phillyinNJ posted:baseballmom posted:RKBH
Coaches don't play favorites. They can't afford to.
Coaches DO play their best 9, those players that hit, steal, score runs & add K's. It is a competition & the Coach that puts up Wins, by utilizing his best players, keeps his job.
Being a "student of the game" would include more batting practice, even if it's on his own. He's got to out perform those that out performed him.
JMO
I think this is probably true in college, but not as much so in HS...while the coaches job is to WIN in HS as well, they have more flexibility to play jimmy over johnny for one reason or another...and its not always because jimmy will help them put a W in the winning column.
Some HS coaches definitely do play favorites. But most who do are unaware of doing so. They tend to tell themselves comforting self-deceptive stories -- just like everybody else.
Baseball is not like my sport, wrestling. You think you can beat the guy ahead of you on the depth chart in Wrestling? Well, you challenge him to a wrestle off. Winner starts. Period. Who gets the call is settled on the mat - mano-a-mano. No ifs ands or buts. No possibility of coach playing favorites.
Unfortunately, there is no equivalent of the wrestle-off in baseball. Especially not in HS, where you get, what 30 games or so and 100 AB's or so to show your stuff?
Coaches like to say that the players write the line-up. For the most part that may be true -- since some guys obviously have more talent and drive than other guys. But shortness of the HS season does tend to put a premium on coaches' gut instinct and less of a premium on objective evidence. In professional baseball you get so much more data on what players can and can't do. In HS, you get only a teeny-tiny bit of data in comparison.
So if you are initially named a bench guy in HS baseball, it's a kiss of death, almost impossible to overcome. You can go weeks without an AB. And then when you do get your chance it's like do or die. On the other hand if you are initially named a starter, coach is going to give you a much longer hook. That's just human nature. Built in confirmation bias and built in endowment effects.
I repeat an extreme example. A kid on my son's HS team was first team all league sophomore year. Everybody thought he was headed for something special. But he literally sucked both junior and senior years -- though he did have brief hot streaks each year. But he was untouchable. Coach trusted him, kept thinking the kid would find it and return to his sophomore year form. Never happened. The kid once struck out like 24 times in 30 AB's and hit under .200 for a huge stretch of the season. But he started every single game. Never even got moved from the 3 hole in the line-up. The coach was "convinced," on the basis of no evidence, that the kid was his best option.
Guys behind the kid busted their butts trying to take the kids spot -- cause they could see that he wasn't bringing it. But the coach just kept trusting his gut. Two years later, some of my sons former teammates still talk about that - they were doing so just the other day at our house.
Found out, from that same conversation, that the former assistant coach (great guy, great coach, coached my son in travel during his last two years in HS) saw what was happening and actually refused to come back this past year, and signed up to help at our bitter rival school, of all things, partly because the head coach at my son's school was so headstrong and just would not listen to his staff about who deserved more playing time and who deserved less.