Money Ball
 

Worked a tournament this weekend where numerous coaches appear to have watched the movie Money Ball and taken it way to seriously. They apparently spend all their time in the batting cage and none actually practicing playing the game. They could hit the ball great, but couldnt field a ball, catch or throw to save their lives. And, absolutely no situational awareness at all.

Yes, offense wins games. But, if you cant at least occasionally stop a ball and get an out, what good does it do to give up just as many runs to the opposition?

Age of players?

Did the coaches care? Meaning, what was the goal of the tournament? It is the end of October. Maybe they were working on offense and didn't really care about defense. Who knows?

Or, maybe they were just lousy ball players.

10's, 12's and 14's. Saw it at all of the age levels. They could hit the ball just fine, but many of the players I saw would have difficulty playing a simple game of catch.

If you watch what any of these teams do in Warmups it is the same thing. They will play catch for 5 minutes, then spend the next hour and a half hitting off tees, into nets and soft toss to the outfield. Of course the muscle memory that they are building is hitting fly balls and no one is correcting bad practice swings either.

One of the worst side effects of the HUGE number of teams playing travel softball now, is that not is the level of player watered down, but the number of actual coaches is too low to actually allow each team to have someone who has played the game at any level above little league. The majority of these coaches could not recognize a swing flaw and if they did recognize it, do not have the skill set to correct it.

Of course, none of this affects us, except to make the game painful (sometimes literally) to call.