Mapping out Fall HS games?

Part of me wants everyone to get roughly the equal playing time so they can prove whether they belong or not but the other side of me says I know who the better players are and I am so dang competitive that even in fall I want to win games because to me winning breeds confidence in the team.

I am a former coach but not HS, I think for fall ball it would be about finiding out what you have. Certainly I would set up a pitching rotation and follow it no matter what is happening in a game. My thoughts are by pitch count versus innings, Though I have no doubts you would have to adjust a bit on fly with that. 

I think you are right in that you know who your better players are, but would like to find out who would be your "2nd" in a position and see what they can do and what you need to coach them on getting better at.

I am with you on winning, I am very competitve and I don't think you should accept losing all the time even in fall ball, you do need to set the tone and expectation of winning so I would think it is a balance of both. Just don't win at cost of finding out what you have in players and what they need to work on.

I do both.  For our first ten games everything is equal.  After that the coaching staff makes their evaluation and then for the next part of the fall season we play it out as if it were regular season.

We have a fall tournament at the end of the fall season and it is HS rules.  Usually I base that line up on what I saw during the regular season fall games.

I guess at least if everyone plays that will show who the good and bad players are.

I think most of the time one can tell just by looking at a kid whether he can play or not. Although a true'er test is real game situations.

Our fall ball is actually in the summer right after the HS season ends.  We mostly try to start figuring out who will be playing what positions to replace the outgoing seniors and get them used to playing together in those new spots.  We get a look at lots of JV kids who have a shot at coming up.  We get innings for pitchers we haven't seen or used much who may have to step in this coming season.  We also use it as continued teaching opportunities.  We certainly look for kids to play hard and compete but this is not the time to focus on winning.  Way too much work to be done on instructing and figuring out what we need to consider for next season.

Our fall league is pretty relaxed and the HS spring coaches can't coach in it so its more about the kids.  I'm coaching this fall and we have 3 teams from our school split up mostly by age but also by ability.  In our area fall is really about getting the young kids used to HS baseball and the older kids get more reps.  We typically bat the lineup of 12 and move kids around the field in spots they would like to work on. I told the kids nobody is winning a state title in the fall so its really their time to improve before spring.

You are correct.  I primarily do this so the stats can speak for themselves.  

I like the idea that everybody plays approx. the same amount of time. But I also recognize that some players really do work harder and deserve to be on the field full-time. 

Hard line to balance. We try our best. 

Originally Posted by soulslam55:

I like the idea that everybody plays approx. the same amount of time. But I also recognize that some players really do work harder and deserve to be on the field full-time. 

Hard line to balance. We try our best. 

In situations like fall ball, I too like to see everyone playing approximately the same amount of time. Here’s my difficulty with that. To me there’s a difference between the different phases of playing. “Playing” to me means on the field. One part of playing is being in a defensive position other than pitcher, another of course is pitching, the 3^rd part is batting, and the final part would be running the bases.

Trying to get everyone approximately the same number of plate appearances and is pretty simple. Every time the batter gets to the plate it’s a PA. Pitching is a bit more challenging, but to me, the equivalent of a batting PA is a batter faced, and that’s not too difficult to track either. Getting everyone opportunities to run the bases is a bit different because in order to run the bases a batter has to reach base. The problem is, reaching bases is something that happens a lot less than either PAs or BFs, so it’s difficult to get everyone opportunities.

That leaves actually “playing”, as in playing in the field as a position player. It’s simple for me during the regular season because it’s tracked automatically in my program. As long as I stay on top of the changes, I can show who’s “playing” the most and what position they’re playing. Unfortunately, in fall ball games which are often nothing more than scrimmages played with very loose substitution rules, it’s almost an impossible task to keep up with every substitution, so I seldom if ever track playing time.

My definition of playing time is as follows. Equal innings on the mound, equal innings in the field, equal PA.  I can't control if a kid isn't good enough to get on base enough times for me to see his base running skills.

Originally Posted by IEBSBL:

My definition of playing time is as follows. Equal innings on the mound, equal innings in the field, equal PA.  I can't control if a kid isn't good enough to get on base enough times for me to see his base running skills.

The coaches I’ve seen over the past decade and a half in fall ball use probably twice as many pinch runners than in the regular season. I’ve asked about it and been told they’re doing it to make sure they get a decent read on the base running skills of kids they don’t get to see run very often. I’ve never gotten the idea that anyone tied base running to hitting ability. Of course our coaches have been extremely aggressive on the bases and want to make sure they have plenty of players available to pinch run without having to worry about them having a brain fart and causing problems.

Tracking IPs and PAs is pretty simple. How do you track fielding time? It seems like innings is a pretty sloppy way to track fielding time the same way it is to track pitching. When I say sloppy, I mean it in the sense that batters is a much more accurate way to do it. It’s the same argument used for using pitch counts rather than IPs for limiting pitchers. 2 players could both play left field for 3 innings, but one could be out there for 20 batters while the other one’s out there for only 9. That’s hardly equal.

To tell the truth, if it were up to me I’d do everything using pitches as the time measuring metric, but while I could do it fairly easily because the computer would be doing it, it would be a real nightmare for most of the scoring apps and nearly impossible with only a pencil and scoresheet.