Creating a System for Development
Every sector in the world uses systems like these, baseball is not an outlier.
Creating a system for development:
Are you actually making your players better? Is your coach actually giving you enough to improve? Are you seeing progress week to week or season to season?
If not, it's probably long overdue for you to overhaul some facet of your coaching or your own personal training. Time is limited.
The term “player development” is possibly the most overused and misunderstood buzzword around athletics these days. Colleges use it to promote their newest million dollar facility upgrade and coaches use it when their players get drafted to show how much improvement they have made under their coaching, but what is it really?
It is simply this: Creating tangible improvement in players physical capabilities.
Whether that be: fastball velocity, running speed, off-speed pitches, hitting for power, arm strength or pitching command. Can you measurably improve your players time and time again?
And no, this isn't measured in draft picks or major leaguers. Is that the end goal? Absolutely. However, the biggest colleges get the most talented players 90% of the time, so how do we know if said players are actually improving from their coaches or if they just “raw talented” their way into professional baseball?
The way you should view talent acquisition and those players' improvement is on a standard bell curve. If an elite college recruits 10 elite players every single year, and half of them improve while the other half doesn't, that doesn’t show their ability to develop players at a high level. This school might win a ton of games, strictly off of talent alone. However, simply acquiring elite talent and letting the odds play out doesn't mean you are actually doing an above average job at “player development”.
This goes into another point: the best college coaches are often elite program managers and elite salesmen/recruiters. It is very simple: the best way to be good is to simply have the best players. Failing to acknowledge this as a major role in the job of all coaches wouldn’t provide a clear picture.
To provide an analogy: you wouldn’t trust a wealth manager to “develop” your finances if their track record was having 50% of their clients lose $ every year.
So how do you create a system to develop your players? It might sound overly complex but it's really not. A really easy way to look at this is to view the “system” that is in place as a flow chart. The “system” sets the precedent and allows everyone to know what is usually done in each situation.
Let's take a pitcher for example: his weekly schedule is a bullpen on Wednesday and then his in-game outings on Saturday. A common way to do this is to have a set bullpen routine for Wednesday and then to go and compete on the weekend and try to win ball games. If you do well, you likely just run it back and do the same thing, and if you do poorly then you probably switch some stuff up.
While this is better than not thinking at all, you're really not maximizing your players ability to improve. There need to be steps in place that allow for improvement.
Here is a better scenario:
Player throws said outing
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After outing player reviews results from outing and looks into key performance metrics (walks, velocity, runs)
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Coach and player then attempts to identify what led to those metrics being good or bad
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Together they formulate a plan to improve those facets before the bullpen
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During midweek bullpen they focus on specific weaknesses from the outing before
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Take bullpen efforts and refocus them into lighter effort work the rest of the week before outing →
Throw next outing
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Repeat
Every “system” will have its bottlenecks, and identifying them is key. If you have a player that is new to pitching full time, he likely needs more reps on the mound than your polished high level arm that has been in pitching lessons as his primary position since he was 8.
A bottleneck of the system above is the limit of 1 bullpen a week and only 1 live outing. There are a few ways you can fix this.
Identify limiting factor
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Create a solution
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Enact solution
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Evaluate results
Let's say the player struggles to be in the zone, so you switch him to 2 bullpens a week at lower intensity to increase repetitions on the mound. This goes on for a few weeks, and you realize that he is dynamite in his bullpens but struggles in the game.
Evaluate results (bad with hitters in the box)
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Create possible solutions (stand-in hitters for bullpen, throw live to hitters on the field instead)
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Evaluate solutions and choose one (were stand-in hitters enough?)
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Rinse and repeat
For this, a possible solution is to throw a live BP during the week instead of throwing a bullpen to a catcher with no hitter in the box. If the batter is what gets in the pitcher's way, what are stress-free bullpens going to do to help?
Does this work? If yes, cool. If not, cool. Evaluate the results and see where to go from there.
Which player improves more? The one running his training on *vibes* or the one that has a plan? Creating your own system is entirely doable and way simpler than you think.
What are the important metrics for your goal? If you coach young pitchers, I highly recommend staying away from “runs” as a metric, because if you coach 10u, your team will likely make a million errors and not cover the same amount of ground that college players cover.
With players under HS, I generally recommend things like throwing velocity and strike %. Things that are controllable for the players and don’t need external factors to validate. If your players think their only job is to not give up runs, then when errors and bloop hits come into play they will view their outings as a failure.
On the flip, if you take a player from a 60% strike thrower at 70 mph to a 65% strike thrower at 75 mph, you made that player drastically better.
What about the player that went from a 6 ERA to a 5.50 ERA over that same span? Maybe he got better, maybe he didn't.
This is what I personally do for myself after my outings.
Throw outing
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Evaluate results and write down thoughts regarding my outing (Did walks come from a really good approach or terrible pitches? Were the hits my fault?)
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Create keys for improvement for the week (slider shape was good but location was bad, vice versa. Maybe I wasn’t as aggressive as I could’ve been in my mentality, velocity was bad)
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Implement in training while managing my workload properly (throwing drills to improve certain mechanics, more repetitions given to certain pitches that I struggle with, but not overthrowing that can affect future performance and injury)
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Throw in a game again (generally every 2-4 days)
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Repeat
Systems like this are key to managing overthinking and its negative effects on performance. The goal of your system is for the system itself to carry the weight of your thought processes or your athletes’ thoughts and give them simple yet actionable steps to improve their performance and their physical capabilities.
This idea of implementing a system to improve a skill can translate to any area, not just skill acquisition.
For example:
Your children keep yelling at umpires during the game
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Find possible reasons why they believe this is the right move (they are stressed about performance, maybe they see adults doing it)
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Give them reasons to understand their performance is not dictated by umpires decisions (taking a pitch that is a ball, but is called a strike doesn't negatively reflect on them)
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Give them positive reinforcement when they take a pitch that is wrongly called a strike (tell them “Hey man not your fault, good take”)
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Evaluate progress and repeat
This principle could be applied to anything.
If you are a player looking for a school/future team, these systems should be in place long before you arrive. If they don't exist before you're there, there is no reason to believe that they will magically appear when you get there.
They don't have to look just like this, but any coach worth trusting your career with will have some system they use to improve their players. If you knew what these coaches were getting paid, you would expect way more out of them then they give without being prompted.
Good Luck
John