Coach Alston

Why I coach baseball

by Thomas A. Alston

I originally wrote this in 2005. Recent events in my personal life caused me to check it out, and remind myself that I sent this note forward in time for me to use over and over again. The last few years have been very trying times for me. The economy put me in the position to lay off many friends from my company. An argument inside my family opened a crevice that still feels like it is widening.

When swirling pressure comes a calling, I often contemplate stepping away from baseball. So, I dug out this column to see if I still have the fire. I read it over and said to myself, “silly boy you ain’t going nowhere.” If you feel like letting go of baseball, see if anything in this list helps you decide.

This is WHY I coach baseball.

1. When I am working on my baseball team, I don’t have to confront the dead bodies in the Middle East or the pseudo science called psychiatry that is killing America’s Future.
2. I know I have something great to offer the athletes that I come in contact with.
3. Baseball is my calm in the eye of the storm.
4. I have great respect for my fellow coaches, and I get to watch them practice their craft.
5. Baseball is a magical game once you recognize its differences from most other sports.
6. High school baseball affords me the opportunity to present some few pieces of truth about life, in contrast to the lies that have become part of their education.
7. I know that 99% of the kids I meet will be parents and part of the work force, not big league ballplayers. My business experience is valuable to them.
8. A person is only as valuable as he can serve others.
9. Competitive sports seems to be one of the few places that mirrors real life:
a. Those who can make the plays get in the lineup regardless of whether they are great kids or not.
b. An organized team will always be the best nine, not the nine best.
c. Never get too high or too low, tomorrow always comes around.
d. Respect your opponent, you need the game.
e. Play like someone is always watching you.
f. Integrity is doing the right thing when no one is watching.
g. Go hard all the time. Never expect to be out or to lose.
h. Losing is NOT getting back up; it is NOT being knocked down.
i. The only real security in life is knowing your craft and practicing it to the fullest extent every day. There are no guaranteed jobs.

I am sure I could extend this list because I have never had a “bad” day on the baseball field. However, I want to make some other points with you.

If you want things to go well in your program make sure you have a clear picture in your mind of what you want to accomplish. Make sure you inform the parents of your prospective players exactly the terms and conditions of your team. This includes what kind of behavior is acceptable from them.

As I have written several times in the past, I think you are gambling your own sanity if you don’t have a written contract that your players, their parents and the A.D. has signed at the beginning of the season before anyone knows who is in the starting lineup and who are the kids that will create a problem. Signing agreements in a calm moment in a group setting is easy. Trying to recreate a verbal agreement once someone is mad is virtually impossible. The sample contract I published in my book (Baseball Coaches Survival Guide available at Amazon.com) was actually created by my players in a group forum in about two hours of very open dialogue.

The answer doesn’t lie in the wins or losses. I love to win, and I feel great when we win. But years ago when I put myself on the line for one of my former players who was supposed to be cut as sophomore, I had faith in another human being. When he showed me his pro-contract, I wanted to hug him like he was my own son. I opened a door for another young man to touch his dream.
I have other great stories that aren’t related to a baseball success. I remember a kid that when he was entering his senior year in high school and had always been a behavioral problem and the psychiatrists had tried to fill him with drugs. He was constantly scraping up every favor to stay eligible by maintaining a 2.0 G.P.A. He came running up to meet me with something in his hand. I thought it was another of his incredible collection of baseball cards or autographed baseballs. His smile was so large he almost couldn’t talk. “Guess what coach?” He held his index finger up just above his thumb. “I just missed a 3.0 grade point by this much.”
Later this same young man graduated from high school and went on to college. When I met him as a Junior, he had not accumulated enough credits to be a sophomore. Baseball was his passion; I used it to motivate him to do the work including summer school and night school to graduate with his fellow seniors. I know I had more to do with that success than any kid who played for me and played pro-ball.
The lesson here is always the same. If you are looking for appreciation, sell ice cream to small children. At least they will love you until the cone flips over, and their mound of rocky road melts into the sidewalk.
When it comes to coaching baseball, you’ll take your lumps no matter what you do. Parents think that their son is the next baseball superstar, even if he can’t hit his weight. When you make a leadership decision, it always impacts some people positively and some negatively. You can’t lose sleep over it. Do what you think is right and live with it.

Be a Man. Throw Me a Fastball-Thomas A. Alston

Be a Man

Recently, between innings of one of our inter squads, I was listening to two of our kids jaw-jacking each other. The pitcher had gotten the hitter to hit a weak grounder. He was pleased with himself. The batter (one of the better high school hitters around) was taking the bait and kept talking smack. Finally, as he took his position in centerfield he yelled, “Be a man. Throw me a fastball!”

Now this isn’t the first time I’ve ever heard a hitter think that was an appropriate comment, and god knows it won’t be the last. However, I do have to tell you that I think as far as comebacks this comment far outweighs the following famous comments;

1. Yea, well my dad is gonna kick your dad’s butt.
2. At least I’ll be sober in the morning. You’ll still be ugly.
3. Because I said so.

“Be a man. Throw me a fastball,” is tops on my “ignorant things to say” list. We don’t play slow –pitch softball. Yes, I do know that in the beginning of baseball history the pitchers sole purpose was to give the hitter something to hit. But that was then, this is NOW.

Our pitcher is fighting to earn playing time in every intersquad. He gets a lot more notice from us as coaches if he can get a good hitter out. He did his job.

The hitter had one of his at bats where he doesn’t get a hit. So what? It wasn’t the end of the world for him. Just to make a point, I always ask my guys would you be happy if you made 5,000 outs as a big league ballplayer? So, there’s the intelligent way to look at the outs you are going to make if you want to stay in baseball.

My apologies to all the hitters in baseball, but I know you like to puff your chest and declare that everything is mano-a-mano. But your fundamental misunderstanding is that you believe, it equates to the pitcher has to throw the ball as hard as he can. You are the guy that has it all wrong. The pitcher has no obligation to your misguided sense of what is supposed to happen.

Or, maybe you are just clever enough to get into a pitcher’s head, and this is one way you can regain your natural advantage. Your natural advantage is your self-confidence that you can hit any pitcher. Maybe it is just a great psyche job on your part?

Yeah, right!

This old baseball coach doesn’t give you that much credit. This crap of chest puffing is false bravado because you refuse to believe what just happened. Some guy on the bump that you failed to respect got you out. So what if he threw you a curve ball? So what if he tossed a change-up?

Very few pitchers can stand on the hill and just toss fast balls. As a pitching coach I try to maximize my hurler’s strengths and minimize his weaknesses. If a guy on my staff isn’t blessed with a lot of arm strength, I work on the things he can do well. If I have a guy that is nearing the end of his career, but he loves the game, I’ll encourage him to try anything including knuckle balls. It is my job to prep every guy to able to get hitters out. I don’t care how he does it, as long as it is legal within the framework of the baseball rules.

In high school baseball our roster is made up of who is legally registered in our school. This is our talent pool. As coaches we have to create the best possible team from that group of kids. We aren’t a major league roster that can just dump as many candidates into the top end of the funnel as are available. Natural selection will always produce some result that brings the cream to the top.

Our seasons are too short, our choices are severely limited, and we adjust to the facts and not some hitter’s misguided sense of right and wrong. If we want to produce the best result for our team, we take what we have and strategize a plan that gives our organization the best chance to get to get into the playoffs and ultimately win it all.

However, if it wasn’t high school baseball, I’d still tell you (hitters) to shut up and get to your position on defense. You are the same guy that would get tired of chasing balls in the gap. You are the same guy that would yell, ‘try throwing something else.’ Unless you are athletically blessed, pitching is about adjusting to a hitter’s weakness. If he knows you are a dead fast ball hitter, he is obligated to put a wrinkle on the ball.

If he gets locked into your sense of false bravado and tries to throw harder, it will kill his fluid mechanics. Everyone knows that when a guy “muscles up” the radar gun reveals less speed. Experience proves to me that in this instance command goes away also.

So, you can keep running your lips. It makes you look almost as silly as you did when my guy got you out. Please keep saying silly things, it gives me things to write about to keep the whole baseball world entertained.

 

 

Mud, blood and tears-by Thomas A. Alston

Mud, blood and tears
By Thomas A. Alston

Because it has been raining for the last ten days, my guys haven’t played a game, and I am sure that they are sick of the weight room and practicing in a gym.  Wiffle balls aren’t the real thing. The sound of errantly thrown baseballs bouncing off the rolled up bleachers is SO WRONG! 

The fact that you are inside a closet where the sounds of baseball can’t escape into the sky is unnatural. Your feet squeaking on a polished wood floor instead of your cleats digging into grass or dirt is like a bad dream.  The sound isn’t right. The feel is freakish.

Okay, so I know we have all been there, and it will always be necessary. Only the truly focused and dedicated manage to make the best use of this time. I admit that I hate it so much I would really suck at it. Thank god as I have gotten completely gray haired that I am no longer the head coach. Fortunately, the guy that runs our program is the best at everything he does relative to baseball.

The part of the game that I like best is game management. There is no way to practice it without playing. I like the chess game of analyzing each moment for match ups and use of our bench players.  I like looking for opportunities to use a guy for the one strength he has to get involved in the game and feel like he contributed to the team.  Because at this stage of my career I don’t have my head totally inside which pitch to call or which play to put on I am exterior to the moment-to-moment problems and constantly am looking for opportunities to keep our head guy on-track.

Sometimes in a long drawn out day, small nuances in a line-up can mean everything. Simple line up switches get covered up in a morass of the scramble that is always in a head coaches mind as the game plays out.  In the twist of too many things to think about in 1/12 of a second the simple things seem complicated because we tend to be trying to simultaneously to consider too much data. This can cause a head coach to apply the right answer to the wrong problem. It is similar to putting your hot cup of coffee into the refrigerator and taking a sip out of the milk container because you were trying to do two things at once.

Working from inside the chaos, you try to put something on automatic and then apply your abilities to one isolated problem. You knew you wanted a sip of coffee; you just put the wrong hand on automatic. Not until you get that cool thick taste of milk do you realize it isn’t the coffee your mouth expected. That’s how you can wind up trying to put a guy in the game for a second time.

I never really understood the value of a bench coach before, but I do now.  I realize that I can see a lot more than I used to when I was inside my own head trying to create a winning future before we ran out of outs.

As long as I record my mental image pictures and report in a calm moment out side of the game to the head guy, I am valuable to him. I can see the little split second things hidden in the details of a complete play. I can observe when an infielder has his hands just a little too close to his feet when he fields a ground ball, I can see the tiniest instance of a bat wrapping in a struggling hitter. We don’t have video equipment to spend hours reviewing so my recounting of these things in a manner that can be assimilated by our head coach is important data for him to use for practice and training purposes.

I will warn you that if you are at the stage of your career you want to add this job title to your resume there are two very important skills you need to possess. You need very broad shoulders and absolute loyalty to the boss. You have to have the courage to approach the head guy in the middle of battle and make your point very clear. Sometimes he will bite your head off because you are the final straw that fills his over worked brain at that moment. Wear it!

This courage comes easy if you believe in your communication. It is empowering if you always have the best interest of the team as part of your analysis. It makes it easy to take an unfavorable response to your idea. If you get introverted or “pissy” because you get yelled at, you aren’t ready for the job.

I figure when it happens to me I have an opportunity to be a good example to the players that don’t handle criticism very well. I don’t fight back, and I do what is ordered. The time to discuss it is later, not during the game. I hate it when a kid thinks that I want a verbose response to every observation that I make.  So I practice what I preach. I put my words out for observation, receive the communicated response, and go back to work.

Of course because I believe I am the smartest baseball SOB that ever lived, I don’t let others’ criticisms bother me much anyway.