Logic say that practice makes you better. If you practice hitting, you become a better hitter. If you practice pitching, you become a better pitcher. And so forth. It’s logical. But is it true? Not always. Maybe not even most of the time in baseball.
No practice in adult or semi-pro baseball
As a kid, I always practiced. But when I played hardball as an adult (semi-pro and adult baseball) in the eighties and nineties, my teams generally did not practice. At first, I thought that was crazy. So did all the other new guys to the team. But it was very hard to have a practice because adults have varying work schedules, as well as wives and kids and so forth. So we simply did not practice.
We played double headers on Sundays year round. (I am in California.) Did we stink from lack of practice? No. We occasionally played high school baseball teams or American Legion teams, and we generally beat them. This, in spite of the fact that they practiced incessantly and we never practiced. Hmmmmm.
Little practice in the Majors
Are there any other baseball teams that do not practice? You bet. Major League teams in season do not practice much. They just play games. When I coached a 13-year-old minors team, I had to cancel practice because of poor attendance. I believe all the other teams in our league did the same. How did we play? Just fine. I do not remember our record, but I believe we were above .500 and we came within two runs of beating the league champion in the playoffs. Sandlot baseball teams, which are rare now, but were common in my 1950’s youth and before, generally did not practice. We just played. Not practicing sounds like heresy. But it is, in fact, a long baseball tradition and the rule where the players are adults or they are kids without adult supervision.
Practice made me worse
Let’s look at the other end of the spectrum. Early in my adult playing career, I used to go to a batting cage almost every day. It was expensive and time-consuming, so I bought my own pitching machine and practiced like crazy in my backyard. I also bought a Swing Rite batting tee and hit 100 balls a day off it using the perfect form I had learned in a number of clinics and batting camps I attended.
So my hitting got much better, right? Nope. In fact, I hit better my first year in adult baseball, before I took the clinics and got all the cage time, than I did after all the instruction and practice. My swing when I hit better was “wrong.” When my swing was “right,” I hit worse.
Bad instruction? No way. I was trained by Major League guys like Jim Lefebvre, pro-hitting consultant and inventor of the Swing Rite™ Oscar Miller, former San Francisco Giant Rob Andrews, and other former Major Leaguers. In fact, I got occasional compliments on my swing after all the instruction and batting practice. Once, at a batting cage, a pro who was working out watched me and asked me who I was and where I played. When I asked why, he said something to the effect that he could tell I knew what I was doing.
Point of diminishing returns
Logic aside, my experience seems to indicate that batting practice does not help much and may hurt. How could that be? For one thing, almost everything has a point of diminishing returns. While batting practice is clearly helpful to a player who has never hit a baseball or who is in his first or second year, it is not true that continuing to practice for years and years will pay equal dividends. It appears that my adult efforts to improve had little or no positive effect and may have even had a slight negative effect.
The theory may be that once you have got the basic hitting motion down, refinements in technique and mechanics add little to your success. Furthermore, obsessing about your hitting mechanics likely causes you to think too much in the batter’s box. Hall of Famer Yogi Berra said, “You can’t think and hit at the same time.” READ MORE
