quote:
Originally posted by smalltown:
Thanks scorekeeper, as a stat junkie I will try it out. I see your boy improved with age. Did you have to interfere on those weeks where he was obviously being used too much and if so how did you approach it.
If you really enjoy stats and would like to compare what’s goin on at your school with what I’m seeing at ours, you’re certainly welcome to peek at
http://infosports.net/scorekeeper/I’ll normally have the up-to-date stats there for the current season, and can easily upload stuff from past seasons.
But even though that PAP is a great way to keep tabs on P’s, there’s other things that need to be looked at too. FI, go to
http://infosports.net/scorekeeper/images/pitall1.pdfYou’ll see page one is pretty much normal pitching stats, but I spend a lot of time looking at page 2.
I don’t know that I HAD to interfere, but there certainly were times when I put down a not so subtle foot. But what happened with us definitely wasn’t normal. We had a war going on from the time my boy was getting ready to start his Fr season, until the day he threw his last game.
My boy and most of the others did everything they were asked to do and more, but the V coach we had was one of those strange guys who would grudgingly give credit when he was forced to, but most of the time everything that went right was because of him, and everything that went wrong was the fault of the players, and he never hesitated to let people know.
But like I said, our relationship to the coach was very strange indeed. He was basically a bully and a huge proponent of negative re-enforcement and punishment. Although I’ve always recognized how important baseball can be, nothing about it has ever been life or death to me, and I’ve always tried to keep in mind that the players are literally kids. Not a good combination.
For the most part, I let the boy do what he wanted as far as pitching went, and in retrospect, that was very wrong! He’d go out there if he was dying and never complain. One day he was throwing and it was one of those “meaningful games”. He was doing well, but the game was close and I could see he was laboring.
After the 4th I asked him if he was ok and he said yes. I asked him after the 5th, and after the 6th when I saw his fielders have to help him off the field, I told him he needed to shut it down, but he insisted he was ok. He went out and threw the 7th, won the game, then collapsed after the last pitch because he couldn’t stand up. His back hurt him so bad, he had to be carried off the field, and it ended up that he couldn’t walk right for 2 days.
Of course a week later he said he was fine and ready to throw again, and like a jackass I let him, but I’ve kicked myself many a time because I was just flat out wrong. I was so intent on seeing him succeed, I didn’t remember that he was still my child and I wasn’t supposed to let him put himself in that kind of harm’s way.
But the thing that I think people should find really frightening is, my son was THE MAN, and yet he was still doing stupid things to keep himself on the field. The kids who weren’t so lucky, would really do stupid things! I saw players out there playing literally with tape keeping them from bleeding like stuck pigs. One boy played 2 weeks with 3 broken fingers, another played 2 games with a fractured leg, and let me tell you, that there wasn’t a game or a practice where at least 2 of our regular P’s had arms so sore they’d have tears in their eyes when they were throwing.
No matter what people think, kids that age seldom are able to process things in the same way an adult does, and the guy who you count on to keep them out of trouble, the coach, sometimes can’t do it because the kids don’t tell them what’s goin’ on for fear they’ll loss a start or a spot.
