10-17-2009
Baseball can be compared to the building of a house. You have to have a strong foundation on which to build upon. If the foundation of your house is weak, the framework and the rest of the house will come crashing to the ground. Baseball is the exact same way.
If you can’t master the fundamentals, then the rest of your game will suffer. Players nowadays want to make the incredible play or the “sexy” play if you will, instead of making the routine one. Fielders want to backhand balls that they easily have time to get in front of because it looks better. Hitters take long, uppercut swings in order to try to hit a five-run home run because a home run is way cooler than a single. Pitchers want to see how high they can get on the radar gun instead of working on control and efficiency. The problem with these things is most age groups are not skilled enough to take these chances.
Those backhand attempts turn into errors, those long, uppercut swings turn into strikeouts, and those radar-gun fastballs turn into walks and wild pitches. Baseball is hard enough to play as it is. Why make the game any harder than it has to be?
Master the fundamentals before you try to challenge yourself.
As a fielder, get your body in front of balls that you know you can get to. As a hitter, work on a short, compact and level swing. As a pitcher, work on hitting spots and throwing all of your pitches for strikes. The “sexier”, or advanced, plays will come over time. Once you have a solid grasp of the fundamentals, then you can move on to practicing the harder plays. The problem is that I don’t know if there are any baseball players out there that have a solid grasp of the fundamentals.
Even the professional baseball players, guys that get paid millions of dollars to play the game of baseball, don’t show great fundamentals. Every year, you see infielders/outfielders drop lazy fly balls or pop-ups because they tried to catch the ball with one hand. You see infielders have ground balls go between their legs because they didn’t get their gloves on the ground. Those were simple plays that were turned into errors (and may have cost their team the game) because they took fundamentals for granted. You can never practice the fundamentals too much, and fundamentals can never be stressed enough.
All age groups, from tee ball to the major leagues, need to get back to practicing the basic fundamentals because quite frankly, fundamentals are a forgotten element in the game today, but they are the most important element. After all, fundamentals is the foundation on which the rest of your baseball success is built.
