I have told this story for a while and will again
my first year of college one of our coaches took us aside and explained that we have 2 of the best pitchers in conference and we will get a lot of groundballs.....but that was all we had, so we had to focus even more on defense for the one and two to keep the pitch counts down because they carried the load, and then to get as many outs for the committee
we spent at least 30 min a day working on the basics and then 30 min after practice...we looked into it and I believe we led the nation in double plays (d3) We would not move on until every feed was perfect, it was to the point where we actually did it blindfolded
I dont care who you are, if you give any team extra outs your not going to win...I dont care how good of a hitting team you have, your still going to make outs 65 percent of the time....as if you practice and preach team defense, you could have a fielding percentage of 95-98 percent as apposed to a BA of .350.
As bad as this sounds, I dont think many players today are willing to work on their own or have knowledge of the game and how it was played. I have heard many coaches say "I dont have ball players, I have kids who play baseball" I almost lost it when I called a kid explaining there would be a makeup game on a saturday and he replied "o man, i wanted to BBQ" I would have and still would be excited about that. Trust me, i know there are a lot of kids out there with a burning passion for the game and the knowledge, but its not constant" I was very impressed with the kids I coached in the fall, they had talent, they were coachable and they knew how to play the game (Mehan (Carmel) Javers (SC North) Fitch (Batavia) Pitlock ( DGS) and Tropp (Woodstock)) I am looking forward to having a team again this fall for that reason.