That's very true, but I think its artificial. IMHO, as pitchers are developing, they should throw against the widest variety of opponents possible. If you think about it, what good is a pitcher who can only beat weak teams? Sooner or later, there aren't any weak teams if you play competitive ball or even in normal ball the weak ones get fewer and farther between.
Ever since my son's been pitching he's one of those loves to throw against the tough ones. It finally got to the point where he'd tell the coach he didn't want to pitch against lousy teams and to put one of the other kids in who didn't get a lot of work.
I'll admit that was always a source of pride in me, because not only did he love that situation, he's fared extremely well in it. but now that I'm a bit older and have the advantage of hindsight, I think I allowed a terrible mistake to be made.
When everything revolves around having the #1 on the mound against the best team of the week, I think it teaches the kid to be a prima donna. Something else it does is put them in a pressure cooker almost every time they go out. My son has been pitching for 5 years now and other than some of the silly draws in tournaments and the occasional week where you don't have a good team to play, there isn't a break.
Maybe that's great for development of a tough, don't quit attitude, but its really unnecessary. Sooner or later it dawns on kids like that, that the pus throwers who get to face the wimps have just as good stats or even better! Its pretty tough to look in the paper or on the net and see pitchers who literally suck higher on the list.
Its no big thing when they're 12, but when they're 16-18 and scouts are looking at them, now it means something. When we were in Az, there were at least 10 guys who I assume were scouts ask our manager for HS stats on the pitchers. Its really difficult to write a 2-7 record for your kid in JV ball. Even with the great ERA, and everything else, the record is still 2-7 for a JV pitcher.
A couple guys actually came back and asked how his record was so rotten with the other stats he had, and listened to and seemed to accept the explanation of why that was. But my guess is, the other ones figured that if the kid was a real stud, he'd win at the JV level no matter what kind of crappy team played behind him and I suppose that's somewhat valid.
In retrospect, I think it would be much better to "set" a rotation and then let the chips fall where they may! What's the matter with letting the "good" pitcher have an easy game once in a while to pad his stats a little and allow him to build up some confidence?
Watching what some of the local HS coaches do with their "studs" leads me to believe that some are looking out for the pitchers. There was a local kid here last year who was voted all everything in the area. I saw him pitch twice and thought he was just another better than average HS pitcher.
But when he got into the HS tournament, some big legion games and went to a couple 18U tournaments, he got his socks knocked off! When I went back and looked at his record closely, I found out that 7 of the 11 games he won were against teams that had losing records, and 2 of the others were against D2 schools. He had 2 wins, 3 losses and 4 no decisions against the other teams.
So, in that sense, I think its much better for everyone to find out if a pitcher can't perform against decent competition and get him off the mound ASAP! The sooner he finds out pitching is a dead end, the sooner he can concentrate on other positions to try to keep playing. And, the sooner those guys are gone, the sooner some of the "undiscovered gems" will get their chance.
The ball parks at the 15O level are all pretty much the same. There's the occasional short porch, but for the most part, you don't find many bandboxes.
< Using ERA, with the trend noted, can be helpful. It isn't the end all. But it is better than deciding on the starter by such things as the pitcher's size or the speed of his best fastball.>
Absitively! Using any decent stats is better than guessing, and guessing is better than judging by the shirt size or a radar gun. Its too bad that's what a lot of lazy coaches do.
Like anything else, the more things that can be taken into consideration, the better the decision will be.
Ya know what drives me up the wall? People who won't even look at the stats. I can understand why its kind of useless to start making decisions in a tournament based on just a few games, but by the time you've played in 4 or 5 tourneys with the same players in a season, the stats mean something.
But this HS coach of ours just drives me nuts! I give him 40-50 pages of stats every week. I don't expect him to thank me, but to watch him throw them away without even looking is just flat stupid! The team scorekeeper gives him the "normal" stuff like BA, ERA, etc. but even though I use the official book to put in the data, this guy refuses to look!
My son was the only one from our school and all of the other kids on the team that went to Az except 4 were from teams we will be playing. I did all of the detailed stats for batting, fielding and pitching, printed them up and gave them to our HS coach with detailed notes on each players strengths and weaknesses as "scouting report".
I'll have to admit that he wasn't his normal arrogant self about it, and only said he knew enough about those players already and gave everything back. I mean these were 10 of the best players in the area! All but 2 had played varsity as sophs and 5 of them played as frosh and half of them were starters!
Like I said, I didn't expect a thank you, but not to even look at what was there seemed completely foolish.
Sorry to go off about our coach again, but tonight was the 1st night of fall ball and its started already. The boys got out of school at 3:15, arranged for rides to the Jr College, killed 3 1/2 hrs until the game was supposed to start and then found out that Mr. Head Coach who didn't even bother to show up, had forgotten to turn in the boys registration forms that he demanded be in his hands two weeks ago, and the game was forfeited!
I mean this slime bag didn't even show up! He said he didn't find out the game was forfeited until 5 o'clock and he couldn't get hold of the players! The AH didn't think for one second that maybe if he had at least gone to the field, the kids could have gotten home before 8:30! Oh yeah, he didn't bother to call the other coach either, so their whole team was there too!
I gotta tell ya, the world would be a better place if we could make sure his genes weren't passed on, if ya know what I mean. (Wink, wink)
Display summaries of other articles about hitting.
