Baseball Development: 10 Lessons for Parents

As a parent of a young baseball player, there are valuable lessons to be gleaned from the game. Here’s a breakdown of key insights that could make a significant impact on your child’s baseball journey:

Practice > Play, but Play Generally Wins Out

Individual sports like swimming and gymnastics are 99% training and 1% competing. Baseball is different with generally more games than practice. Playing games without proper skill acquisition only leads to frustration. Playing more doesn’t solve it unless the movement is corrected. Parents get frustrated when volunteer coaches (and paid ones) don’t help individual players. This is very common, so don’t expect it. Think of the coach more as a game manager and you’ll like need to see a hitting coach or pitching coach at a local baseball facility to help improve your players skills.

Be Patient with Development and Find the Right Level of Competition

Every player develops at different rates and times. Finding the right level of play is a difficult tightrope. Play at a challenging level, but not too challenging resulting in frustration or loss of interest in the sport. Playing at a level that’s too easy may create overconfidence and when failure ultimately comes, he may not be able to be handled it. Relative age makes a significant difference, so be aware that many players reclass to create an physical advantage and the high flying reclasses often come down to earth when they have to play against players of their own age from reclassing up. Dealing with failure is what separates the successful from the unsuccessful players over the longer time. Read Chapter Two in the book Top Dog for more on this point.

Take Time Off (and Play Another Sport)

Give your son an offseason, and if he’s interested, play another sport to take time off of baseball. See the David Epstein’s reach paper on multi-disciplinary practice for more on this topic. I’ve heard this over and over again from former pros and agents. In many areas, baseball is played year-round and never allows for an extended break for physical and mental recovery. While skills might develop faster in these environments, it’s also likely to produce more repetitive stress injuries. Find an activity with different movement patterns and skills such as basketball for lateral movement and explosiveness, boxing for rotational power, rock climbing for upper body strength or Pilates for overall body control and mobility.

Keep the Body in Balance

There needs to be balance in the body – left and right, front and back. Concentric movements create force and eccentric absorb force. When a player throws, the arm must put on the brakes after the ball is released to stop the momentum. If these muscles are too weak, it could lead to injury like a rotator cuff tear. Players need to train these through deceleration exercises such as using a dumbbell and eccentrically resisting it falling. Also ensure that if he’s taking hundreds of swings right-handed, he does exercises to rotate the other direction such as lefty swings or medicine ball throws.

Strength Matters

On the big field, wielding BBCOR or wood bats, strength is a critical asset. Get in the weight room starting around age twelve or thirteen with baseball specific workout plans (not the typical football lifts). Baseball is a rotational power sport driven by lateral movements. Players throw five-ounce balls and swing 30-ounce bats. They rarely sprint over 60 meters and if they do, it’s not in a straight line. They don’t need to squat a massive amount of weight. They don’t need to slowly push a bunch of weight. The do need to explode laterally and then rotate sequentially either to throw or hit a ball efficiently. As a result, they need to be trained differently than other sports. Look here for my list of baseball-specific training exercise ideas.

Speed Matters (and is easily lost)

Sprint in small doses of 30 to 40 yards with one to two minutes of rest in between each to recover enough to run at 95%+ of max speed. It doesn’t need to take long. Just do 200 yards of total volume two to three times a week. Consistency is important. Feeding the Cats from Tony Holler is a great program for baseball players. Also, if max sprints aren’t being run at least once a week, then top speed will be decline.

Rest and Recovery Matters

A player at 90% capability and fully available is more valuable than one nursing an injury from the bench. Players are most susceptible to injury during their peak height velocity years. For boys, this is generally between ages 12-14. You should track how quickly your son grows and take extra care by providing extra rest when he’s sprouting the fastest.

Injury Prevention Through A:C Workload

Limit injury risk by understanding and managing acute to chronic workload (A:C workload). This metric is the volume of short-term throws compared to the average long-term volume (usually a twenty-eight-day moving average). For example, if a player has only thrown 40 pitchers over a period of time as a baseline chronic workload will be at risk of injury if the acute volume all of a suddenly jumps to 80 pitches. This doesn’t seem to be a high volume based on pitch count charts, but there needs to be a build-up during a ramping period or the body will be overloaded and potentially breakdown. The workload concept is just as important or more important than pitch counts, which receive nearly all of the attention for injury prevention.

Protect Arms by Strengthening Forearm Muscles

The forearm muscles protect the UCL in the elbow. The stronger they are the more of the stress they absorb. Throwers need to strengthen forearm and rotator cuff muscles to reduce the change of arm injuries. One key exercise is to improve grip strength of the hand and pointer and middle finger specifically since they grip the ball and can tire quickly. While doing this stay away from weighted balls until college to protect young arms. If you don’t believe me, listen to the top sports doctors on the topic of weighted balls.

Unlock Motivation

Find what motivates your player. It could be consistently overcoming a challenge like improving on a specific metric like a 30 time or the social acceptance of being on a team. Michael Jordan provided a great example of always finding something to fuel his fire to win.