PGStaff posted:Legal or not, why not do it the same way every professional and college team does it? What about the outfield, they never throw the ball to each other in the games.
You might want to be careful with the use of the word "every." What got me thinking about this was how Dallas Baptist, a pretty well-coached D1 school does it. They take the groundball from 1b, then turn and face the plate, with ball in glove, and simulate a groundball from the plate and make the throw to first. I like that, just trying to find out if there's a way to improve upon it.
Again, not dying to discuss coaching philosophy on the umpire board, but if the point is solely to keep the arm and body loose, why even roll groundballs? Why not just throw it around the horn the whole time? Or have the infielders jog to the foul pole and then play catch? Because that's not how it's always been done. I'm guessing at one point 100 years ago, the infielders may have just watched the pitcher throw. Then one day someone thought "why don't we play catch?" Then someone thought "why not use this time to roll groundballs?" I don't know how it all went down, but I promise you Abner Doubleday didn't put an in-between innings warmup routine down in writing.
One of the worst things in coaching, or any leadership, is doing something a certain way because that's how it's always been done. Why not have a kid make every rep "game-like" if it's easily done. Or even better, why have a kid take a non-game like rep that could ingrain bad habits if it's avoidable. This idea may be stupid, and we may try it and think "screw it, the old way was batter." So what if we do? Nothing hurt.
FWIW, we have our OF roll groundballs to each other and charge them and make a throw to their partner between innings. When we throw down we have our SS and 2b start in position and cover the bag instead of standing on it lazily. We played 5 games this weekend, 7 innings each. That's 35 game-like reps covering the bag on steal attempts that my (very young) MIF got that other teams didn't.
Will it make a difference? Hell I don't know. But I know that it can't hurt.