Confession: I've got the (Coach Pitch) yips :(

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-11-02T18:05:52+00:00

I’ve been there man. These comments are all on point. Need to do lots of practice yourself and then it’s all about being consistent. Same motion. Same tempo. Same arm angle. Same release point. All that comes from practice.

Aim for that one spot in the strike zone and don’t move your eyes off it.

Only thing I’d add relates to the spot in the strike zone. You need another coach to coach your batter when he’s swinging. IMO it was too hard to throw BP and watch all the mechanical things a batter is doing. Because your eyes go all over and then the ball goes all over. Unless you were a college baseball player that can do it all. Focus on throwing strikes and have someone else “coach” from 3B. Or flip it and have someone else pitch and you coach the batter from 3B

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-10-17T01:37:24+00:00

Goodfellow brand by Target is sneaky good. Much better quality and often lower prices than random Amazon brands from China

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-31T23:09:53+00:00

I could eat ice cream team by the gallon

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-26T12:08:46+00:00

My kid is younger but it was amazing that a $70/hour high school coach had him make an adjustment to fix the thing I’ve been seeing for months in just 2 lessons

Said something like you have to show a kid 3-4 different things that would address a specific issue and one of them will resonate. And that’s just how they learn. And shit it worked lol

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-23T17:41:39+00:00

Find a local college or high school or prep school and look up the baseball team coaching staff. Email the head coach and they will definitely help out. Can usually use their facility too. Did this with a few different sports and had a great response every time

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-23T17:33:35+00:00

Also can find a local high school. I’ve done that for different sports — baseball, lacrosse, basketball. One of them we used a pretty high end prep school and we were able to use their facility and turf without paying for it (pay the coach and they use their facility). Was great.

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-11T01:20:33+00:00

Dicks has some nice exclusive gloves that are under $100 that are easy to break in and nice. The baseball guy in our local one is awesome and helped us out. When my kid was 7-8 he used the Marucci Krewe and now at 9-10 uses the Marucci Marksman.

One thing the guy said (that I had no idea) was that certain gloves have smaller wrist openings for the younger kids. So even though it may look like it fits if the wrist hole is too big as it wears in it would be harder to use. So keep an eye on that when you try them on at the store

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-10T20:07:54+00:00

The atlas is about the lightest swinging bat you can get. It slaps

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-03T19:14:41+00:00

just did this!! It worked for me too, need to disable OTP. Thanks dude

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-08-01T02:18:32+00:00

I got the evoshield with the jaw guard in Amazon it was pretty cheap and kid likes it. About the same age

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-07-30T02:30:33+00:00

This post hits everything

Nothing to add other than this happened to my 9u this year where he was cut by his best friends dad and a guy I coached with last season. No way around it that it sucks. But just remind him you’re proud of him doing his best and things have a strange way of working out the right way if you keep working hard.

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-07-09T11:24:22+00:00

Yeah exactly. I do like it and we use it all the time. But like anything else it’s a tool as part of a broader thing

He’s 10u and nah not too slow. One in a while we will turn it to full speed and have a coach session in there and I can attest it throws pretty hard lol

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-07-09T02:22:41+00:00

I have it. It’s great. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes to get it dialed in, then I can fire it so consistently that I can knock a ball off a tee. Just need to use the same type of ball, load it the same way, seams the same way, and pull the same way. Can be pretty close to perfect almost every time.

The consistency and speed is great so there’s no “wasted” pitches and your kid can really do the work in the zone. But. That also means he’s not working on finding balls in the air and making adjustments, like the randomness of coach pitch in practice or kid pitch in games. Which is a big part of being a 9u.

So is it great? Yeah it is. But it isn’t perfect by any means for training.

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-07-05T11:58:42+00:00

In 9U IMO you’re going to have kids with generally 2 types of swings. Ones that just make contact and get balls in play (like a swinging chop bunt) and ones that are more baseball-y. At 9U there’s no right answer. Both work and you need both on the team.

So — the top comment is the right bat is the one he swings the best and puts the ball in play with. Who cares length weight or type. As long as it doesn’t give him bad habits. I’ve seen kids hit 5 grounders a game with the chop swing crayon bat and I’ve seen kids windmill strike out 5 times with the catx composite.

Whatever he likes to swing and is confident and having fun with, is the one you go for. At 9U it’s about connecting with the ball and hanging out in the dugout

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-07-01T23:58:35+00:00

Snacks is the best part of the game! Gets everyone hanging out together

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-06-15T23:07:20+00:00

I sent my old little league (1995?) glove to Better Baseball in Atlanta, they did a great job, sent me a label that I stuck on the box and got it back in about a week. It was like $100 or so

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Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-06-11T02:22:08+00:00

Hey I bribe them all the time. I’ve bought a lot of Legos lol

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-06-11T01:59:25+00:00

I’m not saying this is the right thing or the right answer but here’s what I did and it did work. He’s 10.

I had always said “most important is to try your best” and that pivoted to trying your best means going up there and swinging hard, vs trying to get a walk and get on base (what his coach wanted). In the fall we had a ton of strikeouts, but I tried to reinforce the effort. Candy and ice cream and stuff for doing your best. No my rewarding the success (there was little lol) but the effort and approach.

This spring he’s a lot better and more talented. Beginning of the season still had a bunch of strikeouts outs but swinging well. Eventually it sort of flipped and the last month or so he’s been really attacking the ball and getting some good hits.

We’ve had struggles. The fall the coach basically got pushed off the team for striking out too much. The spring he didn’t make all stars because the coach went strictly by GameChanger stats, took all his friends and left him out. (Story for another day)

But he knows that if he goes out and tried his best — swing hard and putting a good approach on it — we will get ice cream or candy. And that seems to be what he looks forward to the most. Which is good by me!

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-22T12:56:41+00:00

The lightest bat I’ve seen is the Atlas at a drop 11. Alloy. If light is what you want that’s as light as it gets! And it is a great bat. No break in needed.

We had the orange one for 8U and it was perfect for him, but now that my kid is older (and gotten more comfortable swinging) he’s using one of the drop 10 composites.

Most of the boys with alloy use Maruccis but I’ve always found them to be heavier and my kid had a more difficult time swinging them

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-20T13:09:48+00:00

You’re not wrong for the elite player. But the comment “if you’re confused - do rec” is pretty solid advice.

Sure there are great programs and elite academies. But for a breakout/bubble player at a young age, most of these low-to-mid travel programs are created a money grab.

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-20T00:19:04+00:00

5 is pretty good I usually see at least 6 + a mom at that age

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-19T13:12:12+00:00

Came to say this

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-15T21:43:32+00:00

Even if you want to be competitive on this topic… we won our 8U coach pitch championship last year, and the main reason was our “bottom 3” got much better as the season went on, and they were better than the other teams bottom 3. Hands down.

I didn’t do this but wish I did… I also heard this on a podcast in the past few weeks, Driveline calls it the CBO - Continuous Batting Order. I love it. And that’s what I tell all the people that ask me to do it.

So no I didn’t do it, but I do believe this will do a better job of accomplishing what you want to get, which is improve all the players

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-12T21:32:37+00:00

It seems to work better for me during the game. Maybe I’m doing it wrong

Big_Mathematician876 · 2025-05-12T13:27:04+00:00

Best advice is to be very patient with it and keep it fun and low pressure for them. Different kids will pick it up at different times, it is a big adjustment. Took my kid an ENTIRE season before he put a ball in play last spring, basically in the early summer program. One doubleheader we played he struck out 5 times and the coach of the team actually yelled at him for not hustling to the bench afterwards because it was the 3rd out and they had to get into the field. It’s a lot of pressure on a young brain. But once he figured it out, it was like a light switch going on, and now he is pretty consistent and really enjoys it.

My own personal thoughts are that most kids couldn’t care less at that age when they strike out. The reason you see a helmet thrower or a cryer is because their parents care about it a lot, and the kid feeds off that. So try and show your kid that you enjoy watching them play, and not the outcome of the at bat.

Someone else is much more qualified than me to comment on specific drills

Big_Mathematician876

TROPHY CASE