Reese Kaplan -- Improving Your Baseball Skills Alone

One of the issues facing the media during the coronavirus debacle is how players and fans will handle themselves without the familiar rituals of practice, rooting and beer-filled castigation of the team not playing 100% perfectly.  With no team to praise or punish, what will we do with those vacant intervals of time?

I got to thinking about the days of learning the game of baseball as a youngster and remembered a great many ways I attempted to better my skills when I wasn’t able to play games.  I’m also curious what others did to help themselves improve their game effectiveness when they weren’t in the starting lineup.

First, there was the issue of throwing.  Much like you see many tennis players practicing against a handball wall for guaranteed returns and a variety of velocities to encounter, those of us playing the field also had to work on the best way to get our thrown balls to the intended targets.  Many years into the exercise came metal-framed gizmos with netting and markings to indicate throw accuracy, but before that I can recall drawing a circle or a square on a brick wall and gradually increasing my distance from the wall, always aiming to get my throws within the boundaries of that dimension.  In my mind I was much better at this skill than my arm would demonstrate.

One of the earlier baseball technologies somewhat readily available were the pitching machines capable of throwing a baseball (or softball) straight as an arrow at varying speeds.  I do know that most of us started out on the slowest machine and gradually worked our way up to the fastest ones, though occasionally the town’s All Stars would jump right to the fastest machine as their first challenge of the day.  I had a good friend who later played in the White Sox organization who would do that and I asked how he never progressed further when he was so competent with the bat.  He smiled and said, “Have you ever seen the machine throw a curveball?”  Good point!

One good thing that came out of pitching machines was the ability to practice switch hitting, bunting and other aspects of the offensive side of the game that usually were neglected by Little League coaches.  With the relatively consistent placement of the pitches at the same velocity, it was easier to practice this way than it was diving out of the way of errant balls more likely headed for your posterior than the strike zone. 

Another young child exercise was to throw the ball straight up into the air as high as possible and then position himself underneath to make the catch.  Oddly, I found this exercise quite a bit more challenging than actual batted balls which had both height and depth to calculate when planning where to stand to make the catch.  This more-or-less straight up into the air throw was a lot more difficult as wind currents and unintended spin on the throw often made the landing spot not exactly where it had been planned (had any thought gone into the exercise at all). 

The one thing I don’t recall practicing much at all was beating the throw from the defensive player.  In these off-the-field exercises it was hard to simulate the amount of time available to make that safe call at the bag when you don’t know how hard the ball was hit, how cleanly it was fielded nor how accurately and quickly it was thrown across the diamond.  Of course, the real reason is that running is like real exercise and I was playing baseball for fun, not for its quotient of suffering. 

I toyed a bit with pitching but never really got into it in a big way.  I had two choices – speed or accuracy.  If you wanted me to throw the ball past you, yes, it was possible for me to do that, but it was impossible to predict how close to the strike zone it would get.  Conversely, I could put some interesting spins on pitches and have them sneak around the perimeter of the zone, but there’s no guarantee a good hitter wouldn’t be able to adjust to the motion of the pitch and make it take a trip long past the outfield fence. 

So how did you try to prepare for your upcoming games?