Today’s blog may be more appropriate for our youth hitters, but it can also be applied to our first year high school hitters. This time of the year, for our young baseball players, means tryouts. There may be a sense of apprehension, nervousness, and butterflies when you go to your team’s tryouts, but our blog today will look to help relieve your anxieties. SKLZ.com’s most recent article is entitled How to Evaluate Players During Tryouts. While the article is generally meant for coaches, it can also serve a purpose for players, and give them an inside edge to see what coaches look at the most in these periods of evaluation.
The article tells coaches to look at four aspects of a player’s game: hitting, fielding, athletic potential, and intangibles. Hitting: don’t abandon your mechanics and swing at bad pitches to show coaches your contact or power potential. They will be able to recognize if you didn’t get a good pitch to hit. Remember, plate discipline is a valuable tool. Fielding: show positive body language, always pay attention to what is happening on the field, don’t be lazy at getting to ground balls/fly balls, and always use two hands. Athletic potential: this is something that you either have or you don’t, but you need to be able to show off whatever athletic potential you do have. Dive after fly balls/ground balls. Sprint out to your position. And if you get walked, sprint to first base. It may be the only chance you get to show off your speed. Intangibles: just show that you love to play baseball.
Most importantly, when it comes to any aspect of your game or the categories listed above, show confidence and have a good attitude. Yogi Berra always used to say, “ninety percent of the game is half mental.” If you can show the confidence, and believe you can make the play, odds are the coaches will see your attitude, and reward it. Coaches don’t want some kid with a bad attitude that they will have to pacify through the long summer months. They want kids with upbeat attitudes that want to win baseball games, and are coachable enough to fix whatever flaws in their game they may have.
Leave a Reply