Chad Moriyama Dodgers, Sabermetrics, Scouting
Dallas Jackson of Rivals brought the public the story of two pitchers who threw 347 pitches between them … in one game. People were shocked, people were angry, and I was … well … unfortunately not all that surprised.
After 501 pitches, the game finally ended.
New Orleans (La.) Jesuit had bettered Metairie (La.) Archbishop Rummel in an 18-inning, pitchers’ duel and the 2-1 victory was exactly what everyone had anticipated when it was announced that both teams would be throwing their ace pitcher.
LSU signee Mitch Sewald started for Rummel; Emerson Gibbs, a Tulane signee, for Jesuit.
Of those 501 pitches needed to decide the victory, the two young arms had accounted for 347 of them.
Sewald pitched 10 innings allowing one run on two hits. He recorded 10 strikeouts and threw 154 pitches. Gibbs pitched 15 innings allowing a single run on six hits. He recorded 13 strikeouts and accounted for 193 pitches.
Is there any way to put this besides negligent? No, I don’t think so. It’s terrible and it’s all too common.
Now the sheer number of pitches is something I haven’t seen outside of Japan, but as far as the gross negligence by coaches? Not all that shocking.
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There are situations where these types of decisions are acceptable. If they’re playing in the state tournament and the pitcher’s career is about to end (not going to play in college), then I can understand risking the injury. But these two pitchers? They both want to continue their playing careers, yet their coaches were okay with putting that on the line … for what, exactly? One random high school game? Disgusting.
Just talked with AD at one of schools where HS pitchers went 154 and 193. Anticipates no changes or limits. “Have to trust coach.”
— Will Carroll (@injuryexpert) April 18, 2012
The athletic director says to trust the coach? Nah, I say be more skeptical and protect your own kids.
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Now there’s always the other end of the spectrum as far as protecting your kids, as Dirk Hayhurst pointed out recently.
Parents, or The Parents, as we call them among coaching circles, are the number one cause of problems for just about every coach and player… including their own.
That’s because The Parents, in their quest to be loving, helpful, and provide the perfect baseball experience, do some crazy-ass s*^#$ like pick fights with coaches in parking lots, start arguments in the middle of games, harass other teams ten year olds to the point of crying, brawl with other dads, attack other mothers, and contact child services over lack of playing time.
Coach for any amount of time and you’ll learn quickly that the hardest part about coaching young children is dealing with the grown up problems of their parents.
Anybody who has coached knows exactly what he’s talking about, and I agree with his general points, but assuming that you’re not one of these emotionally unstable parents, I’m not sure I agree with his view on coaches.
Don’t get me wrong. There are some bad coaches out there, especially at the lowest levels. Most don’t know anything about baseball, or the mechanics. They yell a lot, they boss kids around, and they have big expectations. But that’s life for you: lots of loud mouths, know-nothings, and frustrating expectations to deal with.
Luckily, many coaches are good people doing the best they can with what they’ve got. Even so, it’s important to realize there is no perfect coach.
My requirement isn’t a perfect coach, just a competent one.
Every time these stories about coaching abuse are released, the common rhetoric is that the type of coach who would let their pitcher throw 193 pitches in a game is the vast minority, but I’m not so sure. Maybe the abuse isn’t to that exact extreme all the time, but from my own anecdotal experience*, it’s not as uncommon as people would like you to believe, and I think a lot of coaches from the high school level on down have no business instructing kids.
*I know it’s anecdotal, but I do know about quite a bit of coaches.
Why do coaches let a pitcher throw 200 pitches or pitch five days in a row? Why do they let tweens throw forkballs or 50 curves in a game? Why do they make an outfielder attempt to hobble through an injury?
Simple, the coach wants to win and prioritizes that over everything else. Worse yet, it’s not even for the players, it’s for themselves.
In my opinion, for as much as parents are at fault for the negativity that transpires, so are the coaches. Similar to parents who treat their children like angels, coaches who treat their players like professionals aren’t fostering a productive and healthy environment for everybody involved either. It’s a natural instinct for both parties, but just as Hayhurst encourages parents to lay off and let their kids figure it out for themselves, when a coach takes on that role for kids and young adults, they owe it to them to constantly remind themselves about the big picture and why they’re doing what they’re doing to begin with.
At the end of the day, nobody cares if you win a Little League game, nobody cares if you win a high school game, and nobody cares if you’re named Northwest Regional 10 Division 42 Coach Of The Year.
In the grand scheme of life, how many players would you be proud of if they came back in 30 years and said winning a Little League World Series or winning a High School State Championship was the proudest moment in their lives? None, because while it means a ton at the time, it really doesn’t mean much when all is said and done.
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At the level that I’m talking about, the success of a coach is not determined by how many games they win but by how many players come up to them in a decade and still respect them enough to call them coach. A lot of coaches may have banners or trophies, but in reality, many of them didn’t accomplish anything.
That’s why I feel that all of these coaches who take their jobs way too seriously and base their worth in how many wins they can squeeze out of kids and young adults, consequences be damned, need to be reminded that it should all take a backseat to what they can teach kids about both baseball and life.
I absolutely agree with almost everything you say but this is wrong:
“At the end of the day, nobody cares if you win a Little League game, nobody cares if you win a high school game, and nobody cares if you’re named Northwest Regional 10 Division 42 Coach Of The Year.”
That’s the way it SHOULD be but it’s not the way things are. There are plenty of people who care about every one of those things, parents and ultimately administrators who are responsible for the hiring and firing of coaches.
This is also very relateable to the larger issue in America right now of teacher evaluation. Far too often we forget that coach is just another word for teacher. Their jobs, as you rightly put it is now what’s happening NOW but how they contribute to the maturation and growth of the child (be it in math class or out on the baseball diamond). But the shortsightedness of society and the desire for win now is precisely why we get situations like these.
“Nobody worth a shit should care.”
:o
Exactly, not everywhere is like those sad dudes from “Friday Night Lights” who sit at home alone rubbing their state championship high school football ring.
Well, I guess the argument is that places such as that do indeed exist.
I think it happens FAR more frequently than people would like to acknowledge.
Frightening.
I know what you mean, but part of being that coach/teacher is teaching kids how to succeed and teaching kids how to win.
So if you can be that coach I’m talking about and still be extremely successful in terms of wins and losses. After all, part of being a coach is teaching the kids what it takes to win. Improvement is generally a byproduct of quality coaching, so it will come.
I guess the point was that when it gets to the juncture where you’re willing to sell out your best players and their futures for some random high school game, especially for your own personal glory, you have no business coaching kids or young adults, no matter how successful the results are.
of course, but the coaches are simply a part of the overall system. I follow a lot of soccer/football in Europe and two of the most successful teams over there are Ajax and Barcelona. Teams celebrated not just for their on field success but also the prodigiousness of their ability to keep shepherding talent through their system. One particular feature of both of their system is the focus for young kids not on wins and losses but rather skill sets. This is markedly different from American and English youth sports where so much emphasis is placed on winning.
I understand that the story we’re talking about here is about high school kids but it’s clear to see that the coaches’ skewed incentives is something that’s forced on them. After all, it’s easy enough to dismiss it as a bad coach if one of these coaches allowed his pitcher to go close to 200 pitches while the other one stuck to a pitching count. That both of them felt the need to ride their respective pitcher to such an outrageously high number of pitches tells us all we need to know.
So you think it’s the culture more than the individual then?
I suppose that’s a possibility, but I can’t say I do it.
And I would say that it’s very easy to cherry pick anecdotal evidence to support either side of the argument by the simple fact that we live in a country with over 300MM people.
Certainly, I am an outsider looking in, I have very little practical exposure to youth coaching being that I’m not a coach nor do I have kids of my own. I hope that I am wrong about the culture and that these are outliers.
I know.
Just that every player I’ve had to this point has had at least one coach who was an idiot.
Do they though?
Like seriously, how many people that you hang around with hang their hat on a bullshit accomplishment from Little League or something?
You seem smart, so I doubt you hang out with those type of people.
I mean, yeah, everybody likes to reminisce about past glories, but truly care about that kind of stuff?
It may be my fault for not putting it more clearly above. To the individual, obviously not. I barely remember what I did last week much less what I achieved as a child athletically. But such is the twisted incentive (as Chad points out) that the metric by which the coach is hired or fired depends entirely upon my success.
That is precisely the reason why the two coaches didn’t care about their kids’ arms and allowed one of them to throw close to 200 pitches. There is no incentive for the coach to protect the kids’ long term prospects but because the game was against a hated rival the coach needed the win.
To a certain extent, I doubt even those two pitchers’ parents cared, but the coach wasn’t coaching to them. He was coaching for the administrators and alumni who would authorize his next contract.
Doesn’t that go to my point though? That they owe it to their roles and their kids to remind themselves that there’s a bigger picture at play here.
Absolutely! And I definitely would place the blame squarely where it belongs: with these two coaches.
I’m just extrapolating from this story here and thinking about sporting culture at large.
I know a few, actually. So like I said, “people worth a shit”.
:o
Thanks for pointing it out. Can use as a reference now.
I’ve noticed the bias in coverage of parents/coaches as well.
The media tends to destroy these so-called “Little League Parents” every time they do something stupid (which they should), but whenever these negligent coaches destroy a kid, it’s not news for whatever reason.
I guess it’s because they don’t start fights and stuff, but still, it’s ridiculous and they should be vilified as well.
They aren’t going to put a headline up of “Little League player blows out arm”, basically.
Great post. My freshman son goes to a “baseball factory” type of school and I go to a lot of games and have coached a lot and love baseball more than anyone I know.
But the logic escapes people frequently, in their quest for wins–at least our parents. I am only commenting that they are soooo excited about winning freshman games, it’s ultimately ridiculous, although understandable. I suppose it’s cognitive dissonance? In the context of HS baseball, the goal is to win at the varsity level, so I clearly think that 80% (or whatever) is development at the “younger” stages and 20% winning (perhaps), and as you move up levels, the percentages adjust more towards winning.
I’ve counseled quite a few parents (this is my third son playing sports) on this point, about enjoying the development and shutting up, etc., and they sound skeptical, but pretty accepting.
Agreed on all accounts.