@cabbagedad, great advice, thanks. He is a primary C, but has seen time at nearly every position through the past season or two, and has always tried to balance practice time at places other than behind the plate, (30/70ish during team practices, and I break out the fungo when he says he wants more grounders). He attends one of the 3 largest schools in the state, with a championship-contender team, and he knows from older players that he needs to be ready to play where they need him. He will always take playing time at his least favorite position over the bench (or the bleachers). He wants to play, period. In whatever form that takes.
@cabbagedad & @2022NYC, he does like swimming a lot, but it’s definitely his 2nd choice. His aversion to doing it was due to his concern that it wouldn’t allow him to work on baseball. We promised him that if he was willing to put in the time after school and swim, he would have the opportunity to work on the baseball skills. As of today, he’s happy with his decision (aside from the aforementioned issue of missing workouts), and he says he wants to swim again this summer and next fall. And he’s talked about wanting to find a college where he can both swim and play baseball. But if he ends up having to make a choice, he’ll cross that bridge when he comes to it.
And as for throwing arm health, he is excelling at backstroke, so we have concluded that he’s unwinding each pitch and throwdown slowly but surely 😜!
In all seriousness, he is no stranger to arm injury, as a 13U coach once had him catch a full game, then throw 125 pitches in the next game, resulting in a case of LL elbow (yes, this was back when we were even more clueless than we are now, and no, we will never play with that guy again). We have both read tons and tons about it, and are trying to balance it a lot as a result. He does say that once he started throwing again after a dead period, his arm felt absolutely amazing, and better than it ever had before. So barring bad luck, he’ll go through HS and summer ball, then shut down for at least 6 weeks before he gets back in a pool.