28
2013
Mets Player Development and Theories of Deliberate Practice
An article by 
“Strange, isn’t it? Each man’s life touches so many other lives. When he isn’t around he leaves an awful hole, doesn’t he?” ~ Clarence, from It’s A Wonderful Life.
Just about all of us at some point have been touched by someone who altered the trajectory of our lives for the better. I’m sure you can probably think of such a person right now. Perhaps a teacher, a friend, or a parent extended that guiding hand, but many of us were never lucky enough to receive that nudge at just the right moment. My best friend growing up was a lot like the big creepy kid played by Adam Baldwin in the 1980 film, My Bodyguard. He had the size, the talent, the speed and the freak arm to make it to the NFL (he could chuck a football 80 yards accurately). What he didn’t have was a parent who knew that their kid was special, or a coach who noticed his shoulder had insane potential, it was sad.
For every great prospect that makes a career of playing Major League Baseball there are hundreds who fail in spite of remarkable skill sets. As Met fans we’ve had more than our share of promising talents who’ve crashed and burned. Fernando Martinez, Alex Escobar, Lastings Milledge, Shawn Abner, and an entire “Generation-K.”
It makes you wonder what separates MLB from sports where high draft picks are more or less sure things. You get a top 5 pick in the NFL and you are all but guaranteed an impact player. Why the difference? The learning curve is much steeper in baseball than in any other sport, and at it’s center is the act of hitting a small spherical object, that on any given pitch may sink, slide, curve, or even knuckle, at an ungodly variety of speeds. It’s not just a matter of reflexes, it’s a matter of recognition, prediction, memory, and intuition. Some figure it out, others never do.
While it’s not difficult to find athletes with the tools to succeed, it’s quite another story teaching kids how to play a game that gets ratcheted up to astonishing speed and difficulty at it’s highest level. It’s not enough to have the reaction time, you have to know when and how to react in a given situation, as baseball is easily the most situational of all sports. That, is the difference. It’s a thinking game where you have to know how your place on the field dictates any number of responses to an almost infinite number of possibilities, and you have to settle on the most likely and be prepared for them at a split second’s notice. Unrelenting preparation is essential to success. In light of this, I have always found the “good players make good coaches” argument absurd. It is absolutely the other way around.
The first time I saw Rube Walker, at our training camp in 1968, I was skeptical. I’d never met a pitching coach who hadn’t pitched himself. Rube had been a catcher, mostly with the Brooklyn Dodgers, behind Roy Campanella. But he quickly convinced me. He had spent his whole life studying pitchers.
Rube knew how to condition his pitchers, knew how to pace them and he treated them all as individuals. He never insisted that all of his pitchers use the same motion, the same style; he let them use whatever was best for them. He was, like Gil, always calm, always reasonable; he never got mad at anyone, except an umpire once in a while.
Tom Seaver, The Perfect Game.
Michael Lewis in 2008 was quoted by Paul Nyman of Hardball Times in Beyond Moneyball: Player Development, speculating that besides trying to evaluate players more effectively, predicting the health of pitchers’ arms might become a new means to “creating an unfair advantage.” I am all but certain that the current Met brain-trust has employed whatever faculties are at their disposal to identify “durability profiles,” with (so far) excellent results, but part of me feels like there is always the other side of the coin, what happens after you scout and draft the player?
When you think about it, with millions of dollars to throw around, it shouldn’t be too hard for any team to find 50 outstanding athletes a year from the earth’s population, and in truth it isn’t (you can probably find hundreds of outstanding young athletes in any major city). Teaching them to be outstanding ballplayers, however, is a different undertaking altogether. In a groundbreaking behavioral study The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance, Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer, hypothesize that,
“It does not follow from the rejection of innate limits on acquired performance that everyone can easily attain high levels of skill. Contemporary elite performers have overcome a number of constraints. They have obtained early access to instructors, maintained high levels of deliberate practice throughout development, received continued parental and environmental support, and avoided disease and injury. When one considers in addition the prerequisite motivation necessary to engage in deliberate practice every day for years and decades, when most children and adolescents of similar ages engage in play and leisure, the real constraints on the acquisition of expert performance become apparent. The commitment to deliberate practice distinguishes the expert performer from the vast majority of children and adults who seem to have remarkable difficulty meeting the much lower demands on practice in schools, adult education, and in physical exercise programs.”
They conclude with,
“In most domains of expertise, individuals begin in their childhood a regimen of effortful activities (deliberate practice) designed to optimize improvement. Individual differences, even among elite performers, are closely related to assessed amounts of deliberate practice. Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years.”
So according to the Theory of Deliberate Practice, expert performance is a function of exposure to an environment that is conducive to years and years of purposeful repetition, and that this is in fact remarkably difficult for most adults (let alone children) to maintain without interruption, thus the relative paucity of true prodigies. The theory essentially illustrates the precursors of excellence and concludes that what makes, say a violinist, truly exceptional, is the predilection to amass years upon years of practice. It seems simple but it isn’t. Both Tom Seaver and David Wright were stars as children, as were a great many exceptional major leaguers. They matured in environments where learning how to position yourself with a left-handed batter up against a right-handed pitcher with men on first and third became second nature. Mike Piazza, who was drafted in the 62nd and last round of the 1988 draft perhaps did not have some of the exceptional gifts of other prospects, but he did have the ability to stand in a batting cage for up to four hours at a time, until his hands bled.
What is clear is that there has to be a confluence between physical ability and instruction, but perhaps more importantly there must exist that rare predilection to endless mind-numbing repetition if you are to produce a truly exceptional performer. We’ve come to believe that many players are simply born with the “instincts” to succeed when this may not be the case at all, it is more likely that they have been doing it for so long, what seems “instinctual” to us is really a learned reflex to them. We describe that talent as “God given,” thus relegating an inordinate value to the draft, when in actuality, younger players with aptitude and playing time that have a high tolerance for deliberate practice are the most likely to eventually attain superlative abilities. Billy Beane himself was a “toolsy” outfielder who was the first to admit he didn’t have the drive and perseverance of less “talented” roommate Lenny Dykstra who ate slept and drank baseball.
The Mets, with less money in recent years, have been forced to employ an organizational model gleaned from smaller market operational norms. Teams like the Twins, are so good at churning out major league ready players they were recently able to restock their pitching ranks by trading off two outstanding young center fielders without even hesitating. Why? Because they know there is more where that came from. The remarkable thing about the Twins and their ability to develop players, is that even less gifted prospects invariably hit the majors prepared with the right “intangibles,” which as we previously noted is a function of learned experience, and a product of one of the best Player Development programs in Baseball — one that happens to be inexorably grounded in repetition. You need look no further than Ron Gardenhire’s hilariously understated befuddlement with our very own Carlos Gomez to understand the role of preparation in their system.
Met position player prospects in recent years seemed to reach the majors with loads of talent and yet lacked the intangibles, the little things. Under Omar Minaya we saw a glaring imbalance between some pretty damned good scouting and an ineffective Player Development system. Players struggled to take good routes in the outfield, missed cut-off men, didn’t seem to know when to take a pitch or why it’s probably not a good idea to high-five the entire front row of fans. In more recent drafts the Mets appear to be taking their chances with raw high school players for whom a strong Player Development system is even more integral to success. There was a story about one such player, Gavin Cecchini, how at one point the lactic acid build-up in his legs reached dangerous and chronic levels because of the amount of exercise he was engaging in — he’d get up at night when his parents were asleep and pull 8 foot train-ties attached to a rope back and forth across a field near his house. As a result a doctor prescribed several months of zero activity. This is the predilection towards deliberate practice the study above speaks to. It is what makes players seem like they possess a gift for being in the right place at the right time, when it is in fact learned by means of extraordinary commitment and repetition. The other part of the equation, however, is having the right instructors in place. If your going to draft a bunch of zoned-in single minded maniacs, you’ve got to have coaches who know how to tap their instincts and their innate motivation.
Rube Walker was never an expert pitcher – in fact he was never a pitcher at all — but he was a great instructor. Patient and soft-spoken, he was able to coax and guide individuals with differing abilities and personalities towards a common end. The perception that he might have been weak on mechanics as an ex-catcher by most accounts was inaccurate. He had a knack for finding flaws in a delivery and was a stickler on conditioning, but his real strength was honing an effective mental approach to taking the mound. He was, by all accounts, an extraordinary pitching coach, a “pitcher’s pitching coach” as Seaver described him.
I’m convinced that within this Met organization (as is probably the case with most teams) there exist the elements of a championship run, untapped, unrealized, under-appreciated perhaps, but present nevertheless. Without the right teachers, all the potential in the world remains just that, untapped. It was refreshing to hear Collins go on about preparation and “muscle memory” when he first hit the scene, and it became clear that developmental standards would be instituted system wide. It is certainly reassuring that Manager Ryan Ellis and Pitching Coach Phill Regan return to St. Lucie after taking their team to the league championship series with an 83 – 52 record and a league best ERA. If there is hope in a Met resurgence, the heart of it is in St. Lucie and a development apparatus able to successfully adapt a group of young heart-and-soul grinders to a ridiculously steep learning curve. Players who find ways to win with or without inordinate “God-given” talent — holdovers from the previous regime’s drafts like Daniel Muno and Darrel Cecilliani who by all accounts appear to be textbook examples of hard workers who are uniquely predisposed towards models of Deliberate Practice. It also can’t hurt that an already outstanding pitching staff will be joined by a kid named Syndergaard. Things do appear to be looking up in St Lucie. It is immensely encouraging to me, that at the other end of what is looking like a uniformly administered minor league continuum, their AAA affiliate is being run by the embodiment of leaving it all on the field, Mr. Walter Wayne Backman himself.
Those of us who aren’t privy to the Met inner circle can’t be certain what the guiding principles of the Met Player Development system really are, but judging from their focus in recent drafts we can extrapolate an emphasis on position player selections of a particular sort — raw, athletic, motivated, balls-to-the-wall types. If we can turn even a few of them into thoroughly prepared major-leaguers-in-the-making attaching them at every level to an assortment of durable and overpowering pitching staffs, well, I’d say we might just have a formula for sustained success and a minor league system capable of successfully augmenting the major league roster.
About the Author: Matthew Balasis
I’ve been a Met fan since August 1969 when a fire resulted in the Red Cross placing my family on the 6th floor of a building in Willets Point. I could see Shea from our balcony and I knew something big was going on. I followed them through the dark years and the resurgence of the 80’s only (sadly) to miss the fall of 86 because I was in Boot Camp. I've been serving penance ever since in Minnesota where I'm an SLP. I've written a lot about the Mets in an effort to share with my kids (and anyone else who might listen), a sporting tradition that made much of my childhood worthwhile. Follow me on twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewBalasis
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NL East Standings
| Team | W | L | Pct. | GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Braves | 41 | 28 | .594 | - |
| Nationals | 34 | 34 | .500 | 6.5 |
| Phillies | 33 | 37 | .471 | 8.5 |
| Mets | 25 | 39 | .391 | 13.5 |
| Marlins | 21 | 47 | .309 | 19.5 |
Last updated: 06/16/2013
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Very good article. Kudos.
Alderson certainly has his knocks about him (I’m looking at you, major league OF…), but the overhaul was certainly not just on the major league level, but a complete organizational revamp. Certainly looking forward to seeing these kids progress and hopefully this philosophy starts spitting out players who can make a difference at the major league level.
There is certainly something to it. Some organizations spit out talent while others spit out garbage. And, interestingly, some spit out certain types of players. The Giants and Rays are known for churning out pitchers. The Royals have done a good job developing solid everyday players. The Mets, they seemed to excel at turning out busts the last 10-15 years.
Drafting is one part of the equation while development is another part. It is evident the Mets were faulty in one area or the other (or both). This goes back to the 90s. Little talent has come from the farm throughout the years. Obviously, something required fixing.
Is the type of ballplayer brought in the problem? Well I cannot concede that point. Sure people can point to the talent and work ethic that a Wright used to get to the big leagues. But then there was Jose Reyes who had the reputation (not sure it was founded) of not always putting forth the greatest of effort. Yet, even if his work ethic was not that of some, he was made multiple AS games. And for the attacks on the Lastings and Valdy, a little bravado isnt a bad thing. One of the problems with the Mets is they are comprised of a bunch of poker-faced card board cutouts who do not seem to relish being out there. I am sure they all love playing baseball and enjoy themselves, but few show any passion. I like Valdy arguing a 3rd strike in the 9th in a blowout game. It shows he cares. I think the organization is making a mistake placing him in a box as a problem child. He has the energy that team desperately needs.
Excellent read.
First in depth look at what makes a ball player, the role in development and how that translates to success in the MLs that I’ve seen written this simply in a long time.
While I agree with this, none of this matters if you don’t first focus on selecting the best players available to you in the top 3-4 rounds in the draft, and then signing them. That’s 50% of the job and the most important part of it. Bringing in the top talent is job one, nurturing it and developing it job two.
Sandy in 2011 and 2012 = Failure To Execute
It’s not all Sandy’s fault, but he’s to blame for pegging DePodesta for the head honcho job in the draft in the first place. A GM with an awful track record, particularly in the first round, with one of the highest percentages of first round busts in the game.
It’s not all Sandy’s fault, but he’s to blame for pegging DePodesta for the head honcho job in the draft in the first place. A GM with an awful track record, particularly in the first round, with one of the highest percentages of first round busts in the game”
Maniac, the CORE…. Well… You know
Across baseball you’re looking at a success rate of around 4%, so it’s not just DePo who has an iffy record. Yes, drafting the right players is key, but I think that’s a major point of this article, sometimes the most talented aren’t necessarily the most likely to succeed. With my students I see it all the time, kids who might not be as naturally gifted as some of their peers but have a ridiculous work ethic, given a few years the kids with the work ethic always catch up to and pass their more “talented” peers. It’s surprising to hear how many minor leaguers just don’t really have the temperament (F-Mart anyone?). It’s a tough life, make no mistake, getting bussed from one B-list city to another, no family no more home cooking, you’re not in Wyoming any more Brandon Nimmo. It takes a certain type of person with a certain level of perseverance and determination, and that may play a bigger role in making it to the majors than we realize. Not that natural talent doesn’t play a role, but the Deliberate Practice stuff seems to imply you have to have both the mindset and the physical ability and that the mindset may actually be more important. Maybe this is why we’ve been drafting guys like Nimmo and Cecchini (they fit the Deliberate Practice mold to a “T”) who have not been the most “talented” on the board. If the theory holds, given enough time and enough repetitions, they will work themselves into exceptional levels of performance. Studies show the key to reaching “elite” status is 10 years or 10,000 hours, whichever comes first. M.B.
Success rate about 4%?
Of what? Specifically what are you referring to and where did that stat come from?
I am not following.
“The draft has never been anything but a f**king crapshoot,” Billy has taken to saying. “We take 50 guys and we celebrate if two of them make it. In what other business is 2 for 50 a success? If you did that in the stock market, you go broke.
—Billy Beane on the MLB draft, Moneyball, page 17)
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/beyond-moneyball-player-development/
“A GM with an awful track record, particularly in the first round, with one of the highest percentages of first round busts in the game.”
Lets look at his picks as GM:
1984-1997 draft (1st round)
4 Never made it to the majors (Wagner, Enoch, Rositer, Grisby_
9 Made it for a cup of coffee
5 Were successful ballplayers (McGwire, Weiss, Van Poppel, Grieve, Chavez)
Seems your statement is a bit off. 28% of his first round picks were successful ballplayers with 72% making it to the majors. It seems this beats the medium.
As for 2011 and 2012, that is what I love about you guys, your amazing ability to see into the future. Considering the picks from those drafts have 1 season under their belt of professional baseball. I guess you are also a stock market and lottery genius with the ability to foresee the future so clearly. Can you tell me what Wed Powerball numbers are and where AAPL will be priced a year from now?
Agree with you regarding the 2011 and 2012 draft picks. Way too early to tell if they’ll be productive piece either in a future trade or in the MLs. Especially with the younger ones such as Nimmo. Some break out a bit a little later in their development. If I remember, Ike was in that category.
I would wager that if Ike was drafted by this FO instead of say gavin C., and had the terrible (no HR) year he did in Brooklyn his first season, the core would be screaming about a big time bust for Depo and Sandy.
Didn’t that have to do with switching to wood bats or something?
By the way, as a contrast, the Mets over that same period (1984-1997) 17 picks:
7 busts who never touched the majors 41%
6 decent players 35% (Jeffries, Burnitz, Bob Jones, Pres Wilson, Ter Long, Payton)
4 who touched the majors for a bit
Amazing! Great read! I love the science behind all of this drafting and development. You did a great job explaining the difference between the talent procurement and development.
Matthew – I’ve been a big proponent of development being more to blame than draft picks. There’s clearly something wrong when you look at the Mets with various different GM’s having little success in developing high quality talent.
I don’t think anybody can really grade out the most recent drafts yet, it’s silly to do that.
You can draft a no brainer in the 1st round and he could get hurt, lose his way in the minors or just not get taught the things he needs to maximize his talent.
There are so many factors that go into the draft too. You have to consider what the Mets scouts said and think of each kid, not only his talents but his attitude as well. How open to teaching is he? Does he think he’s got nothing to learn? Is he a kid like David Eckstein was who will work tirelessly to get the most out of his god given ability?
The coaches/trainers/instructors have more to do with the success or failure of a draft pick or IFA than the process of actually signing them.
Totally agree jess,
I am biased as an educator, but I honestly believe that a lot of what we see as talent is really a by product of absurd amounts of work and repetition, but you have to have the right mindset and commitment in a student otherwise forget it. I’ve seen 3rd string bench warmers become stars by the time they reach their Junior year because they bust their tails day and night. Eckstein is a perfect example, Hunter Pence is another kid who fits this profile, as does our own David Wright.
Matt, when I played, I had a coach who didn’t preach “practice makes perfect,” he preached “practice perfect.” Repetition makes the action second nature, but what if it’s the wrong action? Then you’re doomed. That was one of the best piece of coaching advice I ever received.
Heck – I’d even put Murph in the Eckstein category. He’s a product of hard work and willingness to learn ways to maximize his talent.
The draft is one small piece of the puzzle. Not everybody is Bryce Harper or Strasburg – most are not.
You can’t say today “oh we should have drafted this guy instead of Cecchini…” because you weren’t there when the others were scouted/interviewed. What if perhaps a kid with greater now talent appeared less open to learning or less open to criticism or didn’t appear to work as hard in the games he was scouted?
What I find fascinating is most people who downplay intangibles with draft picks are the same who accuse guys like DePo of taking human element out of the scouting. The Mets and others have scouts for a reason.
There are things you cannot simply calculate in a spreadsheet. If DePo and the Mets didn’t agree with that – then they would fire their scouts and get Windows 8.
Everything I’ve seen lately seems to imply that the role of stats crunchers in the organization is hugely overstated, as is the utility of value metrics and forecast calculations. We like to think this sabermetric stuff plays a big role in our “moneyball 2.0 Mets” because it does in our fantasy leagues, but in the real world the pros focus mainly on integrating scouting data with performance data.
Right what they are doing is measuring the information they value in a way that we have no idea about. They aren’t plugging OBP into a spreadsheet and sorting.
Everything is different, I mean you can find numbers that stand out to you in a way that gives you a reason to sign a guy to a minors deal.
But the draft, I’m sure there is some numbers crunching but you have a staff of scouts you send out all year that report back to DePo. To ignore those reports would be a bigger waste of $ than Jason Bay.
Well I agree that muscle memory and development is a key….
But it begs the question should we be drafting players based on Talent if that is the case?
Philly says they look more for makeup which seemingly is what your saying is the most important factor since you plan on developeing the muscle memory and instinct once you get them. Get a guy who has the drive but maybe not the talent you can develop him into a successful player that a great talent who won’t listen to what it is you want to teach him.
If the Memory and instinct is the key then the talent is actually secondary and by taking kids with a good makeup and head on thier shoulder you have a better canvas to apply your development and make him into the player you want as opposed to some talented kid who has never really taken to coaching because he was already talented and felt he didn’t need to listen to coaching as he was already good. read Lastings Milledge and maybe (I hope not) Valedspin….
As for the difference between the NFL/NBA top picks and MLB success thats a product of the college system which are much more like the PROFESSIONAL LEAGUES than College Baseball is.
The NCAA Football and Basketball programs are major money makers for the schools. You can see college basketball for half a month and more in some areas, College football at least once or twice a week.
At best you get to see the college World series which is evidence that college baseball is not the same level of stature the Football and Basketball bretheren are.
And because there is that much money at stake they get much more regimented and professional coaching than the baseball guys…
And also since the MLB will take some of the most accomplished ans talented out of the college system altogether by drafting kids out of HS this is why they bust much more at the top than the NFL and NBA.
“If the Memory and instinct is the key then the talent is actually secondary and by taking kids with a good makeup and head on thier shoulder you have a better canvas to apply your development and make him into the player you want as opposed to some talented kid who has never really taken to coaching because he was already talented and felt he didn’t need to listen to coaching as he was already good. read Lastings Milledge and maybe (I hope not) Valedspin….”
I think prior to reading up for this article I would have put it at 50/50 as far as the importance of talent as opposed to make-up … I am leaning 60/40 now with make-up slightly more important.
Also, your explanation of why drafted players don’t pan out in the majors at the same rate as other sports is as good as any, but even with Hockey you see a much better success rate, & then there is the problem of the jump from AAA to the bigs, you’d think at least there you’d have some transfer, and yet the minors are littered with guys who were great in AAA but bombed at the major league level.
Well the Hockey is really a sport unto itself….
First off the pool of talent your selecting from is far reduced compared to the three big sports (Base, Basket and Foot)
In a way because there are fewer to draw from the entire league is closer together than is the case in those other sports….None are real superstars in the sense of a Seaver or Manning and the few who are (Gretzky) are kids who have played it almost their entire life….Canucks for the most part.
As for the Talent yes it makes for less work but I would not agree it is 50/50….
I would break it down into thirds myself…
Talent, Makeup and Athletisicm. (the latter being body construct not performance.)
If the guy is a good athlete with a good makeup he will achive higher than a guy who jst has talent…
Example F-Mart had a ton of Talent but was always too injured to make use of it.
Some feel the same way about Reyes although I attribute him more to a racehorse who when runs at full speed has a higher predetermination to get injured)
Look at guys like Rollins who had some talent but a great makeup that was honed to be what he became…
A Hernandez who had the heart of a lion but was not thought much of as far as talent was concerened considering where he was drafted….
I think it also should be pointed out what you said about the encouragement factor while young….
It has been VERY underrated by people but look at the guys we love the most and there is almost ALWAYS a father figure or coach that pushed them to the hieghts they became and instilled in them the instincts that made them great…
Hernandez’ Father was a big influence as was Piazza’s…
In Football the Manning Brothers sure got a lot form Dad…
And that again goes to heart and instincts way more than Athletic makeup or talent…
A player who learns the game can succeed with lesser talent because the brain tells the body what to do…
Right in line with what you said about Muscle Memory and Instincts.
Knowing where to play makes it easier to field the ball and requires less TALENT in the end.
“I would break it down into thirds myself…
Talent, Makeup and Athletisicm. (the latter being body construct not performance.)”
At times it seemed like the authors of that study were implying that there is no such thing as “talent,” that what we think of as talent is a is a function of environmental factors (good instruction) and deliberate practice, about 10,000 hours of practice to be exact, if you want to achieve elite levels. It kind of makes sense, I mean I don’t know too many guys who were genetically predisposed to playing second base.
It’s the age old question isn’t it?
Nature or Nurture?
Is Talent a genetic gift? Or can anyone be that good with the same Nurturing…
And while there are some genetic differences (everyone is different in some way) Unless your RA Dickey and missing a ligament, for the most part you have the same muscles in the same place and with the same food, conditioning and training could achieve what anyone else who is deemed talented could.
Under the same conditions with the same coaching the end result is based on the individual response to those conditions not so much limited by the genetics.
Someone with a great muscle genetics will be a weakling if he sits at home eating chips all day while some guy with weak muscle genetics who works out daily will be far stronger…
Muscles can be worked and changed for the better….
Minds can be changed for the better as well….
Which should make Talent the product of those two items combined…
You can be a great Opera singer if you work to be a great opera singer you aren’t born with that…..
And therefore they say Talent doesn’t exist as a trait of an individual…
It’s not something your BORN with and those who might seemingly have less talent can still be more successful that those who suuposedly have more but don’t work as hard.
Jimmy Johnson was fond of saying Good is the Enemy of great!
If you think your good you won’t put the work or effort in to being great.
Talent like potential is useless if it doesn’t translate to results.
>>First off the pool of talent your selecting from is far reduced compared to the three big sports (Base, Basket and Foot)
In a way because there are fewer to draw from the entire league is closer together than is the case in those other sports….None are real superstars in the sense of a Seaver or Manning and the few who are (Gretzky) are kids who have played it almost their entire life….Canucks for the most part.
Clearly, you have never been to Europe. I was over in Finland a couple weeks ago and trust me, hockey in ginormous throughout northern Europe. It was only a few years ago that the Detroit Red Army, er, Red Wings, won the Cup with a huge input of Russian talent.
The big buzz over there now is that with Russia finally emerging from the dark ages the game is going to get even bigger as they are now paying salaries on par and in some cases larger than what players are getting in the NHL.
Sure I have been there 5 times on Tour with Bands….
What you obviously don’t realize is that the Eurpoean influx of players is only a recent development that has been since the Iron Curtain fell….
Thats about the last 17 years or so….
And most of them aren’t even drafted they are signed FAs just like the Intl kids Baseball signs today.
Actually, no. That’s only true for the players who were trapped behind the curtain. Germans, Swedes and other European players have been coming here for years.
As to the draft, no again. Europeans started being drafted in the 60′s. Europeans hit a high point in 2000 when about 40% of the draft was Europeans and it remains in the 30-40% range to this day.
And even with ALL of those counties they still don’t tally up to ALL the countries that play baseball between Asia, US Canada, and 99% of south america….
But you keep pressing that point….
One area that you missed was how important the mental acuity of the player is which can ultimately determine how far a player goes.
Once you reach a certain point, most players’ ability levels out. They aren’t separated by much whien it boils down to ability. However, mentally, the players can be separated quite a bit. That is what ultimately will determine how far the player goes. Look at the SEC in college. All those guys throw in the low 90s, have great sliders, hit for power, hit for average and probably have the ability to play professional ball – but a lot of those guys get don’t get drafted. Mental makeup is more important in baseball than any other sport. The confidence in your abilities and ability to forget your failures and forge ahead are things that cannot be taught, and if the players do not have mental fortitude they will end up like Billy Beane did when he was a player.
“The confidence in your abilities and ability to forget your failures and forge ahead are things that cannot be taught…”
This was one of the differences noted between Ike Davis and Lucas Duda last season based on some reports.
Billy Beane is the perfect example of how a man with all the talent in the world can be limited by mental aspects. That’s not saying he isn’t smart or anything like that…far from it.
Better than Beane in the example department is Pelfrey….
It will be really interesting to see what Rick Anderson and a top notch development program that focuses on command (his big Achilles heel throughout his career) will do with Pelfrey’s very flawed brain!
I have always said there was nothing wrong with Pelfrey that a good head shrinker couldn’t solve….LOL
Great post.
This is extraordinary stuff. Educators and parents should take notice. I was an educator and coach for over three decades in public schools. Misconceptions about teaching and learning used to drive me batty. At the core was tremendous confusion about learning concepts and learning skills. Reading and writing are skills. They aren’t learned in frontal teaching settings. They are learned through Deliberate Practice, just as the author prescribes for learning baseball skills. It used to infuriate me to walk through the halls at school, peek through the classroom windows and see so many kids listening and far to kids reading and writing..
It’s the same Deliberate Practice that makes great baseball players, musicians, artists. Yet, most youth sport organizations are interested only in playing games. Very few skill driven practices are held. Rather, even at the earliest points, youth sports leagues are only focused on games.
Recently, I served as a temporary replacement as a high school basketball coach in a program that historically hadn’t been doing well. I tried to get the guys to concentrate on their hoop game during the off-season, first by following an individual skill development plan utilizing Deliberate Practice, and, second, by forming an AAU team to focus on team playing skills. Several joined the team but no one worked on the individual skills.
I watch the B-Mets Double AA team all the time. I’m always looking for sigs that the young recruits have the work ethic I believe they need to succeed. Last year I was high on this kid named Darin Gorski. It became obvious to me Darin was working during throwing sessions and games oin mastering his off-speed pitches, even at the risk of temporarily pitching less effectively during a contest.
I like to sit behind the plate where I can carefully study the pitchers and batters. That’s where the pitchers assigned to chart assemble. Listening in to some of the conversations, I was impressed with Gorski’s attention to detail and overall attitude about the game. He might not have a 97 mph fastball, but I think this kid might utilize his potential well.
Reese Havens is another guy who I believe values Deliberate Practice. On 90+ degree days, the players often don’t engage in too much pregame prep. Not Reese. Haven has a routine that involves some running and some bat swing mechanic work. You can count on his preparation before every game; snow, rain or 90 degree heat. You get all three during a minor league baseball season in Binghamton.
I was worried about Reese last seasonr. His progress has been continually interrupted by injury and I sense he is beginning to struggle with the idea his time is passing. Reese seemed to lack the spark he had during a very successful previous season. I hope someone counsels him this spring, and I hope the baseball minds are aware enough to give him a fair shot in spring training. The kid has something to prove and the grit and fortitude to prove it.
After reading some of the comments in this thread I can’t believe how many people don’t understand how athletes and baseball players are developed.
Talent doesn’t exist? I will never accept that. So everyone is born with the ability to throw a 90mph fastball or run a 6.2 60 yard dash if they train hard enough? No way. Talent=Ability and Hardwork+Ability=Skill. Without ability there is no skill no matter how hard you work.
“I’ve been a big proponent of development being more to blame than draft picks.” Let me rebutt this real quick by reminding you that these are professional ball players. Player development rests about 75% on the player’s shoulders once they are professionals. The coaches are there as guides, but the players are expected to put in maximum effort since it is their job. Coaches point out deficiences and can lead a horse to water, but they can’t force the horse to drink. How hard the player works to correct those deficencies will dictate their development. When player’s stop progressing it is generally a sign that they have hit their ceiling, or just aren’t putting in the work necessary to keep progressing.
Well Matt is anyone born TROWING a 90 MPH Fastball?
If a guy who does now did not ever work at it or try to throw one 90MPH would he?
Talent exists as I said….
Talent is the result of hard work on your physical condition PLUS hard work on the mental learning needed to make the body make the motions that gets that 90MPH Fastball to happen.
Anyone can build the muscles to throw a 90 Fastball….
The talent comes from those who do what it takes to get those muscles there.
I think you meant Mitch and I wasn’t speaking in response to anything you said but what the authors that Matt quoted in an earlier comment about talent not existing. Not everyone can throw 90mph – doesn’t matter how perfect your mechanics are or how hard you work. YOu can see pitchers in the major leagues now that work their asses off and have perfect mechanics but they can’t throw 90mph. I know there were just certain things I couldn’t do as an athlete no matter how hard I worked – now you will come across a large portion of people that will say the reason I never was able to do those things is because I never accepted that they were possible in my mind. I am a huge believer in that, which is why I said in an earlier post that mental acuity is one of the most important things for an athlete.
LOL Yes I did and it isn’t the first time I have screwed up and misnamed a reply between the two of you…
You hear the same argument all the time with good leaders…are they born or developed? Some argue that there are innate qualities that people are born with that have to be developed over time in order to be a good leader. Some argue that good leaders aren’t born with anything different than the next person and due to circumstance, upbringing, and a combination of other things develop into good leaders.
Well I agre some have qualities (Genetic) that make them more amenable to development than others…
But in the end it still has to be developed and at best you could argue that one just has to work harder than the other to get there…
Hi Mitch,
I think the authors tried to isolate athleticism as an independent variable. “Talent” on the other hand they saw as a nebulous array of abilities that were actually the by-product of practice. They found that individuals who were more or less equally gifted (physically) were distinguishable by practice hours (around 10,000 hours to be precise) in whether or not they reached exemplary levels of performance. Those who didn’t reach those levels were still good athletes but not as good at whatever the particular skill was — whether it was playing a violin or, to use your example, learning how to not only throw a baseball 90 mph, but to pitch successfully in the major leagues. They do add the “barring disease or injury” caviat, which, with pitchers especially is a big one — it’s hard to accumulate the requisite number of innings to attain elite status if you’re hurt … so in that sense some pitchers are “gifted” with a more durable physiology than others. It’s also hard to believe that really really great performers (someone like Ted Williams for instance) are also the product of practice. I don’t know, this trend towards drafting raw high schoolers is along these lines — basically they believe that if you draft a reasonably athletic kid with the right make-up (Brandon Nimmo for instance) you can build your own superstar by immersing them in the right development program.
I understand their theory but I don’t like it lol
This is essentially a “nature/nurture” discussion.