PGStaff posted:
…If all of this sounds like I'm on both sides of the fence about this, it is because I am. I do think in a few isolated cases, coaches are calling pitches just because others are doing it and some have no idea of what they are doing. Might as well be pulling the pitch call out of a hat. However, especially at the higher levels, there are coaches that are great at it. All those that call pitches, just like all those that throw pitches, are not created equal.
Very very true! And something that skews any argument on this topic in a forum like this is that those posters who have been around the longest are generally the best examples of “good” coaches and coaching practices. The problem is, when talking about ALL HS’s, we’re talking about more than 30,000 teams. That makes it ludicrous to believe ALL teams where coaches are calling pitches are doing it the way the best coaches here say they do it!
No matter what anyone wants to believe, there is an “average” coach just like there’s an average player or an average anything else for that matter. So even if the average coach is pretty darn good, that’s gonna leave a lot of cases where what people see isn’t very good, so it’s not at all unreasonable to believe someone can easily come across a program where things aren’t being done the best way possible.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole lot of top notch coaches out there doing things the right way for the right reason, but it does make it prudent to believe all the good reasons for doing it and the way it should be done aren’t happening everywhere. So it shouldn’t be considered heresy or some kind of insult for someone to not just go with the flow.