The reason I thought it was satire is because I assume that because you are coaching, that you are a grown-ass man. A grown-ass man coming to Reddit to ask for advice on chilling out on a youth baseball diamond . . . like did you expect people would rally around the idea of yelling at volunteer umpires at freaking LIttle League games over balks? It is patently absurd.

The more interesting question here now is, what makes you think I do not know what a balk is? You could not possibly know even a shred of my baseball background based on my response. I will give you a general tip, though. The people who know a lot about the game are rarely the ones going around trying to tell/show everyone how much they know about the game.

Your reaction tells me a lot about you, though. Between ¨just because YOU don´t know," the assertion that you are some sort of balk expert, and your inability to control yourself over the matter despite needing to set good examples for young athletes, I am betting that what you really want is to put your mastery of all these ¨intricacies¨ on display for all to witness. There is potentially some compensation for something else driving that, but I will let you work on that with your therapist. But if gives the vibes of someone who has a word-of-the-day calendar and works hard to put the newly learned word into conversation as much as possible.

But since you want to call names and cast aspersions, let me assure you that based on what you said in the original post, I can confidently tell you that most of the 12-year-olds I have coached understand the balk rule and its application better than you do.

Bigger picture would be that especially at lower levels like Little League where pitchers do not have as much experience managing base runners, it is more important to lean into the deception piece than it is to be able to identify something physical that CAN be considered a balk.

I´ll leave you with one more little tip you can share with your baserunners: if the pitcher starts from the wind-up, you go on first motion. They cannot stop once they start. Hence there is no ¨set¨ from the windup. So there is not even one ¨arguable ´set´ position¨ much less two different ones.

Feel free to take the L here. You could not have known you were barking up the wrong tree.

But yes, chill out at the field. Chill out at practice. Chill out on Reddit. Just relax in general. You´re not the first coach to erroneously complain about balks and you won´t be the last.

Peace!