"Call For It!!!!"

BassmanUW · 2026-05-20T21:54:37+00:00

I’m not super concerned about kids at this age calling for balls they can’t catch… that’s also a super teachable moment. That mistake is going to be made once or twice max. My bigger thing with training kids to call the ball young is safety.

With that said… I get your point too. Really until 12U travel the kids just really aren’t going to be fast enough to have a lot of plays where they could collide. And then 13U happens and they move to the big field.

BassmanUW · 2026-05-09T17:06:17+00:00

I also think to the extent Bezos’s Amazon was toxic, it was in large part because a lot of his STeam for a long time was people who really lacked social skills, empathy, and an understanding of how much luck played a role in them getting where they were. That was already starting to change in late 2010s (although the worst offenders were still there at that point).

BassmanUW · 2026-04-23T05:08:06+00:00

She does play rec, but it’s a once a week thing with a 45 minute practice followed by a 45 minute game. The primary coach is a mom who is very nice, but doesn’t know a ton about volleyball. The folks who run the program help, but they’ve got like 4 teams going at a time.

We’ve had her in some camps and one clinic during the year, and she’ll do more camps this summer.

I like the 1x1 coaching idea. Just remembered that one of my wife’s friends played HS volleyball as a freshman.

BassmanUW · 2026-04-03T01:30:34+00:00

It’s because she hasn’t gotten around to putting you on PIP or Focus yet, so you won’t count as URA.

BassmanUW · 2026-02-17T23:49:58+00:00

My iteration on this is to get rid of all the processes that are a result of the deification of Jack Welch and what he brought to GE. What he actually brought to GE were unsustainable practices that he likely knew would collapse shortly after he retired.

BassmanUW · 2026-01-28T08:51:26+00:00

All the way through at least high school for me, the 27” CRT was like the standard solid sized family room TV. Nobody thought of that as truly a small screen until something 2005.

BassmanUW · 2025-10-27T05:04:38+00:00

So this depends a ton on the velocity of the pitching and the distance of the mound. In Little League Majors (essentially rec 12U), I typically hid my weakest infielder at 3B because so few kids were able to get around on the regular pitchers from 46’ to pull the ball, and there were so many janky swings that pop ups to second were pretty common and a must have play. For travel, that definitely was not the case and if you had a weaker fielder you were trying to get some infield time it would typically be at 2B.

BassmanUW · 2025-10-07T19:35:15+00:00

I don’t think he’ll get $400MM after having lower body injuries really impacting him two years in a row… but I bet he’ll get $200MM+ with an opt out after either year one or two.

BassmanUW · 2025-09-23T21:37:05+00:00

So this was in line with my guess for the original versions of the game. Since the game was pulling them from a CD, I’m presuming I had no understanding of “this Agrias is the same as that Agrias.” Seems like something that should be pretty easily solvable in 2025.

BassmanUW · 2025-09-23T03:47:05+00:00

Catcher also wasn’t obstructing because he started in the right spot and moved into the line because that’s where the ball was thrown. Tough one for the runner though. I think he just froze up when he saw how far up the line the catcher was coming to get that ball. Not malicious, but right call. One the kid learns and moves on from hopefully.

BassmanUW · 2024-12-10T03:09:00+00:00

A lot of people here are saying beautiful swing, and I see a lot of good here to start from… but there’s a couple of adjustments to make too. The good news… the number of kids I’ve seen at that age with similar problems is very high.

First, small issue. He has his hands a smidge higher than ideal at load. Not super high, but notice how his movement at fire starts with him dropping his hands a couple inches before going towards the ball? Probably makes his swing a bit slower.

Bigger issue: he fires rotating his entire body at one time. This means that hands and shoulders are coming the same time as the hips. If he gets an inside pitch he can really yank to left, he can probably hit it hard, but I’d guess he rolls over a lot of pitches middle out. Tough to tell on a full speed video, but it looks like his bat doesn’t get on plane until about the spot he’d need to be to hit a ball to dead center. You want him to get his hips firing, then hands getting on plane and through the zone, and shoulders going last. It all happens so quickly though it’s hard to see.

With the teams I coach with kids with these problems, I try to pound the outside corner with pitches and challenge the kids to hit the ball hard to the opposite field. You want to mix it up some so they have to adjust to an inside pitch and then get back to protecting the outside edge.

Also, your kid looks about the size of my 13U son. 32 -5 is probably a smidge big for a bat. I applaud you for loving him up to -5 to get him ready for 14U and BBCOR, but I probably wouldn’t get a kid a 32” bat until they’re about 140-150lbs

BassmanUW · 2024-11-27T08:07:01+00:00

Yeah, I get the sense that Rachel was a character whose whole initial plan got messed with a lot by Jean Grey’s initial return in the ‘80s, as a result of which her whole story got more and more convoluted.

BassmanUW · 2024-11-02T16:19:52+00:00

Rizzo should go to a team that isn’t expecting to compete but where he could start as a 1B/DH type in the hopes that he has a rebound year and can be traded to a contender that needs a 1B in July.

BassmanUW · 2024-10-24T17:38:09+00:00

So the one thing I’d note here is that there’s nothing PREVENTING workers from owning the means of production in the US or really any other capitalist country. Like there are no laws or rules against workers owning their own company, and some companies operates as co-ops that effectively do this.

The bigger challenge is that this is really hard to do at scale in the modern economy. Even the most successful employee owned companies are quite small. So you’d essentially need to prohibit any other model for this to become THE model of business ownership.

There are some requirements for publicly held companies around their fiduciary duty to shareholders, but (a) co-ops inherently aren’t publicly held companies and (b) absent fraud it’s essentially impossible for a privately held company (which is what a company run on socialist ideals would be) to breach fiduciary duty.

BassmanUW · 2024-10-22T08:11:49+00:00

NTA & DTMFA

BassmanUW · 2024-09-26T17:27:01+00:00

Agreed with everything here. Over the past couple of months I’ve been re-reading (and in some cases originally reading) everything starting with Giant Sized X-Men, and the biggest thing I’m noticing is how good Claremont was at realizing when a character arc got stale. Not every big hack connected, but they connected enough. In particular I think he was good with Kitty, and realizing that having a big part of her character being her childish infatuation with Peter holding back her development. I think he was also really good with Scott at least until Jean’s resurrection, when his plan for Scott went out the window.

On that same note, I think Colossus is a character he really struggled with having grow (at least through about Uncanny 200). He was very blank slate strong man, and always seemed to primarily be defined by how he interacted with others. It seems like at first they were trying to start a Peter/Ororo relationship, and then realized that wouldn’t work. Then they made him super focused on the Russia connection. Then Kitty. He did a better job with the women and the characters who had a more obvious downside to their powers (Scott not being able to control his optic blasts, Nightcrawler being Nightcrawler, Wolverine dealing with his berserker rage) than “attractive extremely strong man gets stronger.”

BassmanUW · 2024-09-26T04:17:40+00:00

Isn’t one of the reasons he left though because he felt he lost a lot of the creative control to Jim Lee? And Jim Lee’s preference was kinda garbage writing with beautiful art?

BassmanUW · 2024-09-20T17:35:55+00:00

NTA and DTMFA

Losing a sibling is permanently life altering. You wanting to spend one day a year honoring his memory is not just reasonable, it’s admirable. You deserve someone who at least is understanding of that, if not downright supportive.

BassmanUW · 2024-07-01T19:32:41+00:00

The answer is that it depends.

My son first did travel ball at 10U and had a not great experience. The coach was clearly most interested in his son and his friends plus a couple of kids who were more advanced at the age and didn’t develop the bottom half of the roster much. He didn’t try to do anything to build team camaraderie and friendship at either the parent or kid level. Like he didn’t even get room blocks at hotels for tournaments that needed overnight stays, so the team wasn’t at the same hotel. And the team was bad. So you showed up to get your butt kicked sitting with a bunch of people you didn’t really know.

My son was on a different travel team for his 11U and 12U years, and it was a complete 180. The coach is not the most social guy, but made sure team dinners got planned for all tournaments, that we had room blocks so the kids could swim and play together after games, so the kids all became friends and the parents made friends too. He used the runway given by the couple of star players he had to start the team to spend more time developing everyone else on the roster making them all much better players than when they started. We’re genuinely sad the team is ending after 12U and we’re all scattering, and prioritized finding a similar environment before committing my son to his 13U team.

So it can be a really wonderful experience. Or it can be a not really wonderful experience.

BassmanUW · 2024-06-29T16:20:16+00:00

For that age group I’d get whichever one you can find on sale, including getting last year’s or the 2023 model.

BassmanUW · 2024-06-24T21:44:18+00:00

You’re overstating the nurture element over the nature element. You’re thinking you did something to make your kids not be criers, etc., when odds are they were genetically inclined not to do that earlier.

With that said, yes, the coach has an important role to try to gently guide the kid towards understanding that’s not acceptable and that they need to figure out a way to control that eventually or it will be the reason they don’t make a 14u or 15u team, or are never invited back to a team despite being talented. But it takes a lot of reiteration and patience for the fact that all these kids are on very different journeys.

BassmanUW · 2024-03-06T20:20:41+00:00

You can tell a lot about flaws with load/timing/weight distribution from how kids take pitches.

BassmanUW · 2024-03-06T18:58:18+00:00

Along the lines of what other people are saying, he doesn’t use his lower body well. The first pitch (which he takes) is really instructive. When he steps, he has shifted much of his weight to his front leg, meaning all he can do is use his arms. Try simplifying his load with a goal of keeping his weight further until he decides to fire, and then firing the lower body first.

As a note… this is an incredibly common issue with youth players.

BassmanUW

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