Is baseball complex or just instinct?

I coached baseball, softball and boys and girls basketball for years at the rec and travel level. I've always said I prefer teaching baseball/ softball but enjoy coaching basketball games more. Baseball is about being fundamentally sound and prepared. Basketball is a high speed chess match. Instincts are important in any sport. The fundamentals of baseball are complex to teach and learn properly. It's not complex to coach. By the MLB level it's more about managing personalities and playing time (for ego purposes) than the game.

I think the guy is a fool and proved that his occupation is a waste of time and is ruining sports because everyone thinks they are a genius who can critique anything a coach does.  You can't have a simple answer that baseball is easier than football or basketball or soccer or whatever sport.  Each sport is different and have their own strategies.  I was an offensive coordinator in HS football for 3 years and no way in the world would I ever consider myself on Belicek's level.  I was a HS head baseball coach for 9 years and it doesn't mean I can sit down with LaRussa and have an equal conversation.  But you also can't have those guys and step right in and take over my teams and make game time decisions on the fly better than me.  Reason is.....it's because I know my guys and they don't.  The players are what makes coaching any sport difficult - knowing who is good at what and what their weaknesses are to help them avoid failure.  It's not easy and it take someone who understands the sport (no matter what it is) to know strategy, personnel and make an informed decision on what to do.  Hispanics can do this, whites can do this, blacks can do this, asians can do this and anybody I'm forgetting can do this.  You have to learn the game as best you can and learn your personnel as best you can.  It's not easy for any sport.

 

Teaching the game is fun and only people who know the sport can do it at a high level.  The more / better you know it puts you at the level of Belicek and LaRussa.

 

The guy is an idiot and was trying to stir up something because that's his job.  He wasn't smart enough to realize you can't insult a group of people and get away with it.  Similar to Jimmy the Greek back in the 80's when he got ran off TV.

I hate when people say "Baseball is a simple game".  In many ways it is so very complex.  The old saying 'know what you are.going to do with the ball before it comes to you'.  Think about how many scenarios you need to prep for.  My son is a 1B so let's just take that considered an easy position.  What do we have to consider?  What bases are occupied, how many outs, speed of runners/batter, score, inning, how good is next batter, field condition, where I may have to go with the ball after getting the out, what if he's safe, is anybody running on the pitch?  And probably more but for the sake of time...  Now we actually get to the part where.the ball is hit to you!  Is it to your right, left, right at you?  Hit hard, slow roller?  Do you have to angle back?  Is it on the ground, line drive or pop up?  Is pitcher covering?  And on and on.  Baseball is very complex and 'instincts' really have to be taught over time.  Which is why youth baseball is failing our kids in so many ways.

Originally Posted by 2020dad:

I hate when people say "Baseball is a simple game".  In many ways it is so very complex.  …

 

In many ways baseball IS a very simple game, and in many it’s very complex, but the same can be said for tiddlywinks or mumlypeg! Joe Jackson is a pretty good example of an adult not needing to be a member of M.E.N.S.A. in order to play it at a very high level. And since there are literally millions of little kids playing the game that don’t understand the complexities but are still having fun, I think it’s safe to say understanding all the things that could be complex about it don’t mean the game itself is complex.

 

 

       
       
I should probably know better than get in this debate but...  just because the game has had some players who are very talented but YOU consider slow, or because kids all over play the game does not change the complexities of the game itself.  And by the way these kids are making mistakes every day.

Originally Posted by 2020dad:

I should probably know better than get in this debate but...  just because the game has had some players who are very talented but YOU consider slow, or because kids all over play the game does not change the complexities of the game itself.  And by the way these kids are making mistakes every day.

 

Why is it that even though I acknowledged the game can be both simple and complex, you chose to take it as me only saying it was simple?

 

Are there positions in baseball that take a very deep knowledge level to succeed, like GM or Manager? Absolutely! But does that mean every player at every defensive position, sitting on the bench, batting, or running the bases has to have that same depth of knowledge? Absolutely NOT!

 

The game of baseball is based on 3 simple everyday things. Throwing something, catching something, and hitting something with an implement of some kind. Those are all basic skills cavemen needed to survive. Can each be complex in itself? You bet! But does that make the game complex? No!

 

You want me to look at the game only from your perspective and I won’t do that. I have my own perspective, and it doesn’t see baseball as only being some intricate and complex way to pass time.

 

And by the way, the very best ML players make mistakes every day too. So what? Is that supposed to mean the game’s complex or does it just mean it’s difficult to execute baseball skills at a consistently high level?

Baseball, like just about anything else, can be as complex or as simple as one wants it to be. . . . or needs it to be. 

So the average baseball beat writer could draw up the pitching strategy and defensive positioning plan for his home team's next game?  

 

Just my opinion but it appears to me:

 

Coaching Baseball = 85% complex, 15% instinctual.

Playing Baseball = 85% instinctual, 15% complex.

 

And it's the rare player that can truly cross the line effectively into coaching at the higher levels.

Originally Posted by Swampboy:

So the average baseball beat writer could draw up the pitching strategy and defensive positioning plan for his home team's next game?  

 

Why do you think that couldn’t happen? Don’t you think a “beat writer” could look at the 25 man roster and pick 8 position players and a pitcher? As for a pitching “strategy”, don’t you suppose a ML pitcher and catcher could somehow manage to play without having a play given to them by the manager? And as for a defensive strategy, don’t you think ML players have a good enough idea about how to play their defensive position in order to play a game against another ML team without having signals sent to them from the bench?

 

Heck, when I was 8 years old I could’ve made a lineup putting players in defensive positions and picked a pitcher well enough for the Indians to have been competitive. Would they have done as well as they did? Not very likely, but that doesn’t mean the only way to do those things was so complex no one other than the manager or one of his assistants could do it.

 

Like Truman said, Baseball, like just about anything else, can be as complex or as simple as one wants it to be. . . . or needs it to be.

 

At the layman's level baseball isn't hard to understand and discuss. Maybe it's because until recent years every kid played baseball at least until age twelve. In baseball scoring involves advancing counter clockwise around the bases. Football is very complex. Basketball, hockey and soccer have fundamental rotations that someone who doesn't know the sport wouldn't even recognize.

 

im not saying baseball is a simple sport. But at the layman's level it is less complex than other sports.

Stats, 

 

Once again, you distort what I said and react to your distortion as if it were my comment. 

 

I wasn't talking about making up the starting line up. I was talking about knowing enough about how effectively your team's pitcher throws all of his pitches and how the particular batters he will face that night handle those pitches to call the right pitches and put your defensive players in positions that maximize the chance of getting outs based on knowledge of where these particular batters are likely to hit the pitches your pitcher throws to the locations he is throwing them.

 

There is a vast difference between telling players to go out and play and planning your team's approach to the game in a manner that increases your chance of winning a closely contested game involving 50 of the top 750 players in the world--and doing so in the context of a 162-game season. 

 

No, you couldn't have done that when you were 8. You can't do it now. Neither can I. Neither can the typical sports reporter.

 

A typical baseball reporter who thinks he can participate in a "real baseball argument" that Tony LaRussa considers meaningful is delusional. That he can imagine such a scenario says more about the demeanor of the particular baseball and football coaches he mentioned than the relative complexity of the sports they coach.

 

 

I have been very blessed to have access to some outstanding coaches in my time.  My mentor won several hundred HS games.  I used to get to talk to another coaching legend in our state.  I have experienced just the opposite when talking to first year new coaches at 300 student HS.  The one thing I have always marveled in is the differences in the ways that all of these guys think.  Baseball is a great game that can be, "dumbed down" or a complex as you want to make it.  That is a part of what makes the game so fun.  I can watch a MLB game and manage my Cardinals in the way that I would have wanted in my head while seeing what those on the field do.  Sometimes I'm right and some times I'm wroooo  I'm wrooo I'm not right. 

Son is home from college.  We're sitting here watching Yanks v Rangers on ESPN.  4-2 getting late in the game.  Fly ball hit down right field line.  Choo dives and comes up short.  The moment the ball gets by Choo, son states "stupid, nobody out, runner on first, ball toward the line where you don't have backup.  bad decision."  He has that sort of situational awareness and is able to make the right decisions in-game.  The average reporter MAY be able to recognize this after the fact but stick him in the OF and see if he makes the right mental decisions in that split second as he is reading the fly ball and determining whether he can get to it.

Originally Posted by CoachB25:

I have been very blessed to have access to some outstanding coaches in my time.  My mentor won several hundred HS games.  I used to get to talk to another coaching legend in our state.  I have experienced just the opposite when talking to first year new coaches at 300 student HS.  The one thing I have always marveled in is the differences in the ways that all of these guys think.  Baseball is a great game that can be, "dumbed down" or a complex as you want to make it.  That is a part of what makes the game so fun.  I can watch a MLB game and manage my Cardinals in the way that I would have wanted in my head while seeing what those on the field do.  Sometimes I'm right and some times I'm wroooo  I'm wrooo I'm not right. 

 

To me, everything’s in the perspective. The coach of our current team is looking at things very basically and simply because of the state of the program. 2 years ago that same coach at was an assistant on a team in the top 100 in the country, and the mindset was entirely different.

 

I remember when my boy was just old enough to swing a blowup bat. I toss him floating blowup balls and he’d try to figger out how to make that bat hit that ball. He learned to play catch as I’d sit on the floor and roll the ball to him. It would take him 2 or 3 tries to grab it, and once he did, it took a couple tries to even let it go, let alone throw it. That’s about as simple as it gets, but it was easy to see that every time we did it he was getting better at it, and slowly the game got more complex.

 

When I was a kid, most kids who had a favorite team weren’t thinking about all the mini-moves and micro-decisions the manager had to make. They knew 9 guys need to be in the lineup. They knew the guy who hits the most HRs will likely be in the #3 or 4 spot, and the weakest hitters would be at the bottom of the order. They also knew who played every position and who the best pitchers were, and from that they could easily make a lineup.

 

Unlike so many of today’s fans, just about every kid in our neighborhood had some kind of baseball board game where the players picked the teams, made the lineups, and had to use strategy to win the game. Mine was “All Star Baseball”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Star_Baseball

 

I had leagues set up, made trades, played games, kept stats and standings, and even had a World Series at the end of the season. So by the time I started playing organized baseball, I already knew much more than the basics of the game, and that was “normal”. I don’t see that being true anymore. Many kids today never play baseball in any form other than organized ball where adults do everything as far as organization and administration, and kids who missed that growing up would of course not believe anyone other than a ML manager could possibly do even the most basic things needed to play a game. Like I said, it’s all in the perspective.