Team fielding

A few things I emphasize with infielders include:
- Proper fielding position with knees bent, feet not too wide, toes straight ahead, and hands out in front of the body to help with range and vision
- Be low enough to "see the bottom of the ball."
- Field the ball on the middle-left side of body and snatch hands to the ear to get arm into throwing position.
- Proper footwork; right foot in front of left, toes toward target, momentum should carry fielder through the throw toward the target.

We work on shorthops, backhands, and slow rollers daily. Middle infielders also use a four corners drill to practice double play feeds. First base works daily on scoops.

My favorite team drill is something I call a "Perfect Game." The team starts in the dugout and sprints to their position. I then hit fungos to random players, making each position react to the hit. We add baserunners, etc. to vary situations. When an error occurs, physical or mental, we will sprint back to the dugout and start over for that inning. Mental errors may include missing cuts, throwing to the wrong base, not executing a double cut, not communicating, etc.

I'm interested to see what other coaches have to say!

Good stuff I am interested also. We are not getting very many hits and this is an awful important topic

Texas Christian University has a great DVD on infield done by Asst. Todd Whitting. We go to a clinic there each year, this is the first year they offered the DVD. We bought it to show more visuals to our kids, have cut errors in half this year. Really breaks fielding down to simple things, but things you may think your kids know. They have several DVDs available, tremendous staff at TCU.

Wow,land,that is great stuff. Like the hustle, team work and the accountability.

How do you teach the fielding process for infielders?
We teach our players to hinge or pick through the ball instead of funnel.

How often to you do position specific drills and what are they?
We do them much more often at the start of the year than later.
We break the fielding process down step by step. We use a partner to roll the ball from about 10’
1. The fielding position
2. Middle picks and flip the ball back to their partner with the glove.
3. Middle pick and take the ball to a throwing position
4. 1-3 + footwork.
5. 1-4 + approach and throw.

What type of team drills/ practice plans do you have?
In a typical practice we do:
20 mins of individual defense
30 mins of team defense (pick-offs, run downs, bunt coverage)
50 mins of hitting
This does not include warm up before and we usually do 21 outs or another some other aspect to end practice.

How would you handle a team that goes along playing the game then just implodes for an inning and now is becoming a habit?

We had a saying one year when that was a problem when I first took over this program…”Kill the clowns”. That was in reference to not letting the circus get started. If we booted a ball we made sure to get our feet back under us in order to make a good throw. We let them know that it was ok to make an error on a play but not 2. We also pushed that if we made a mistake, we needed to do something to make up for it (pick-off, double play, etc).

If you start at the beginning we had a down to up philosophy. Players should be fielding about 80%+ of a 90 minute practice. That means they each hit about 10 minutes or about 30-50 swings in 5-8 swing chunks max. Any more and they tire and they get bad habits and reinforce them.

The core teaching point was get your fanny down, glove in the dirt and play up from there. Never stab down to the ball. What we had a 3 step drill:

1) Put a 6" by 6" piece of plywood on the glove hand strapped with a rubber or bungee type cord. Start rolling balls from 15-20' in front of players and make them soften the glove hand and secure the ball the throwing hand and then move into throwing position 20-25 reps per infielder rotating by position.

2) Back up 10' do the same drill with bare hands to get them to catch the ball cleanly with the glove hand again 20-25 reps.

3) Get gloves and do infield 15 reps throwing to 1st and 5-6 to second per player. Focus on accurate throws in this phase as well.

While this is going on hit fungos to the OF. About half of that time they should just make good throws to 2nd base the other half drop balls in a bucket so you don't wear out arms.

If you have 2 infielders for each position it takes about 30-40 minutes if you keep it moving. Do it every practice. Within 2 weeks or about 6 practices you will see results. Once the season starts you may choose to reduce reps to add time to other areas that might be presenting problems such as run downs, cut offs or pick offs.

Get your pitchers to throw low strikes and dare teams to get 3 hits to score runs. Hold good teams to 4-5 runs and weaker ones to 2 or less and you'll get the W's.

Every day when I was coaching at the collegiate level I would have the team warmup, stretch, etc. then I would break them off into what we called drill series. Pitchers work on foot work, picks, pfp's. Catchers work on foot work, blocking, popups where I stand behind them, hit the ball up, and they have to locate the ball, clear the mask, and turn to the proper position to catch the ball, also have them in their stance, stand behind them roll a ball in front, left, right side of them and have them find the ball, call inside or outside, and throw the ball to first. Another good drill I do for blocking with the catchers is stand at the mound, have the catcher in their stance, and hit fungo's at them. This drill is amazing, and gets the fear of being hit with the ball out of them very quickly.

For infielders, 1st basemen together, middle infielders together, and 3rd basemen together. Start with their gloves off, work on rollers fielding from the ground up, coming through the ball, proper foot work, staying low and firing a strike to 1st base. Also working on flipping the ball in the DP situation, pivots, working on always keeping the feet moving at the bag, work on slow rollers coming in, balls in the hole with your backhand, and balls up the middle. 3rd Baseman work on fielding the slow roller, charging the ball and throwing on the run, work on backhand, work on read and react bunts.

Outfielders work on balls over the shoulder to the left, and right. Work on pursuit angles, crow hops, coming through the ball, fielding the ball on the lines, etc..

These are just a few little things I had my guys do.