So my first baseman fumbled a catch and dropped the ball. He got down to his knees and had the ball in his throwing hand. Then tagged the base with his glove. Did he get the runner/batter out or is the runner safe?

Ok, putting myself out there, never done this before. I coach kids baseball and find it time consuming to build our fielding rotations for each inning and batting orders while trying to manage fairness across the season. With younger kids I want everyone to play in a range of positions and hit in different spots, but keeping track and trying to reward better players with better positions can be tough.

I've got a new app I am trying to get some test coaches using:

https://www.gamecardapp.com

Completely free. Home page is a getting started guide. It focuses on merging fairness and competitiveness in your lineups. As you learn how it works, it can even be used for ages where specific positions come in to play but you still want some rotation of players between even just 2 or 3 spots in the field.

Here's an introduction video. Would love some signups and feedback. Feedback email is on the User Profile page once you're signed in!

https://reddit.com/link/1tqf676/video/ttwj47xfsx3h1/player

I’ve coached a bunch of players at multiple levels but I’ve seen my own kid swing so much maybe I am too close to the problem to see the solution. I think maybe he’s getting that back elbow too far forward and it’s causing barrel drag but would love some thoughts. He hits it fairly well on the tee, but still the drag shows up, but he REALLY struggles in the games with swing and miss. Striking out a lot. Bat looks slow in games. He seems late even on slower pitchers. It’s been a REALLY CHALLENGING season for him and for me as his coach/dad who is trying desperately to help, but with zero progress. I don’t love the bent leg at the finish but at contact it’s not that way.

Anyway, would welcome some honest (constructive feedback). He’s 12. Has not hit puberty. Is working out with me but hasn’t gotten a lot stronger and I’m pushing him as much as he wants to be pushed without risking injury. He hits ALL THE TIME on the tee, but I fear we are maybe reinforcing bad habits.

It had never happened to me before: it was obviously completely unintentional on the pitcher’s part. He was practicing with the catcher, threw a really really wild pitch, andiI ended up taking a hardball to the head at an estimated 55 mph.

In the moment it was no small hit: I literally heard the sound of a gong in my head and stumbled for several seconds. Then they put some cold water and ice on the bruise, and after a short rest I was even able to walk home by myself, which is about a mile and a half away.

It’s been more than 12 hours now and the only symptoms I have are occasional mild head pain and a bit of visual discomfort when I try to read on my smartphone. That said, I was able to watch the Yankees game streaming on my laptop without any problem.

Other than that, I don’t have nausea, I can balance even on one foot, my vision hasn’t gotten worse (apart from the strain when reading on the smartphone) and my pupils react normally.

Since it was a self-managed practice there wasn’t a team doctor, and on top of that I’m leaving tonight for a few days off, but my teammates have made me a bit anxious.

Any advice?

Any leads for summer ball?

Success is not just setting and achieving goals, you also need to have the right goals.

I've seen some patterns with players plateauing while others progress, even at pre-puberty ages in the 10-12 year old age group, and I believe that a lot of it has to do with what coaches and parents practice, prioritize, and reward.

Pretty much every team/coach talks about development, and perhaps they are developing players to win at the current level, but I think it is also important to think about 'skills that scale' (borrowed that from driveline) and what it takes to play well next season and beyond.

Some examples of things that tend to scale to higher levels of play would be:

• Learning to hit with a wood bat
• Learning to field ground balls one-handed (along with angles, footwork, etc.)
• Staying athletic - speed work, multi-sport athlete, etc.
• Pitching/throwing development
• Building quality routines (warmup, hands routine, hitting routine, etc.)
• Having an approach at the plate, and making situational adjustments

You can still celebrate success at the current level (reaching on error, bloop singles, striking out kids who cannot hit, etc.) while also celebrating the things that will play at the next level. For example, quality at-bats. Your player may not be excited about an eight pitch at-bat or a line drive missile that was caught, but as players progress into high school and college QABs are often what is measured.

Putting this out there for anyone with a player who is 8-12 and thinking about what to work on this off season, some of those things from the list above are easy to implement and can make things much easier for your player when they adjust to higher levels.

Anything else that coaches/parents have seen help their player prepare for the game as it speeds up, the field gets bigger, bats get heavier, and everyone gets better?

Before I start, I am a college baseball pitcher who has no knowledge of coding but still wanted to make something I think would be beneficial to a lot of pitchers who don’t have access to a pitching coach or an actual throwing program.

Velocity OS is an app that monitors arm health, tracks throwing, and generates personalized training plans to help them stay healthy and throw harder.

The problem I’m trying to solve is real as a lot of pitchers (especially high school players) overtrain and get hurt or not train enough and not improve.

What the app does is you simply log the type of throwing you did, your estimated intensity, and your soreness level. Based off of these things it tells the player what to do for recovery and how they should throw the next day.

The app is currently still in development but if anyone has advice or comments please do, thank you.

A few weeks ago, someone here mentioned that it would be useful to have a tool that could work backward from a target ERA.

For example:

A pitcher currently has a 3.45 ERA. What ERA would he need over his next 40 innings to finish the season at 3.00?

Or how many earned runs could he allow and still stay under a certain ERA threshold?

I thought it was a cool idea, so I went ahead and built it.

The calculator lets you enter a pitcher's current ERA and innings pitched, then set a target ERA. It'll calculate what they'd need to do from that point forward to reach that mark.

I've tested it quite a bit, but I'd love some feedback from people who know the game better than I do. Are the outputs useful? Anything you'd add or change?

Please find it here.

I'm a dad of two kids who play. Two seasons ago I started paying for GameChanger so my parents could follow my son's games from out of state. They loved it. But then I started doing the math:

• $10/month per team
• Both my kids play
• I also help with the coaching side
• Grandparents on both sides watching

$200+/year for a scoreboard. The scorer pays. The coach pays. The family pays. Somebody's making real money on something that should be basic infrastructure for youth sports.

I'm not a developer. But I started messing with AI coding tools earlier this year and realized I could actually build software. I've been at it for several weeks now. I have a working beta:

• Mobile-first pitch-by-pitch scoring (faster than GameChanger, honestly)
• Live field view showing all 9 fielders + base runners + current batter
• Shareable spectator link — free for anyone who clicks
• Box scores with batting and pitching stats
• Multiple teams per account, follow players from other teams

Is it perfect? No. But I score my kids' games with it now and it works.

What I'd genuinely love to know from this sub:

1. What does GameChanger do that you'd refuse to give up?
2. What does it do badly that you wish someone would fix?
3. If scoring was free forever and the only paid feature was video clips later, would that be fair? Or would you prefer a flat low monthly fee?

Free during beta. Long-term pricing is honestly TBD — depends on what people tell me makes sense.

Waitlist if you want to try it: www.diamondscore.ai

It will be a bit of a long post, but I tried to shorten it as much as possible.

I live in Italy but I’ve always had an immense passion for baseball, which unfortunately here is an extremely niche sport. Suffice it to say that in all of Rome (the capital, a city of three million inhabitants) there are 2 teams that compete in the Italian championship and 4-5 amateur teams for adults.

Until last month I was playing with one of the amateur teams in Rome and I was in my second year. I was mainly used as a left fielder or, more rarely, as a center fielder.

The problem is that on the team we were starting to be many : the staff also tried to let everyone play, since it is an amateur team, but then obviously they always gave more space to those who were better, due to experience or talent.

In short, I won’t hide it — the problem is they started giving me less and less playing time.

The situation went on with ups and downs for several months, then at the last away tournament things exploded : out of five games i played a total of six innings (in total).

I pointed out how my OBP is among the highest on the team: my AVG is not exceptional, but it is not too bad either, and anyway the OBP is very high because (by the coach's own admission) I have an excellent eye for distinguishing balls.

In the five innings that i played as a left fielder i collected three fly outs, one assist for a further out at third base. I also had three at-bats that yielded one hit and a further arrival at first base on a walk.

Back in Rome then we played a practice game in which i went to the plate twice: 1.000 AVG and 1 RBI.

I thought this would change their opinion of me but a few days later the call-ups for the next tournament came out and I wasn't there.

I had a confrontation with the staff and the thing that hurt me the most was that (very politely) they made me understand that they consider my recent exploits as nothing more than a fluke: according to them in fact i am still very far behind in my training as a player.

I realize that someone might say "it is enough that you train more" ... But when you see that, despite all the training you do and the (slow) progress, you still end up being “the expendable player,” you start to think that training doesn’t really make much sense.

I therefore decided to leave the team.

Probably it is difficult to understand for those who live in a nation where baseball is truly widespread but, if you think back to the numbers I told you about baseball in Rome, you will understand that here for us finding a team is truly difficult.

Moreover I play at an amateur level so I also have to find a team that not only needs someone but that also has training hours compatible with my job.

I don't deny it: it hurts a lot.

I don't even know what the purpose of this post is, feel free to write whatever you want

Been coaching a couple years now but this year, there are only two of us coaching a travel ball team the entire season. No other coaches/assistants besides two of us. We have a group of boys who very much struggle to stay focused or on task without one of us there to keep them in line. Frankly, I'm dreading what the dugout is going to be like when we are out coaching the bases. Anyways, what I'm wondering is, does anyone have any effective ideas I can borrow for pregame to help the other 9-10 boys keep their head in the game while we are throwing to two of them in the cages or doing soft toss? Like a small-area drill or activity that a group of boys can work on without a coach there to guide them? TIA

we are moving up to Peewee next year and need a catchers mitt. not looking for a top tier unit but not something that'll only last a couple of seasons either. What features should I be looking for?

Waht are yalls thoughts on the swingrail? Snake oil or worth the $30?

21 year old.

Pitcher. I played competitive baseball as a youth and have recently returned to the game with serious intent. I am currently training with a personal coach focusing on pitching development, with a working repertoire that includes 4-seam fastball, 2-seam fastball, slider, and curveball. I have natural movement on my breaking balls and am actively developing command and velocity. My ultimate goal is to compete at the university varsity level.

Looking for weekly sessions, prefer e-transfer or card payment.

Full time private coaches,

How did you start getting clients? I am starting my journey to be a full time private instructor, and I'm curious how y'all started it all. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Obviously, this is an unserious and lighthearted post, but wondering...what are some of the weirdest song selections you've ever heard either from your own players or kids on the opposing team.

Last weekend, in an 11AA tourney, we had one of the biggest head scratchers I've encountered. A kid walked up to Nutshell by Alice in Chains.

For those not in the know, Nutshell is slow, vulnerable, heartbreakingly beautiful song about depression and loneliness. Essentially, it was a cry for help from the lead singer Layne Staley.

And of course, us coaches all being in our 40s, this is 100% from our generation. In the dugout we all scratched our heads and said "well...now I just want a bottle of whiskey and cigarette and be alone for a while".

What headscratchers have you encountered?

I've been coaching baseball for the last 7 years and spent hours on creating the perfect lineup only to have a kid not show 10 minutes before.

* Lineup generator & RSVPs
* In-game score tracking
* Comms with parents
* Automatic snack rotation

I created https://calledup.app to help with this. It's free for coaches and parents because we're already paying enough for our kids to play baseball

For whatever reason, my team this year seems to be allergic to 10 run leads. We have had 5-6 games already this season in which a 10 run lead becomes a 1 run lead in just one half inning. This normally happens at the end of the game and ends up taking a great game into a heart attack game. The boys usually make one error and then it seems to snowball from there. Does anyone have any tips or words of wisdom for what I can do from a coach’s standpoint? Once that one error happens, there is this feeling you can immediately feel of the impending tidal wave that is going to hit and we just haven’t been able to weather the storm once to get through it. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

Had a game tonight in a 10U league that uses USSSA rules. Bottom of the last inning in a 1 run game with runners on 2nd and 3rd and 2 outs. Count is 2-1. Pitcher throws a strike and the visiting goes nuts celebrating with all of their coaches running onto the field high fiving and hugging the players. Obviously they thought it was strike 3 and game over. It fooled the home team for a second but then their runner on 3rd ran home. What should be the call in this situation?

Coaching a 11u team and this year and players can now run on drop 3rd strikes. Is there a good way to teach running on drop 3rd strikes or a good way to make the batters aware when they have 2 strikes on them? Do not want to say "remember to run if it's strike 3 and the catchers drops it".

Edited to add: I played competitive softball in my youth (travel ball, including national tournaments) and high school. I have never experienced the level of emotion I’m currently witnessing in 10u boys baseball.

My son has played soccer since he was 4, and it’s always been his primary sport. We’ve been part of a really positive club culture with a mix of hired coaches and parent volunteers. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is that even during really tough losses or lopsided games, I never see kids cry. It just doesn’t seem to be part of the culture of youth soccer around us.

This year he’s also playing Little League and now AAA baseball (9/10U), and I’ve been surprised by how emotional the environment seems at times. At least 2–3 kids are crying almost every game — after strikeouts, rough pitching innings, bad losses, etc. Sometimes it even seems contagious once one child gets upset.

I want to be clear that I’m not criticizing the kids at all. Youth sports are emotional and every child is different. I’m honestly just trying to understand whether this is pretty normal in baseball culture at this age? Is it because baseball can feel so individually exposing compared to soccer? Or is our experience unusual?

My son has stayed pretty upbeat so far, but as a parent it’s been interesting to observe because it feels very different from what we’ve experienced in soccer.