runner on first."

But I won, a lot. Out of the eight teams, in divisions with 6-8 teams each, we won three championships and came down to the last couple of games with two others. Only one of the eight teams was really bad. Overall all put together I won like 70 percent of my games.

The rosters (for the city-sponsored teams anyway) were assigned by random, so it wasn't like I had packed the teams with all kinds of dynamite grade-school talent.

So, woohoo for me. But the moral of the story is: the shit really works. Put your best athletes in the position to do the most damage, don't try to make players do things they can't, don't throw away outs or baserunners, and you win.

 

I've seen sac bunts used gratuitously by a 9-10 All-Star team in my nephew's league.
That was pre-Moneyball, when the prevailing thought was that this was Good Fun-damental Baseball Like It Oughtta Be.
They went pretty far in that tournament despite having a bunch of kids who clearly couldn't hit for shit, and weren't encouraged to swing.

 

For lower level rec leagues, I would argue that 1b is much more important. The shittiest fielder on a 10 year old rec league is going to drop a lot of balls thrown to him by the SS, 2b and 3b. That is a whole lot of missed 'sure outs'.

 

Yeah, I did make a specific exception from the Defensive Spectrum to allow for first base -- that league had a rule (at most levels) that everybody had to change defensive positions every couple of innings, so I usually rotated a good fielder (a good throw-reciever anyway) from either 3B or 2B over to 1B. We rarely if ever had a real bad fielder at 1B; I'd usually stick 'em at 3B or LF.

(At which most of the old-timers said, "OMG, what if somebody hits a hot shot down the line or a hard drive into LF," to which I replied, "if it's a ground ball hit hard enough our slick-fielding SS can't get it, or a fly ball hit to LF harder than a nice easy popup, we're probably in trouble anyway.")

Actually, at levels below HS, first base really needs to join P and C as non-covered positions in the defensive spectrum, a position where one or two specific skills outweigh pretty much all other considerations.

Plus we spent a lot of practice time trying to teach tall immobile sluggers to catch throws from the infielders. I didn't really give a damn if a 1B could get off the bag or field grounders -- as long as they could knock down the throws, that was good enough for me. What mainly kills you isn't if they don't make the catch on an infield throw and the batter is safe at first; what kills you is when they whiff on it completely, the ball gets loose up the RF line, and ALL the runners take an extra base (or three).

Any coach who attempts to teach kids under high school age to sac bunt needs to be fucking slaughtered. At that age kids need to learn how to fucking HIT.

 

Eh, most of the time I'd agree with you, Starman, but some kids LOVE to bunt and feel really good about making that contribution. I don't normally give them the sign, but I do kinda sorta give them the green light to try it if they feel like they can get on. These are your bottom-of-roster 11-12-year-olds who have a very hard time hitting anything and who know they're just about done playing baseball anyway, so why not let them have some fun.

It is definitely a high-percentage play too. If you get the bunt down, the chance of a rec league pitcher or third baseman getting the out at first is well below 50 percent.

 

Oh, please. Go watch a high school, or even college, game today. You'll see your result of the kids learning only to fucking HIT.

They can enjoy the game and still learn how to play the game right. But I guess the "everybody gets a trophy" crowd told us we couldn't have it both ways.

You're too good a baseball man to even remotely believe what you said there.

 

At least until you get to high school (and even then, sometimes), the worst fielder on the team always get put in right field, just because left-handed hitters are rare and thus so few balls get hit that way.

 

I'd say it's moving toward left field -- opposite-field hitting is taught so well and so early now, and between that and the speed on some of these pitchers the RF gets a lot more balls. Plus the play at first on a line drive is a real possibility so you want someone out there with an arm. We can go whole games without the left fielder seeing any real action.

Our worst fielders are typically the left fielder and sometimes the third baseman.