Thinking Fool

I find it hard to believe that the worst person on the team wasnt thinking fool himself.

Why do you assume my dad wasn't both the yellee and the yeller? Or have you not seen A Beautiful Mind?

Fool just poked yo' ass, Ben.

When I coached similar teams I rarely had parents yelling at their own kids. Sometimes stuff like "back elbow up" to the hitter or "you got him" to the pitcher (in the meantime I was encouraging my players to Cadillac to first on any single and to stare at hitters after striking them out).

The real problem I had was parents yelling at me. As Fool said, it was usually the parents of the bad players, upset that their kid wasn't getting enough playing time. I often had to explain to parents that "this isn't basketball", meaning that baseball does not allow for free substitution. Thus playing the bad players force a coach into a difficult conundrum -- do you play the bad players early and get them out, possibly leaving the good players a huge hole out of which to dig, or bring them in late to choke away a win?

I usually chose door number three -- use the bad players only in blowouts. Sometimes one of the bad players could run, or could only field but couldn't hit at all. The fast guys could be used as pinchrunners provided I had someone else to bring in to hit and field (my best team had about 11 or 12 players that could be used in actual strategic maneuvers, so this was possible). I was fond of the defensive substitution late in games that we led; one player probably hit .125 over his four-year career with me but was a good glove man and could pitch a little.

The defensive substitutions are rarely the "bad players." The bad players generally can't do anything, and they come in four types: [1] good attitude / good parents. These are the best. The kids aren't that good, they know they aren't that good, but they are good kids and you want to get them in for their good behavior and commitment to the team. Their parents don't complain (or never go to games). You love these.

[2] good attitude / bad parents. The worst situation I was ever in involved one of these. I had a player who was just a great kid, very polite, worked hard, etc., he just wasn't particularly good. Okay on defense but could not hit a lick. Late in the year (including 3 playoff games) we got into a skein of one-run games. We won all but one, usually against superior opponents, but this required playing almost no substitutes. After the game, an insane stepfather came up to me and I thought he was going to hit me. (I had one arm in a cast from a run-in with a bookie or something.) It would not have been good. The crazy SOB wrote a letter to the editor about me later that week which was filled w/ the usual platitudes about how baseball should be just a bunch of kids playing and not keeping score (yeah, tons of kids would sign up for THAT). I responded with my own letter a week later that showed them to be crazy moonbats.

[3] bad attitude / good parents. Rare.

[4] bad attitude / bad parents. Usually one happens because of the other; this is the most prevalent of bad player. Player and parents constantly demanding playing time. These kids usually get tortured in practice as a result -- forced to catch the star pitcher with no gear, run 50 laps in mid-July, or have the coach hit balls as hard as he can at him at the hot corner. Good fun for all.

The Llamoo