If you know what machine pitch is then ignore this paragraph. Machine pitch is a level of little league where the pitches are thrown to the players by a machine (the one we use works like a catapult) and while there is some variability in the height of the throw there is very little lateral variability so the kids usually don’t have to worry about getting hit with the pitch. In a division with over 100 players, only 5 players have ever hit a double and only one has hit more than one. Because of this you need 4 hits to score a run and then every hit after the 4th in an inning usually results in a run. Fielding is sporadic at best at this level.
I am lucky enough to have 6 players batting above 600; 3 player batting between 600 and 300; and 3 players that are below 200.
I generally organize my batting order in order of their batting average while saving the 4th and 5th spots for two players who can potentially hit a double. I place my three worst hitters right next to each other and I frequently end up with three up, three down.
Some of my coaches are suggesting that I sprinkle some of the sub 200 batters throughout the line up so we don’t have three up three down. I much prefer three up three down to barely filling up the bases just in time to get the third out.
My coaches all have much more baseball experience than me and I am wondering if I am missing something.
Does it make sense to sprinkle a few of my weaker hitters near the top of my lineup or in the middle of my lineup to spread out the “automatic outs”?
If you want to score more runs, teach the kids to be more aggressive on the base paths. I’m guessing that we’re talking about 7 or 8 year-olds. They tend to run one base and then stop. They do this because they don’t know any better. Do you have base coaches? They should be telling the kids to take an extra base any time they think that they have a fair chance of getting there before the ball does. Since the combination of a fielder who can make a good throw and a baseman who will be in position and can catch it is rare, they have a high probability of being safe. I always tell kids “If I tell you to go and you run hard but you’re put out, it’s my fault”. This takes the pressure off of them and they are happy to get the extra bases and score runs so they take to it quickly.
Other teams may be a bit upset at first but their kids will see what’s happening and will start doing it too.
As to the batting order, I arrange my batting order to make sure that every kid gets an equal number of at-bats over the season (the kid who always bats last will not get up as often as the kid who bats first), not to maximize run-scoring potential. You should be more concerned with teaching them how to play and making sure that they’re having fun than tweaking your batting lineup to squeeze out an extra run or two.
You should be organizing the lineup to ensure all the children get a roughly equal number of at bats. I just did it alphabetically and resumed the lineup in the next game starting with the batter after the last batter of the previous game.
If the goal is to maximize runs, I agree with putting the worst 3 hitters in the last 3 spots of the lineup. Machine pitch is a league up from coach pitch, right? Or what age are these kids? We don’t have machine pitch in my town, thank goodness. But if they’re 9+, they’re old enough to put together a competitive lineup. Equal playing time yes, but still play to win.
Where we live there are two towns next to each other, each with their own leagues. In one town you start with coach pitch and graduate to machine pitch. In the other town you start with machine pitch and graduate to coach pitch. I imagine there’s something approaching religion involved there.
Most likely the dominant effect is just from the weaker hitters not getting as many at-bats: That’s why the major leagues put them at the end of the lineup.
Aside from that, though (like, if you change the order every game to take up where the last one ended, to give all the kids the same number of at-bats), then you’re probably right that it’s best to clump the kids by ability. You don’t win based on the number of hits you get; you win based on the number of hits more or less in a row that you get.
But I’m having a hard time proving it. It’s easy to show for the (contrary to the rules) case where you have a great many players, but 9 players in a lineup isn’t that much bigger than the four hits you need to score, or the three outs you need to end the inning. For instance, if you had a ten-player lineup, with (for simplicity) four kids who always hit and six who always strike out, then ordering them four-and-six would give you one score every ten players, but ordering them two-three-two-three would never get you any scores. But I can’t construct any cases that simple for 9 players.
Hm, how about this: Three always-hit players, five always-strikeout, and one who gets a base hit half of the time: If you put the four best together, then you’ll get one score every 20 at-bats (i.e., for every time the maybe guy comes up, if he hits you’ll score), but if you break up the good players, then you’ll only score if the maybe-guy hits and he’s not in the middle of the inning, which is less often.
I’m also not sure, in the real world where hitting ability is on a continuum and where you can put all of your players in order of hitting ability, if you want your “good clump” to consist of the best in the middle of the clump tapering down on both sides, or if you want them at the start or end of the clump. And again, the possibility of multiple-base hits complicates this even further.
I’m assuming that machine pitch is in place of coach pitch, instead of being another level (that is, you go from t-ball to machine pitch to kid pitch instead of t-ball to coach pitch to kid pitch).
Our league doesn’t do machine pitch but I can see how it has come about because the majority of coaches aren’t good pitchers. Most of them think that laying the ball in as softly as possible will make it easier to hit, but it’s actually much more difficult that way. The slower you pitch the higher the arc you must use, so kids end up trying to swing at balls that start dropping from above their heads. I took a knee and threw balls just hard enough that they crossed the plate without sinking too much and most kids hit them with no trouble (it helped that I could place a pitch so that it would be in the right spot for kids who missed the first couple of pitches). I would hear “Slow down, Coach!” from some spectators but my teams hit the ball much more often than the other teams so I ignored those people.
A machine also has the advantage of consistently. Regardless of what pitches are easier or harder to hit, all of a machine’s pitches will be equally easy, which keeps things fair. You won’t get games decided by which coach is the better pitcher (whatever “better” means in this context), and you don’t have to worry about a single pitcher pitching for both teams favoring one over the other.
The league where I grew up had a rule in its secondary level (“minor league,” we called it) where everybody batted once (and only once) in every inning, regardless of outs. The main problem was, invariably both teams ended up with different final scores, usually with that team winning the game. I think it added “if it gets to ball four, the batter hits the ball off a tee” a few years later.
You would certainly think that, but I spent 3 or 4 seasons in a machine pitch league for 6 and 7 year olds and those machines are damn finicky. I was constantly adjusting speed and angle, sometimes from pitch to pitch, in order to get it to consistently put the ball across the plate. I was good enough at it though that often I’d be asked to “pitch” to both teams as other coaches never could get the hang of it. I found you had to get the seams aligned just right and press the ball into the chute so it caught the wheel with just the right pressure in order to give a good pitch.
The league handy man would be adjusting one or more of the machines every week and sometimes it made it better and sometimes worse. Some games when the machine got really ornery we just gave up and went to coach pitch.
We just finished our tenth game. The player at the top of my line up has had 37 plate appearances and the player at the bottom of my line up has had 33 player appearances. Not really enough to represent a large disparity IMHO.
Kids are only allowed to advance more than one base if the batter hits the ball into the grass. There is no coach pitch in my league (other than as relief pitchers in the first year of kids pitch).
Ok, so your league is probably age 6 - 8 or so? Do you keep score? You must record outs, since you are tracking batting averages. I’m just curious how much the score really matters.
What a machine can’t do is what a good coach pitcher can, which is hit the kid’s bat. I’m pitching coach pitch this year and there are some kids who need the ball lobbed in as slow as possible, some who can hit a regular pitch. One kid I need to pretty much throw it at him because he’s bailing out so bad on every swing. But at least the kids are seeing a live arm.
Yes 6-8. We keep score. After T ball (when everyone gets a trophy) only one team per division gets a trophy every season.
I am not concerned at all about plate appearances when the difference is 4 plate appearances over 10 games. The weaker batters get more swings during practice than the better batters who spend comparatively more time on fielding.
I’m not saying that machine pitch is always better than coach pitch but from what I have seen of relief coach pitching in Double AA, the game is frequently won or lost on the quality of the coach pitchers. Some teams have coach pitchers that are beaning their own kids in the head and other have coach pitchers that can literally throw the ball where the batter is swinging. With a pitching machine, the variability in quality of pitches is smaller.